Crucially, the purpose of Blacksky is to provide a service for the (US) black community which has its own moderation decisions while being substantially interoperable.
(Remember, the reasons people use one social network rather than another are almost always social first and technical second, where the social functions are enabled or hindered by the technology)
That post isn't very clear about what specifically happened on BlueSky that made the author move, and I can't see the full thread he links without having a BlackSky account.
What moderation decisions were made regarding this "Link" user that were suspect, using the post author's word?
My perspective of that situation is Link was a fairly popular poster, and had a post that was a quote post of someone from the Bluesky team with an image of an assassinated figure and an alt text that couldve been perceived as a threat to the bluesky team.
> Crucially, the purpose of Blacksky is to provide a service for the (US) black community which has its own moderation decisions while being substantially interoperable.
What are the differences between Bluesky and Blacksky? What does it mean to provide different services for the black community?
> The main Blacksky feed and platform are exclusively for Black people. Non-Black people cannot create accounts to post on Blacksky.
Fascinating
edit: before people take it the wrong way, I mean it's fascinating in that I've never seen these type of moderation policies before. I've seen plenty of communities about cultures (i.e. Ukrainian discord servers), but not around Race and not exclusionary to outsiders. I'm not making a moral judgement here.
Yeah it's worth noting that blacksky provides accounts to non-black users but their posts don't get included in the blacksky feed. And non-blacksky PDS users who are confirmed black still are allowed to be included in the blacksky feed.
So it's multiple components really.
- The blacksky feed which is a curated feed and community built around the US black community on atproto.
- The blacksky client, appview, moderation team, and relay which provide the necessary infrastructure for blacksky to operate independent of the rest of the ecosystem if they need to and for them to tailor their experience to their community.
- The blacksky PDS which serves as a source of truth for data storage and auth for blacksky users that choose to use it.
And of course non-black users can use all of this infrastructure but if you aren't black and you want to host your account on a blacksky PDS you have to pay a small subscription/donation.
It's all for their community but they are more than willing to let other people use their infra as long as those people pay their fair share.
Note that I'm not a blacksky member, just someone involved in the greater atproto space so my understanding of the process is likely not perfect.
But AFAIK the way blacksky operates is that they assume good faith when new users join. If it becomes obvious that you are not black then you will likely get reported or directly hit by moderation action and they will ask you to verify your identity at some level.
I think it's something along the lines of "send a photograph that would be non-trivial to fake". Not necessarily forcing you to dox yourself but requiring that you provide some level of evidence that's visibly resistant to AI/tampering. Now I have no idea the extent to which they do this to be entirely honest but I do know they don't mess around with people doing "digital blackface".
I'm not sure how well that moderation approach will scale at large but given they are a community that has carved out their own niche and not a corp just blindly driving to scale, I doubt they'll see the strain that the greater bluesky and atproto have experienced with moderation struggles at scale. And given all decisions around policy and moderation rules are decided by the Blacksky People's Assembly, as the community evolves participants can participate in governance and help craft the process if they are dissatisfied.
i.e. it becomes clear you are using it as a sockpuppet account (some users have been caught trying to do this), outright saying you aren't black, etc.
Like if you aren't being a niche internet celebrity and aren't trying to play main character on the internet it's unlikely you'd get caught unless you were particularly stupid but that's also kinda part of the point. It's a community and people in that community know each other both online and IRL. It'd be pretty hard to be involved in the community without leaving behind an evidence trail of you blatantly lying about who you are.
Go into the subreddit "blackpeopletwitter" and just open a bunch of threads and look for someone commenting "found the white guy", or something like that.
Black people seeking structural or infrastructural autonomy within the US to counteract their historic exclusion from power, production, and protection post-slave-trade is a fairly specific context which doesn't apply to white or asian folks. Also I don't think asian people would appreciate being called "yellow."
I can understand it from their perspective, but still don't think it's a good development (same with other exclusionary "safe spaces" for other groups).
Or rather, I'd at least like to know what is the end game here. Have those groups effectively given up any hope of changing the country and mainstream society at large, so the new strategy is now retreating into gated communities while leaving the rest to the Trumps and Musks?
> I'd at least like to know what is the end game here. Have those groups effectively given up any hope of changing the country and mainstream society at large, so the new strategy is now retreating into gated communities
I noticed this occasional tendency in the west to analyze an action or behavior by hypothetically scaling it to way beyond the scope of the actual action or behavior, and I've been wondering if this is some kind of judicial application of Kantian thinking?
I'd push back on that and say, not everything has to be scaled. Not every behavior is an indictment of other behavior. People doing things isn't necessarily an argument that all people should do those same things. Nor is it an indication that those people only want to do those things that way - just because some black people want a reprieve from whatever their perception of day to day western life is, doesn't mean they've "given up" on making any changes to that society.
It's facetious when people question why BlackSky need to exist 40+ years after the "14 words" and in the age where White Christian Nationalism is completely mask-off.
HN often tolerates dog whistles about how school kids bussed from "the had part of town" are a net-negative, but BlackSky is suddenly the bad type of segregation? GTFOH.
I might be missing something about the protocol, but when logged into BlueSky, I can't interact with BlackSky accounts at all. I specifically have to have an account there to even follow a BlackSky account.
I'm not as familiar with ATProto as ActivityPub, but following someone from another Mastodon instance, for example, is seamless as long as I'm logged in to the account I have on my home instance.
I follow, and am followed by, folks who use Blacksky and interact with them regularly. I have had zero issue with this, at any point. As Paul (the CTO of Bluesky) said in a sibling comment this would be a very serious bug.
FWIW— I have also not heard anything even remotely close to this at all from anyone using either service.
I can't comment, follow, like, or anything like that without getting the "Sign in or create your account to join the cookout!" popup. I wasn't trying to cause problems or get downvoted, this is just the the first non-BlueSky PDS I've ever come across and was curious to see the federation work.
Ah, okay, thank you. I was expecting it to work more like Mastodon in the sense that I can go to a different instance and interact with accounts seamlessly without having to bring them up in my own instance, but this is fine, too.
The way the protocol works, they're not isolated, and so they're not ceding ground to other groups. I suppose the closest analogy would be an email host, in that running your own email host wouldn't materially isolate your users but it would enable you to set policies for your own users.
What is an exclusionary safe space? I've never heard of or encountered such a thing. Or are you saying that safe spaces are necessarily exclusionary, because they are welcoming people that have reasons to feel unsafe other places?
It seems like a very confusing concept to just throw out there without explanation!
It's difficult to describe how the US black community has uniquely suffered for centuries due to unique appeal of the mercantile class to the Catholic church about how it's actually okay to mistreat their human cargo and perform chattel slavery. Then, hundreds of years later the mercantile reason is forgotten, yet bigotry from it lays embedded in American society. And in other societies that took black people as slaves, to a lesser extent.
So a black segregated community does not sound very racist for these historical reasons. Not to say that desegregation in America has failed, but that there are infallible holdouts that wish to cling to a rotted out ideology that, again, its origins by its believers have largely forgotten.
Asian American communities are complicit, more or less unknowingly, to a lesser extent but only because they have aped to authority in America to achieve "whiteness".
The sad truth is that there is no community that prides itself on being white without parroting trickster mercantile talking points, of which again I remind that their origins are forgotten and they do not even know why they hate so fiercely.
So something like Blacksky is genuinely exciting in theory. Even though it will probably self select in a way that makes it inhospitable for new comers. Much like Bluesky...but, I'm describing a separate argument from historical bigotry, which I feel compelled to call out since its origins have--for the fourth time--been so forgotten.
If and when the asian community decides to reappropriate "yellow" as a way of self identification, then given a few decades, it will not be seen as racist anymore.
In the mean time, "yellow" is a racist adjective for asians, "black" is not a racist adjective for black people.
> In several Gallup measurements over the next three decades, including the most recent in 2019, the large majority of Black Americans have said the use of Black vs. African American doesn't matter to them.
Not caring is not acceptance. The term is literally racist both and origin. Unfortunately they were denied being called simply Americans due to historical reasons. African American is sadly also a misnomer given that there’s barely any connection to Africa for the people generally referred to as “black”.
Notice how everyone else is called by nationality or origin.
Black is absolutely accepted as an accepted adjective. Especially with the capital-b, Black is used to refer to the unique Black culture and heritage in the United States. Black history is one where people were taken from their nations or places of origin, transported to a foreign land, and put in bondage. As you say in your own comment, many black or African-American people (whichever label you prefer) have little connection to Africa; it wouldn't make sense to them to refer to them by nationality or origin, when Black culture is its own thing.
Don't get it twisted: I agree that the history of African-Americans in the US is one marred by slavery, segregation, racism, and the constant struggle to attain and retain equality. But out of that came something unique that many black people celebrate to this day.
this is true, "black" has been used in racist ways, but it got rehabbed and reclaimed in the 60s and 70s.
but more to the point, it is not currently used in a racist manner by the vast majority of the US, and certainly does not carry the same connotations as "yellow", so not really comparable imo
There's not really a black community either, it's a demographic. There are many communities of black people, but we really need to stop equating demographics with communities (not just this case).
"yellowsky" sounds racist because calling asians "yellow" is racist.
"whitesky" sounds racist because...well, i don't know if you're a big history buff but in the US white-people-only gatherings were always suuuuper racist.
I don’t really care if some group that doesn’t include me wants to exercise their freedom of association — whatever, it’s a free internet, go do your thing — but my lord it’s amusing to see Bluesky keep purging itself via these endless purity spirals.
I actually don't think Blacksky reflects any kind of cultural purging cycle. Blacksky is extremely practical in its formation & purpose - not reactionary to any specific events on the network - and most of the bluesky/blacksky userbases are connected and socializing. There's no beef between the userbases.
Crucially, the purpose of Blacksky is to provide a service for the (US) black community which has its own moderation decisions while being substantially interoperable.
(Remember, the reasons people use one social network rather than another are almost always social first and technical second, where the social functions are enabled or hindered by the technology)