There Are No Girls on the Internet - Can BlackSky Fix What Twitter Broke Using Bluesky Tech? (w/ Rudy Fraser)

Episode Date: October 21, 2025

When Elon Musk took over X, a lot of us left the platform, searching for alternatives. One platform that gained attention is Bluesky. It looks a lot like Twitter, but it’s different. Bluesky is built on a decentralized system, and that decentralized nature has allowed powerful pockets of community to emerge. To date, Blacksky is the biggest and most successful effort to take advantage of Bluesky's decentralization.  It's led by Rudy Fraser, a technologist committed to building resilient, independent infrastructure that can be a home for Black folks online.  During a session at Rights x Tech, the growing community forum that brings together technologists, policy makers, and movement leaders to explore the intersections of technology and power, Bridget had a fascinating conversation with BlackSky’s founder, Rudy Fraser, about the project and the future of Black voices online. Learn more about Rights x Tech: https://www.rightsxtech.com/   If you’re listening on Spotify, you can leave a comment there to let us know what you thought about these stories, or email us at [e-mail]  Follow Bridget and TANGOTI on social media!  ||  instagram.com/bridgetmarieindc/ || tiktok.com/@bridgetmarieindc ||  youtube.com/@ThereAreNoGirlsOnTheInternet    See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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you just anticipate that. There are no girls on the internet as a production of IHeart Radio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, many users left the platform, searching for alternatives, and one platform that gained attention early is Blue Sky. At first glance, Blue Sky looks a lot like classic Twitter, short posts, replies, and reposts,

but underneath, it's very different. Because Blue Sky is built on a decentralized system, meaning no single company controls your data or the network. Folks on Blue Sky can choose the algorithms that should. shape their feeds. And developers can build their own versions of the app. Blue Sky has become kind of a unique space online. Some users associate it with more progressive voices, and the most followed individual on Blue Sky right now is AOC. As of August 2025, Blue Sky had just under 40 million registered users. And just last week, the Trump administration joined the platform posting,

Can't wait to spend more quality time together. Unsurprisingly, absolutely no one wanted this, and according to the Blue Sky block tracking site, Clear Sky, the White House is now the second most blocked account on Blue Sky, just behind Vice President J.D. Vance. Controversial moderation decisions have led some to wonder if Blue Sky is just another version of the same old social media battles. But the platform's decentralized nature has allowed for powerful pockets of community to emerge, like Black Sky, a custom feed and moderation service,

gradually becoming a key space online for black folks. To date, Black Sky is the largest and most successful effort to take advantage of Blue Sky's decentralization. And it's all being led by Rudy Frazier, a technologist who is committed to building resilient, independent infrastructure that can be a home for Black Voices. During a session at WrightsX Tech, the growing community forum that brings together technologists

and movement leaders to explore the intersections of technology and power, I had the chance to sit down with Black Sky founder Rudy Frazier, to talk through blue sky, black sky, and the future of black voices online. I want to start with a question. Am I the only one that is kind of feeling a bit, I guess I would say burnt out by our current social media and technology landscape? Don't get me wrong. I don't want to get kind of caught up in false nostalgia for the old days.

I know social media has never been perfect, but to me, lately, it feels like a slog. And I remember when Elon Musk took over Twitter, I had all of these deep, deep, fond memories of cutting it up on the OG Black Twitter. Some of my best days spent procrastinating at my office job on the computer were spent on Black Twitter. And so it was very tough for me to kind of accept that that time was over. And I probably was not going to be experiencing these feelings of genuine connection and joy. and humor and community on a social media platform run by Elon Musk, right? And so as we think about the future of social platforms,

today's conversation really invites us to, I guess, do a bit of speculative world building, imagining what it would take to unbreak social networks and rebuild online spaces rooted in things like care, dignity, connection, community, and freedom. Now, to get into all of this, we'll be speaking to Rudy Frazier. Rudy is a technologist, community organizer, and the founder of Black Sky Algorithms, where he develops open-source infrastructure that lets communities shape their social media experience, govern their own data, and fund their collective needs. In this conversation, we'll be tackling questions like,

how does Blue Sky reimagine the role of a public square online compared to legacy platforms like Twitter or X or whatever we're calling it these days? What does community ownership of data mean in practice, and how could it transform our relationship to digital platforms? And really, where do we see opportunities for decentralized platforms to resist things like harassment, surveillance, and disinformation? Rudy, I know that these are questions that you spend, I would assume a fair amount of time really wrestling with. So I want to kick it over to you. I have been following along with a conversation happening.

So I know that it has been an interesting few weeks over at Blue Sky and Black Sky. But before I get into all of that, I want to be a conversation happening. to take it back, what were your early experiences like on social media? Like, where did you go online to experience things like joy and connection and community? Yeah. Hey, Bridgett. So I would say the platforms I think of are not platforms folks like consider social media platforms. I think of early, I do think of like early internet forums. I was big into video game modding and kind of like hacker culture at a young age

and so like those old video game modding forms like Seven Sins I felt like that was I don't know, that was where I found comedian and online gaming. You know, I've made the same way I make friends on Black Sky and Blue Sky and then meet them in person is the same experience I used to have as a teenager playing online video games.

Yeah. And then I think my traditional social media experience was very much folks you already kind of knew online, like Facebook, MySpace era. And yeah, just being able to stay in touch with people like family members across the world. My family's from Guyana in South America. I can stay in touch with them via Facebook, stuff like that. I got to say the kind of person that is the person that you just described who was making Internet friends using. technology and, you know, old school platforms, and then was like, I'm going to go meet these people in person. That's a unique personality type, I feel. I feel like it's so normal now.

I met my, you know, like my wife. We got married last year. We met on Bumble. And so like I feel like it's become where it used to be strange. I feel like internet culture is very just like ingrained in at least a certain generation there's like rappers who are constantly rapping about things that happen on the internet and you know and so yeah I think it's like become it's it used to be a weird thing like it used to be like a weird separate world now

I feel like a lot of us understand that it is it's a part of how we stay connected with people. Totally you were I feel like you were an early to be clear you were like an early adopter of that I have a very clear memory of being quite young and a teacher in my school met her husband on an online dating site. And it was the biggest scandal in our town. And now it's so commonplace. It feels like that level of connection that you were seeking on those early days of social media and platforms like that,

you were an early adopter for what would become commonplace today in 2025. Yeah, for sure. And I think I had like relatives who were very, you know, folks, like a lot of my closest, as friends and family members, they're like creatives. And so they were using those social media platforms to try to like build their careers on. And so I think I also got inspired a little bit like that. So you mentioned that you, you know, experienced the sort of social media platforms that we were all probably on. MySpace.

Side note, there was no better platform. That's how I learned how to code. When you went to my MySpace page, a panic at the disco song played very loud. And then the pause button was hidden. So it was like, no, you were. were going to listen to this panic at the disco song. It would definitely crash your browser with like falling glitter stars. So I loved those platforms as well. I'm curious about your journey with more sort of traditional social media platforms. When you were on platforms like Twitter,

was there a moment or a red line that made you say no more, this is not going to work for me anymore? I actually came to this work from a different place. It's kind of funny. Like I was never really big on Twitter. I was, I used it early on and to like follow like artists and stuff like that. But I never actually encountered myself the kinds of like challenges you would face from like having a big platform on those spaces. So I kind of came, I think that probably maybe helped in some ways because I came into working on Black Sky with just like fresh eyes in terms of what are my expectations of how a community should work, and that was heavily influenced by my in real life organizing work.

And so I tried to replicate the things that I was seeing and experiencing in real life. Because for me, like, I guess bigger than just like the apps, it's the kind of like this kind of definition of community I have that is between like mutual, accountability. And before working on Black Sky, I was working on a project called Paper Tree that was a way for folks to kind of practice mutual aid and Bettsdie, be able to pool funds together and be able to buy, like pay for each other's groceries, essentially. And so in kind of, as I kept doing mutual aid organizing and learning about mutual aid, I thought it was very, I wanted to, technology was my thing. And so that was the way that I saw myself fitting into that world and not wanting to be like,

like their techno solutionist person who's like, I'm going to like, you know, revolutionize mutual aid by like building some app. It was more like I just wanted to like find my way of being seen and being able to contribute to what I saw as a movement that kind of came out of 2020 here in New York where I'm based at. And building, yeah, a bit like you kind of find that like social media is actually a really great place both for real life community to be developed and for people to even practice like these kinds of like care practices like mutual aid

but it's the it's then seeing that you can't really do something like that in the traditional platforms right it's more that like the I saw with this new wave of decentralized social media protocols I saw an opportunity to be able to like execute against that let's take a quick break

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It's so interesting to me that you say that the way that you say that the way that you're Your expectations for what being on a social media platform could feel like, should feel like, were really rooted in your IRL experiences around things like mutual aid. So for you, what are the expectations that you have in your mind for what it can feel like or be like to try to find community on social media platforms? What does that experience like for you? And what have you taken from your work in mutual aid to inform that? Yeah.

I think the internet is interesting because there's, and there's people who have like, all different kinds of like philosophies and ideas around how the inertial work. I think for one, I'd take like a, you know, I think there's some people who view, for example, that like there's this like instrumentalist kind of view of technology where technology is kind of like impartial. It's non-biased. It can't be, you know, it's a hammer is just a hammer. And I kind of reject that.

I think tools tend to better. They tend to like align with our structures and they benefit, they benefit someone usually and they harm, they often harm someone usually. And so I think in real life organizing, you start to acknowledge some things like that. You also kind of, you also recognize that there's this like kind of philosophy that like every cook can govern, but like really anyone can contribute. There's not, it's not like there's, there's maybe specialized knowledge that's needed to set up, technical infrastructure, but there's a role that everyone can play in like content moderation, in community building, in getting people into physical spaces together, like event planning. It's like a thing that I'm not really good at, but there's folks in the community who are good at.

There's folks in the community who are creators who are like, like that idea that everyone can come in and just, as long as you make it so that this is not like this closed off thing that you own, that like you have this kind of abundance mindset that there's enough to go around that everyone can play a role. that I think that some of that is the kind of thing that influences and I do think you get that from like community forums where it was like you know there was a space created and then people came in and gave that space value and then those people were rewarded with reputation and respect to a degree you know and like that's a thing you can get on the internet there's like a kind of respect capital that gets associated with with someone people sometimes use that with like followers or they try to like hack it with followers but there's kind of a you know we we've a lot into our online identities. And then, you know, part of the problem is that you don't actually own that identity, like a corporation owns that. And they can just take that handle away from you at any point.

They could shut your account down if they want to. But yeah. And so those fundamentals, I think, are some of the things that, like, you see that in, like, in real life organizing where you're doing work and then people, you know, that kind of brings people in. And they make it their own. and then it becomes this new thing. That's kind of how I think of like spaces created online.

Boy, you said it and especially, you know, maybe one day a billionaire buys the platform where you spent most of your time building up your capital and followers and relationships and connections, and it's not a fun place to hang out anymore, so that's just that. Maybe that's what happens. Yeah, and, you know, I think that can happen in real life spaces as well,

but yeah, like trying to, how do you build the stuff that makes that less possible? Exactly. Let's talk about that. So give us a, so I'm curious, what drew you to looking at decentralized platforms? And for folks who might not know, can you give us sort of a quick and dirty rundown of decentralization? Yeah, yeah. So the analogy, I give a lot of analogies with this stuff. I'll give an analogy for decentralization in general. and then I'll give one for decentralization and interoperability, which are big, big words, and then one specifically for app protocol. So decentralization, I would say is like a lot of folks,

you know, are used to buying furniture from some store, IKEA, Target, wherever, I don't know. And then, like, often there's an Allen wrench, you know, that, like, hexagon shape that you use to screw in the bolts together. Usually, it's funny, they usually send a lot of Allen wrenches with like a lot of the furniture you put together. And then if you keep them, it can work on the next thing that you buy. And so that's an example of interoperability.

All these, if you think about it, all these people who produced this furniture decided that they were going to use the same hexagon shape. And, you know, now the tools work between each other. That's an example of interoperability and decentralization. Where like decentralization like kind of requires interoperability. It requires for two things to be able to work together without those two people speaking. And right now it's like you can't, you cannot, you can't be on Instagram. Like let's say you were just on Instagram.

You can't from your Instagram account DM someone on Twitter. You can export, you can export your data in a lot of these places. And then it's just like a dead set of data. Like you can't take that and put it anywhere. You can't leave and keep your followers, right? That's how they get you. And folks call this like a walled garden. And so decentralization eliminates that.

It makes it so that you have some kind of data portability. You can pick up where you were, and if you don't like it anymore, you can take it somewhere else. And then you still have your identity stays the same. You still have your followers. You still have your posts. you didn't lose anything. You're just under new management. And so that's like decentralization brought me.

And then there's lots of different ways people have approached designing decentralized systems. You know, the one that I, the space that I work in is particularly app protocol, which the experience of that from a user is like if every piece, if you download a social media app, if you download Blue Sky, for example, everything is ran by a different, it's one app, but everything is ran by a different company. You could have downloaded Blue Sky. You could have downloaded something else. Another app, Skylight is another example. They're like a TikTok version of Blue Sky. And your account will work with both. You can sign up on either and your account will work with both. And then, you know, there's, then there's your social media feed, right?

Folks are usually used to just like a following feed and then a kind of recommendation algorithm, a for you page, a Discover feed. Blue Sky may come with those by default. but then you can switch to another algorithm or feed that was designed by someone else. So we have one's designed specifically for showcasing black content. There's a trending version. There's a chronological version. There's a TikTok-like version of videos. There's one for just images like Instagram.

And yeah, and then if you encounter some harmful content, you can choose who your moderators are. You can choose where your data is hosted. That is, that's the experience of at, protocol. And I think where it comes into like the, you mentioned earlier that there's been a lot of stuff going on in the ecosystem. There was an incident that I addressed yesterday where a user who was, he had his account hosted by Black Sky, but he was suspended from Blue Sky. And so, folks are kind of had the reaction of like, well, what's the point then of decentralization? If you can be, you can maybe move your account, but then they can like, they can, this other

company can still suspend you. You're still subject to the moderation rules of the other company. But it's really like the way app protocol is kind of set up is that your data, if you imagine publishing as an example, right, you're a writer and you write a manuscript, right? The PDS or some of the infrastructure Black Sky runs is a safe space to store your manuscript. But then Blue Sky, what they also had running, is kind of this. the distribution. It is the, it's kind of like the Barnes & Noble, the bookstore, the publishing house, the thing that gets your, your manuscript from just your hands into the hands of millions of people. And so this person was banned from the bookstore, essentially. But even though he was

banned from the bookstore, there are different apps that people have built that instead of going to the bookstore to find the manuscript, it goes directly to the author. So that's kind of the example of like what decentralization can allow. You can still maintain your data and your ownership and not have it deleted because typically when blue sky if you're only if you're only on the blue sky infrastructure and they suspended you they would also delete all your data but so some of these conversations around data sovereignty is that like you should be able to maintain your identity an app can suspend you because they have their rules right they may you may just be promoting something that they don't want to help distribute to millions of people that's there right um you basically have

freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach, is kind of the example that folks talk about. Like, you know, that's why, and there's other, like, ways that I can kind of explain how that plays out in the ecosystem, but you really should always be able to publish whatever you want. And then, but people who governs certain spaces, like blue sky governs their space, black sky governs our space, those organizations, and anyone can start that out. You know, it takes some technical infrastructure, some money. but like you can start to create those spaces and to kind of design the experience you want in there

without infringing on other people's, you know, ability to speak. I was quite surprised at how people reacted to that user that you described their experience on the platform. And I wondered, do you think that users are, do you think that response was rooted in a sort of anxiety about the kind of things that maybe are the reason why they left Twitter for Blue Sky or other platforms in the first place, that concern about how these platforms are moderated and what's showing up their means.

I was genuinely surprised at the reaction to what you just described happening. And maybe you weren't surprised, but what do you think was going on there? There's a lot. I think there's some folks who say, like, I think I agree with some people in the ecosystem. that's like moderation is your product. Like if you, like in a traditional social media experience, their business model is ad-driven, right? And so that's why the experience of a social media app

kind of plays out the way it does. Because they need, they make money by having you scroll the feed and stay on their app for as long as possible. That's why TikTok is super addictive. They've done, you could, you could, it's all, weird to say they've done a great job at their algorithm, but they've done a great job of keeping you glued to the screen. Twitter also has that for folks. And there's, there's like a ton of research. There's like books written. I have a book here called like Hook. Like people have, there's people

done research on how to keep you addicted to and to these applications. It's like a science. And, and so that's why they keep you locked in. They don't want you to be able to leave. They don't want you to be able to take your data. They want you to be able to keep scrolling. In a decentralized protocol, you don't have the same incentives. So the users are not the product in that case. You have to find some other revenue stream. And so, like, Blue Sky, I think there's a lot of, when there's an absence of information, people fill that in with assumptions, their own anxieties, like you mentioned. So people are like, how will Blue Sky make their money? So we don't know. you know, probably blue sky doesn't know.

And so people fill that in with like, are they training, are they taking our data to like train an AI model? Are they trying to pander to like these right wing conservative folks? Like, why are they doing that? Like all these different things kind of come into play because things are not made explicit. It's kind of like, I'm sure there's some theory of this. There's like the tyranny of structurallessness where it's like there's, if there's like a vacuum or like an unclear, there's no clarity around a power structure. A power structure kind of forms is just a little unaccountable.

I think the same thing kind of happens with like the fact that there's no clear business model and things like that. And so people just kind of fill in those blanks. So for me, I wasn't as surprised because a lot of the users who are on Blue Sky as well, they've migrated from Twitter. And so I think some of them without even really recognizing, they thought it was Blue Sky. was just Twitter but ran by, you know, not Elon. And so the expectations, like the user education, there's a lot of stuff that's like not there. So a lot of what I just tried to do that seem to have gotten positive responses for is just try to like break things down for people, be really clear, be really transparent,

be really honest about where stuff is at and like what we're planning to do next. That makes a lot of sense. I was one of those people who just thought, screw Elon Musk. I'm going over to the Twitter that he doesn't own. And then someone was like, oh, you should try Mastodon if you're looking for a decentralized experience. And that didn't work out for me. But like, there is, I think there has been a user education piece of it that I think your work at Black Sky has been so instrumental in being a foundation of. Can you walk us through Black Sky, how it works, and what makes it different from centralized platforms? So if you visit BlackSkyDot community, which is our

web app. That's where you could sign up for an account. And you'll notice immediately that like if you went to, it looks similar to Blue Sky, which looks similar to Twitter, but it's branded as our thing. And when you create an account on BlackSky.comunity, you will be under the BlackSky Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. You'll have a handle that's like Bridgett.blacksky.com, for example. But the feed that you see immediately is Black Sky. The Black Sky community itself. So this is an algorithm that is just of the black users on the platform who've opted in voluntarily to be a part of Black Sky as a community. From there, and I think even just stopping there, if you can imagine, we sometimes get

this question from folks of like, what will stop Black Sky from being overran by bad actors? And I think the last two years of us running the platform has been the demonstration of that. We can't stop other people's hate. But we've put up a really good fight, I would say. I've been dachs by white supremacist because of my work on Black Sky. We've had people try to like raid the feed and do all kinds of crazy things. But we built in systems to actively prevent that harm. And not only do we have the automated system,

to do that. We also have a team of all black moderation team, you know, very familiar with the kind of context that we work within that is always there. And so folks feel attended to, folks feel heard. We strike this balance of trying to create a space where you can have fun and like not care about all this super technical, like all this infrastructure that we're running in the background. But we're there when you need it, right? So like, we're there when you want to speak truth to power and then you feel like Blue Sky, the company may censor you for that, right? Or take your account down. We're there, you know, if you encounter, there's, maybe there is some bad actor that rolls up and they're like, what the fuck is black sky? You know, we can,

you can still do the like 300 quote posts on that person, like feel free. But we, you could also just quietly and discreetly hit the report post button and our team will will handle that. And yeah, and then all your data is hosted by us. So that's just all governed by our processes. And for us, we're looking to, like the next thing that we want to do is kind of create these community only spaces. So I believe that you should have control over your speech on these platforms, like be able to modulate your speech. So, right? Like, every time you make a post, it's kind of a megaphone.

You know, sometimes for me, I'm trying to whisper and it ends up being a shout because there's no really, there's no way to distinguish that. I may be replying to someone and then people would be like, oh, he was saying this really low key. I'm just like, yeah, I was trying to just say this one person. I guess I should have the end bit. But, but yeah, and so we, sometimes you want to just speak to a more closed-off group of friends. On other platforms, you have the opportunity to do stuff like private posts. In the way the protocol is designed, you enter into these tricky situations where things that should be obvious are just difficult to do.

So like, Boosty didn't ship with private accounts. You can't, like, lock your account down to just be, you know, just your followers. We're introducing something that will allow you to, like, be able to make public posts. You can speak to the megaphone because, like, sometimes there's weird misunderstanding. saying that like we just want to like create another bubble for people that I don't think that's true. I think people have group chats, right? You have one-on-one conversations with friends. Sometimes you have a group chat. We're trying to create a big group chat where you can come in and be a part of a community and meet people. And you'll have that. And then we also have created a platform for you.

If you really want to speak to thousands of people, like there's been millions of people who have viewed the black sky feeds, this is also your way to get an audience. You know, whether there's it's some important issue. You just want to make some jokes. You want to build a following, whatever that case, whatever that thing is like, you should have these options. We want to give people options that keep them, allow them to have fun and be able to also, you know, not face harassment when they want to speak out against white supremacy. And then ultimately, too, like, we really want to in a long time, we want to become like the Reddit for app protocol. We want to be able to anyone can come. People have been inspired by our work already. There's Latin sky. We're

you know, doing the same, not even using our tools, but replicating how we do things. Because there's a barrier to that, right? Today, there's a barrier to, like, using the stuff that we've built. All of our code is open source. It's very transparent. You can jump in and contribute to the code if you want to. It's written in Rust. That's also another barrier.

We're trying to break down the barriers. We want the most amount of people to be able to participate and co-create this with us as possible. You know, but, but, yeah, so we want people to build them to come and take their communities, Latin sky did that. North sky has followed in our footsteps. They're doing similar things for the LGBTQ community. And yeah, and so we want anyone to be able to just come in and take our tools, click a button, and then get a whole community infrastructure and community app set up that is not closed off. It's still like it has a quiet space for your community. And then it has a, you also have this like public global social media infrastructure. So,

You know, you can still, we like, like app protocol wants to get to four billion people, whatever number of Facebook has, but on a decentralized protocol that no one owns. And so that's the vision. That's the goal. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL late night comedy guide, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel,

help an acapella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The group.

The yard birds, right? That's the name. The Harvard yard, but they're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle aged. One erection Listen to humor me with Robert Smygel and friends

On the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Humor me I need some jokes to make me seem funny Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio.

Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at iHeartadvertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast's point game is about defying the odds.

Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win no matter what. He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is at a level that we've never seen before. And he knows. Without Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game. We get a player's perspective on the challenges of the playoffs. I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series

because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup, he has to really guard guys like Nas Reid. He has to guard Julius Randall. And then he has to give us everything he gives us on the night-to-night basis on offense. And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too. Steve Nash will get that thing.

That man, hell get the flying. He running up the court, licking his fingers why he got the ball like, after you go through a training camp with that, I said, you figure it out real quick. Get your ass up and down the court, and you're going to get the ball. So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your, body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation. There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that

our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resized. I wish that I hadn't for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it. Rudy, I did have a question for you. I think it, somebody mentioned this in the chat, and I do think it's worth kind of plus-plusing. The way that you were very intentional about things like moderation from the beginning.

of starting this process. And I've often wondered, is there a balance to be had between scale and making the biggest platform that you can have with the most amount of users and saying, well, there might be some value in intimacy. There might be some value in intentionally curating a smaller set of users.

Is there attention with what you're doing at Black Sky in that? Yeah, I talk about this in some presentations I give where I think there's, you know, you mentioned Macedon. I think Macedon is a good example. If you want like maybe 100 people in a community and you want like infrastructure that's like owned by you and then maybe you selectively connect with some other 100 person communities and stuff, I think that's good.

That is a use case. I think we want to have the fun, the funnest block party in the city is kind of the experience. And I think that needs a lot of people. And so I think for the kind of experience and stuff that we want to build, I think you need to be looking to scale. You know, we spend a lot of money and time on creating scalable infrastructure for communities. Black Sky, again, has been used by millions of people. and we want to help out the other folks. That's why I use Reddit as the example.

There are some credits that are used by millions of people. Like, that is the, it's a technically challenging thing to do that, though, as a decentralized service. So that's where there's some of the technical tensions. There's also moderation challenges. I think after a certain number, you do encounter, like, there's a question that's come up in the community that we're working through to resolve. but like moderation people are very anti-AI but what do you do when you have a hundred

thousand people like 100,000 images and videos being uploaded to a platform every month a lot of them are going to be sexual content and you have to be able to distinguish against like what's not okay or at least just even just label that content so that people so then end users can make their choice of like do I want to see sexual content do want to hide it do want to have a blur with the warning label, people get that control on that protocol. And so I think some of that is a bit of attention because some people are like, well, someone should manually review all those images. And it's like, well, then you have to have, then you have to have a smaller space.

And so I think like we don't want to be like, we don't want to just have like the billion person, one space, billion person in this space. We do want to foster communities of millions of people. And I think we can, I think you can do that with the tools that we, created. There's also like one thing we didn't talk too much about, but like we want our, it's weird that people make community guidelines, but their communities don't influence the guidelines. And so that's something we did where we try to co-create our community guidelines with our community. We have this tool called the Black Sky People's Assembly that is a deliberation tool where people can

weigh in, submit statements. So we had one was like, what should be our community guidelines? and 600 people submitted over, I think about 500 statements of what should go into our community guidelines, over 20,000 votes submitted on the different things of what people agree with, what people disagree with. So these are the things that where it's like, you know, if you want to do this at scale, there's tools that need to be built to allow you to do this kind of decentralized community governance at scale. I think that's just a very interesting space for us to work here. Yeah, I mean, that speaks to the question that we got from John, who says, it's worth highlighting that Black Sky is incredibly unusual, complimentary, for focusing on moderation up front and having a moderation expert as a core member of the team. How many other social networks have ever done that?

I don't know any. Rudy, I don't know if that's a question that you have any insight into, but I do think it highlights exactly what you were just speaking about, the importance of having these. decisions be things that are that are thought of very early on and foundational to the experience of being on this platform? Yeah, I think that comes from like, honestly, I mean, that's, that's more like, sometimes I think people have this like superficial understanding of like wide black sky is important. And I think that like being a black person on the internet,

you just anticipate that. You know, like you just anticipate, we will get attacked. Like, and so for me, I'm always just like, okay, I know, this is going to happen, so I'll have a plan for when it happens, and then when it happens, then I can just immediately drop the thing. Like, we have a feature called BAN from TV that stops people from being able to view the Black Sky Feed. And I knew that that was going to be a thing that we were going to want to do at some point. And then there was an issue where people were like trolling the black sky feet to find, they weren't posting to the Black Sky Feed, but they were finding people and then harassing them. So I was like, oh, like, now this is happening. So now let me ship this.

and that was like the second month that we were in operation of the Black Sky Feet. So it happened, it all happened very quickly, but we've been battle tested over time. And then, yeah, I've always wanted, our community moderators, there's folks who used to work at places like TikTok.

There's people who worked at doing trust and safety there. There's folks who have done a research on massagina war. Shot of Dr. Kay. Yeah, so we've got a team of folks who all have done community moderation in other spaces before and now do it for Black Star. They've done it from Macedon, et cetera. It kind of makes me,

I haven't, it's like a bittersweet thing to hear you describe this because on the one hand, what a tired story that it's like, oh, you're a black person or some sort of a traditionally marginalized person in a digital space. Get ready for harassment, you know.

But also part of me is like, well, I'm glad the people in charge have that historical and cultural knowledge or that they didn't have to go through the thing of being like, oh, we are shocked. This happened and are not prepared. for it, which I feel that so often is the case on social media platforms or people don't necessarily have that, that cultural background. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

There's always like, yeah, the shocked Pikachu face every time someone abuses your platform. It's just like, I don't know, like we, I don't know even what practice of, I don't know, I always find a dishonest. Because like, even if you put a server up on the internet, it's getting scanned by like attackers immediately. Like, and so, uh, this just kind of like defensive posture without having it take,

without having it be a burden of, um, you know, we still have this, we have a move fast break chains ethos, um, at Black Sky, which is that like,

like, like, I think there are some folks who are like, I don't know, there is a lot going on or there's always this, uh, there's kind of like a move slow ethos sometimes with social justice basis. And I'm like,

If you believe the problems are urgent, I feel like you should move fast. Like, if you think that, like, we're in, like, late stage capitalism and we're under fascism, like, why would you be chill about that? And so that's why we want to build things as quickly as possible for, like, private spaces for people, for people to be able to, yeah, build communities, send money to each other, practice mutual aid because we think it's urgent. And then there's the break chains part, which is that, like, we are going to be in count, we know that we are encountering, like, we're fighting an up. pill battle. And we should just be prepared for that. Like, you kind of just kind of know what comes with it. My own team says to the back to me.

It's like you named your, you named the company Black Sky. Like it's going to like get attacked. Well, yeah. Can you put, this is a personal question. Can you put move fast and break chains on a t-shirt for me or perhaps some swim. Coming soon. Come in soon.

How do you see shirts. I mean, that does seem to one of my kind of questions is how do you, think about balancing things like freedom of expression with genuine meaningful community driven safety in decentralized environments? Yeah, I think of their people often because of like, I guess there's some people who have this like understanding of like, okay, well, you know, black sky, so it will be attacked. There's like, there's, like, there's, there's like outside attackers, right? And then there's community conflict. And I think of like the outside attackers, we have generally, you know, knock on wood, but like so far has been a solved problem for us. The really

interesting challenges do come with, okay, now there's intracommunal conflict, not intercommunal, intracumunal. And so it's like, do you, some, there's, you know, like, generally our, our approaches to be hands off, like let the community sort itself out. because conflict can be generative at times. As long as folks aren't demonstrating forms of internal, internalized anti-blackness or misogynar war, you know, as long as you aren't breaking our community guidelines, again, which we develop with the community.

So like now there's going to be things around like fatphobia and like all these other. protections, but as long as you are following the community guidelines go off, you know, we want to be, we want to leave space for people to get creative, have fun. Sometimes, you know, sometimes, sometimes the jokes are at the expense of someone, but I think there's still like, you think that's still like a worthwhile experience that you can have in a communal space and then you brush it off, you come back the next day. And isn't there kind of, I mean, haven't we all been roasted by our cousins where it's like, or you, or you laugh a little too hard at a

and someone is like, I know you're not laughing. And you're like, oh, no, they got it. Yeah, like, I posted a by listening to Young Thug, and someone was like, I hope you heal. And I'm like, you know, I can't. I'm like, even I'm getting cooked on my own app. I think, I mean, having folks who know, folks who know our communities at the helm is important.

This is going to be a weird analogy, but there's a scene in the movie Mean Girls where the popular girls, they all have to have like a girl, student-wide meeting to discuss tensions. And the popular girls realize, oh, the drama girls have their own little, you know, conflict. And the softball team, they have their own little conflict. And there's all these other little micro conflicts in these communities that people might not know the norms that dictate those communities.

And you just sort of have to let them talk it out and work it out amongst themselves because that's the only way they're going to get anywhere. It kind of seems like that of there is some value in just sort of letting folks settle. things tensions and conflict in their own community via their own norms that like you might not necessarily know the ins and outs of. Yeah. And I think that like, I think that's like super important. Community norms are like,

sometimes people are like, what's this hard and fast rule that you're going to put in place to stop this thing from happening? I'm like, well, I feel like we have norms for that. Like there's laws and then there's norms. And I don't want to make a law for like something that could just be resolved with a norm. And the communities should organically come up with that community norm to, like,

enforce that behavior. And, and yeah, and I think that, like, you, yeah, you see that within real life groups all the time. Like that conflict resolution is, and I think you have to draw a line. You have to be able to draw a line around a space. So there's a question around here about, like, the public square conversation. And I've,

I really, I think the public square is somebody else's problem. I am trying to create community spaces. I'm trying to make the hangout spot. And, you know, we got some bouncers here.

We got, you know, they're just on the outside, guard the door. Folks on the inside are figuring themselves out. We have some music playing. We want,

and, you know, and it's a voluntary association, You want to come kick it with us, come kick it with us. That is what we're trying to solve for. And then you also have like maybe a mega, you know, we have like, I guess, a loud speaker outside. If you want to go reach everybody else, feel free. But the public square has been dominated by people trying to fight it out in the marketplace of ideas and algorithms kind of like trying to influence people in all kinds of ways. And so like that is a different problem that someone else may be trying to solve.

But I'm trying to solve for communal spaces where you come. You have a good time. More after a quick break. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriter, Streeter Seidel,

help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group? The worst? Yeah. Me. Is there anything to the idea that because you're from Harvard, you only got in because your parents made a huge donation. The yard birds, right? That's the name.

The Harvard Yardt. They're open. Do you have a name suggestion? We're open. Since you guys are middle-aged. One erection. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Human me.

I need some jokes. to make me seem funny. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than ads supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHearts twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business.

Think IHeart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Let us show you at IHeart Advertising.com. That's iHeartadvertising.com. What's up, fam? It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano, and our podcast, Point Game is about defying the odds. Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win no matter what.

He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is at a level that we've never seen before. And he knows. Without Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game. We get a player's perspective on the challenges of the playoffs. I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series. because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup, he has to really guard guys like Nas Reid. He has to guard Julius Randall.

And then he has to give us everything he gives us on the night-to-night basis on offense. And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too. Steve Nash would get that thing. That man, hell get the flying. He running up the court, licking his fingers while he got the ball, like,

after you go through a training camp with that, Isaiah, you figure it out real quick. Get your ass up and down the court, and you're going to get the bomb. So listen to Point Game on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance.

And then there's your body having its own program. I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. We share stories and scientific insights to help us all better navigate these periods of turbulence and transformation.

There is one finding that is consistent, and that is that our resilience rests on our relationships. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's get right back into it. This conversation is all about sort of how we are trying to unbreak social networks.

How do you think Blue Sky helps move us more toward those community-centered digital spaces? I think that Black Sky is more so the ones like helping to demonstrate what that can look like. I think Blue Sky wants to invest more into the creation of community. there's been conversations about like turning kind of following again following an effort steps of like combining a feed with a moderation service and then calling that like a particular space and so there's a place where you can go you can post to a feed um i think there's like some of that work being done i'm personally really there's some like under explored areas with a app protocol in blue sky that i'm that we're interested in like we we just um

We just got this fellowship, this cyphur punk fellowship, to help kind of develop private payments. You know, I think that's a very, I think it's, again, practice of mutual aid is important. Black Sky as a community have done that for a while from the very beginning. But then also creators being able to like monetize their content. There's someone on Black Sky who, the name is Nye.

Every day they post like a, they call it Question Sky. and they post these like 20 questions that people all quote post and reply and it's always like a different theme and then they end it with like their cash app and so like people should be able to help support the creators in these spaces and then like you know sex workers as well

should be able to be able to monetize their content without you know worrying about all kinds of restrictions that could end up being placed on them the other thing is reputation so verification the conversation around this has subsided a little bit, but folks were a little disappointed that Blue Sky's model for verification

ended up being that Blue Sky gives out the Blue Checks. There are more interesting versions of this that can be built out with like Web of Trust kind of models. So basically like I think of like, I don't think it's perfect, but Reddit's karma score is very interesting. So are there ways for you to create a decentralized reputation system for people? Because I do think that like once you, online identities cost nothing to create.

And so there should be some way for you to be able to build up reputation on against a certain identity over time and know that this is like a trusted, a trusted thing. They have like domain. Like you can like make your domain your handle on Blue Sky. And that's like, that was. is like the original form of verification. So, you know, fake CNN.Biski.Social is clearly distinguished from CNN.com or like Rudyfraser.com versus fake rudy.dbiski.com. But I think there's, like, more that could be explored there.

And I think communities can verify people. Like it, you know, I've always, like, Black Sky should be able to hand out verification. So, like, key members of their community, badgeing, you know, being able to say that, like, I'm a sucker for, like, GitHub, you. you get a certain amount of stars, you get like a gold medal, you get a silver medal. Being able to incorporate stuff like that, like, if you're a black sky supporter, be able to show like a badge or your profile. I think stuff like that is really cool and interesting to build, to be able to take, to basically

build on the decentralized identity layer, which is like way in the background for a lot of people, but there's, there's interesting stuff there. There's a meeting with someone from the Applied Social Media Lab where I was a fellow earlier this year. they want to work on verified credentials so you can basically say that like connect your blue sky identity to this account on Instagram and Twitter and stuff like that. So I think those are like interesting spaces

to work on. Yeah, I'm curious, do you see all of these so both with the success of Black Sky and then these smaller decentralized platforms and communities popping up, do you see this as the way of the future that we genuinely can help reset or unbreak kind of our default settings and default learnings of social media platforms and what they can be?

Yeah, I think there's a strong signal there. Even Facebook, to their credit, like, build threads and they're trying to integrate with the Fedover's. I think there is, it's like a half-hearted attempt, but I do think that, like, that's acknowledgement that, you know, maybe that's like Zuckerberg in the back of his head, like not wanting to be disrupted in the future. But yeah, I think it lets you unlock way more creativity around the stuff that you're

that you're doing being able to like and I've been asked a lot about like our niche online spaces the future of social media I personally want it both ways I want you to be able to have a cozy corner

to hang out in and for you to be able to because organize again with organizing right like we have we the people NYC, which I'm a lead organizer for as a mutual aid group in New York, we have a like a hundred person signal group chat where we're like organizing and talking about stuff. And then we like, if like the cops, you know, arrest us at our mutual aid distro, we then do want to post on Instagram and TikTok and get 100,000 views because that's what brings the news crews around and then we can like get our message out and you know. And so like I think you need both. I think you need

private spaces and you need to be able to have a global reach especially if you think about internationally like folks who are like facing like these real life crises around the world like they

they need a global reach they need people who understand their context right like if you think of like Facebook's role in genocides globally like Myanmar and stuff like some of that was because the moderators did not have a local context and they didn't have the tool.

They had the option to use the tools to translate it, but they didn't. Right. And there's like a world where, you know, there, we aren't seeing this yet, but we're actually, we're actually seeing it with Europe, I guess. There's some folks trying to create Eurosky. There's like building tools that are specific to the regulations and norms of your physical geolocation and then still being able to reach everyone around the world. You know, I do think that is the future.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I want to sort of click into that because, you know, I think back to all the different very impactful social and political movements that were started on social media platforms, things like Me Too, things like Black Lives Matter, the racial justice uprisings that we saw in 2020. Do you think that have we, because in some ways what you're saying makes me feel hopeful, I sometimes get a little pessimistic and think, oh, we'll never see another global movement pop off on social media as effectively as we once did. But when you were speaking, I thought maybe it won't look like it did or maybe it won't be on the platforms that it happened in in 2020 or 2016.

But that doesn't mean it can't still happen. What do you think about that? Yeah. I mean, it's nowhere near those other movements. But like the Tesla takedown thing did start on Blue Sky with like a Blue Sky post. And then I do think that it won't look like how they did it, how it looked in the past. I think I think it will look differently. I can't speak for the early Black Lives Matter protests that started on Twitter.

But I do know that like, I do know how it felt for like 2020 in the George Floyd uprisings. And we did use Instagram. Like Instagram kept me informed on lots of things. Instagram is still, like, useful for a lot of that. And, like, getting people out in the street. But I think I do, like, I don't know how it will look. But people are actually, matter of fact, we have current examples.

Nepal. They're, like, using tools like Jack Dorsey's Ditchat. One of the Noster devs, like, shared this chart that's like, he knows that, he knows when there's a social uprising because he sees like installs from certain locations with like the bitchat installs go out. So like Myanmar had a bunch of installs recently because they have, or not Myanmar. I'm sorry, Madagascar had something going on recently. Nepal, like they also, the Nepal joint was interesting because like I wasn't, they voted in their prime minister like in Discord.

And so like, you know, I'm like, for me, I'm like, why didn't they, I think that's like a damning thing. like, why didn't they use these other so-called decentralized social media platforms, like, to do that on, you know? And so I think there's a lot there that is, like, under-explored. So, yes, I don't think it will look the same. What is giving you hope about building these healthier community-centered online spaces these days? I'm always just really, everyone that's joined the team has joined, like, voluntarily or, like, the fact that, like, people just kind of, have come into black sky, like make it their own. There's a very common narrative, I think, in like, like, particularly, like, white tech

circles that, like, the founder is just, like, visionary who, like, charts this course. And, like, really, I think of first myself is just practicing, you know, like, being influenced by the black radical tradition and being influenced by my cultural upbringing and, like, literally, like, how I grew up as, like, the way I think about the stuff that I build. and seeing people then come into like someone made a fellowship to get people, to get Black Sky members to the At Protocol Conference early this year. Shout out to Linda.

Otherwise, I would have probably been one of the two black people there if it wasn't for Linda and the fellows. One of those fellows became, is now like a core team member. The other fellow has been like a contributor to our documentation, which has helped other people learn about the tools. There's folks who have built like entire applications, for us. Someone built this tool called Safe Skies, that is a way for us to even further decentralize

our moderation so that the other moderators on the team can come in and control the feed, the algorithm of the feed. And so, like, I'm like, and just being able to have this kind of like black tech project, open source, all the ethos behind it and see that reach people and see how that inspires them to like, how it changes. changes them a bit. That's what, like, keeps me going and makes it worth it for me. Wow. What a beautiful vision. I mean, I started this conversation saying that I wasn't feeling great about our current social media landscape and tech landscape, but ending it there with

what's making you feel hope, what's giving you motivation, what keeps you in this work and in this fight that we all know sometimes can feel like a slog, I think, is really beautiful. Got a story about an interesting thing in tech or just want to say hi? You could reach us at Hello at Tangote You can also find transcripts for today's episode at tangoity.com. There are no girls on the internet was created by me, Bridget Todd. It's a production of IHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. Jonathan Strickland is our executive producer. Tarry Harrison is our producer and sound engineer.

Michael Amato is our contributing producer. I'm your host, Bridget Todd. If you want to help us grow, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, check out the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer Streeter Seidel

help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. podcasts. What's up, fam?

It's Isaiah Thomas. And I'm C.J. Toledano. It's our favorite time of the year on our podcast, Point Game, the playoffs. We're digging into the biggest surprises of the season. And I'm looking back on some of my greatest playoff moments. If we didn't talk ever again, I was partying. You just understood. That's how personal it got.

Wow. Then after that game seven, Marquis come in. He's like, you know, I love you, dog. You know, it's all love. This was just playoffs. This was just basketball. So listen to Point Game on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your Why are we all so obsessed with romance?

On the Radio 831 podcast, join us, Sanjana Basker and Tyler McCall, as we unpack all the trending tropes, fuzzy adaptations, book talk drama, and celebrity love stories with hot takes and sharp guests. Each episode digs into what these stories reveal about desire, fantasy, identity, and how we love now. Listen to the Radio 831 podcast on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. This season on Dear Chelsea with me, Chelsea Handler, we have some fantastic guests like Amelia Clark. When like young people come up to me and they want to be an actor or whatever. My first thing is always, can you think of anything else that you can do? Rather be disappointed in. Do that. David O'Yello. I love this podcast, whether it's therapy or relationships or religion or sex or addiction or you just go straight for the guts.

Dennis Leary, Gaten Moderato from Stranger Things, Tanna Monsu, Camilla Morone, Carrie Kenny Silver, and more. Listen to these episodes of Dear Chelsea on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.