URL: https://blog.rudyfraser.com/an-internet-of-many-autonomous-communities/
A post by Rudy Fraser—the founder, creator, developer, and maintainer of BlackSky—sharing reflections and where his mind is after Atmosphere Conf 2025:
I veer dangerously close to thought leadership territory here but that's never my intention. This whole post should be read as either a product roadmap for Blacksky Algorithms or a very long feature request for Bluesky PBC.
Can watch his talk on Youtube—Beyond Horseless Carriages: Building Communities for the Decentralized Era.
He breaks the talk down:
- Horseless Carriages: Similar to the skeuomorphic design back in the day, using the metaphor to describe where ATProto is today.
- Path to a Zillion: Breaking down the sizing and scales of social networks. Specifically Bluesky, "Bluesky is paving the way to a first-of-its-kind, multi-billion person decentralized social network (as evidenced by user growth, VC investment, and READMEs that literally say so)."
- A Call to Action: "Build for your community. That's all that matters. That's all I've been doing at least."
...what seems to stick with folks is my framing of how large, decentralized communities are underserved, not easy to build, but have implicit benefits such as still being reasonably human scale, context-aware, and grow organically.
Making communities a true part of the protocol will encourage others to build things for those communities, start new communities, and hopefully foster models for self-sustainability.
AT Protocol breaks apart traditional social media infrastructure into individual Lego bricks (downloadable app brick, authn + authz brick, CDN brick, backlinks/aggregator brick, etc.) and allows users, builders and developers to reconstruct those bricks into new experiences. I am asking here for new types of bricks.
If what exists today is a dotted line, I'd like something that provides the option and flexibility of a more shaded in border. If the excuse and commonly given raison d'etre of public centralized social media is to be a global town hall – if we're using metaphors for IRL speech and discussions in digital spaces – then I as a user should be free to use my inside-voice/whisper (private conversation), choose who I'm speaking to/with (audience control), and maybe even opt to have someone facilitate a conversation.
Some "old school" ways of handling verification:
- 🔐 PGP Key Signing Parties: A Trust Network by Handshake
- 🌐 Webrings: Community-Based Affiliation on the Early Web
My main takeaway from the past is that in lieu of platforms, we relied on communities. So, why not both?
"The revolution ain't free" is a thing I like to say. It will cost you coins, resources, labor, etc. What has absolutely floored me is people's willingness to contribute all-the-above and more for Blacksky's cause.