Timestamped Conversation Guide

Navigate the full conversation by topic and timestamp.

Intro (0:00)

• 00:00 - Welcome to Eclecticisms; introducing the publication's first recorded conversation

• 00:07 - Guest introduction: Rudy Fraser, Blacksky Algorithms, Berkman Klein Center

• 00:29 - Framing the podcast: people who exist at unconventional intersections

Part I: The Genesis Story (1:04)

"If you follow the thread that eventually evolved into Blacksky, back to its very beginnings, where does that take you?"

• 01:18 - Community as the crux of Blacksky

• 01:43 - "I did it for me, and then everyone else just showed up"

• 02:01 - 2020, the George Floyd uprisings, and rediscovering community

• 02:28 - New York City as inherently communal — eight million people, one of the most expensive cities

• 03:27- Protests as an expression of shared rage and shared belonging

• 03:50 - Seeing community fridges for the first time

• 03:55 - Quitting his executive role after a company exit; having runway

• 04:06 - First startup ideas in enterprise IT — doing what he thought he was "supposed to"

• 04:44 - The pivot: "Win, lose, or draw, I'm happy with the journey"

• 04:55 - PaperTree: the digital community fridge — upload grocery receipts in Brooklyn, get them paid for

• 05:41 - Personal connection to food insecurity

• 06:20 - From grocery receipts → susu → mutual aid organizing

• 06:41 - Unconventional path to becoming an organizer

Part II: Community Infrastructure (7:04)

"I'd love to hear you talk a bit more about how this infrastructure piece first came into focus for you."

• 07:38 - Assessing the current organizing landscape

• 08:53 - Organizing in the 2020s: too many people looking to the past

• 09:06 - "The Panthers weren't facing what we are facing today" — robot dogs, Flock Safety, ShotSpotter, drones, NYPD tanks

• 09:41 - Copying 1960s-era organizing is inadequate against modern surveillance

• 10:50 - Community fridge mapping apps (Google Maps overlays)

• 11:06 - General consensus: technology = bad = big tech

• 11:19 - "I've always just been a hacker" — getting a desktop computer as a teen

• 12:53 - Setting up infrastructure for organizing: websites, domain names, Open Collective

• 13:00 - Open Collective explained: fiscal hosting for unincorporated mutual aid groups

• 13:38 - Modeling infrastructure after Bushwick mutual aid groups

• 14:00 - Technology elitism vs. meeting people where they are

Part III: Developing a Political Praxis (14:34)

"I'm curious at what point you start to develop your own political philosophy around all of this?"

• 14:54 - Research into political ideology: why set up servers for people?

• 15:24 - Black American desire for ownership

• 15:40 - Jay-Z and 50 Cent as models of ownership thinking (Brooklyn Nets, Vitaminwater, RadioShack stock)

• 16:36 - "We need our own social network"

• 16:42 - Exclusion driving the logic of self-sovereignty: "If you're gonna exclude us, we should have our own space"

• 17:01 - Black Panthers' evolution: nationalism → internationalism → intercommunalism

• 17:22 - Huey Newton's intercommunalism: "There's really just one nation and a bunch of communities"

• 17:54 - Black radical tradition on building infrastructure for your people

• 18:03 - Mutual aid as building alternative systems

• 18:07 - Abolition and the "What do you have instead?" question

Part IV: Black Anarchism & Web3 (18:47)

"There's also this dynamic of being the Black guy in the Web3 circles, and I'd love to hear you riff a bit on what that's been like."

• 19:36 - Believing in building things when people need them

• 19:52 - "You can't get too ahead of the people"

• 21:00 - The tech industry's execution philosophy vs. its motivations

• 21:08 - "I hate capitalism" — but wouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater

• 21:27 - Linus Torvalds as counterexample: scale of impact ≠ personal wealth

• 23:44 - Aaron Swartz and the limits of libertarian tech ideology

• 24:04 -Cypherpunk fellow; IPFS support for Blacksky

• 24:20 - "The founder of the cypherpunk movement literally called for the extermination of Black and Jewish people"

• 24:36 - Role as narrative changer

• 24:46 - "Win, lose, or draw, you at least have somebody to point to" — a Black kid from New York, no college degree, building open source at scale

Part V: Intro to Blacksky (25:17) 

"Maybe this is the perfect place to talk more directly about Blacksky, what exactly it is really."

• 25:34 - Started as just a custom feed on Bluesky

• 25:46 - Fundamentally motivated by being in service to people

• 26:18 - PaperTree → curiosity → Web3

• 26:27 - Sold first Bitcoin at ~$200 in 2013

• 26:51 - Bitcoin as his generational tech wave (like AI for college kids now)

• 27:05 - Early crypto: LocalBitcoins, Western Union to Romania, legal gray area

• 28:01 - Finding AT Protocol

• 28:28 - Philosophy: do things that are harder or scarier than your peers are willing to

• 29:00 - Interest in protocol-level building, not speculation

• 29:34 - What attracted him to AT Protocol: Web3 vibes, self-hosting, ownership, public key cryptography

• 31:14 - Black Planet existed, but never a Black social network connected to a global network

• 31:44 - The "switch" UX: toggle into your community, toggle into the wider world

• 32:07 - AT Protocol as vehicle for globally connected communities

• 32:38 - Two startup paradigms: A/B testing optimization vs. Steve Jobs intuition

• 33:26 - Ruha Benjamin's Imagination Manifesto: imagining the future vs. testing the present

• 34:00 - "I think of myself as a creative... I think of entrepreneurship as a spiritual kind of journey"

• 34:38 - Drawing on 1990s internet communities — peak optimism for what the internet could be

• 34:50 - Blacksky People's Assembly via a Pol.is fork

• 34:55 - Bitcoin emerged from Occupy Wall Street; Occupy also practiced people's assemblies

• 35:23 - Blacksky Cash as "the anarchist Venmo"

"A quick way to produce something valuable is to just do things that are harder or scarier to your peers."

Part VI: Sovereignty vs. Ecosystem (35:42)

"I'd love to hear you talk about what your experience has been like... where are the tensions, where's the alignment?"

• 36:36 - Relationship with Bluesky: professional, mutual benefit

• 37:04 - Bluesky moderation mistakes → Rudy has to answer for them

• 37:54 - "We help each other. Maybe we hurt each other."

• 38:41 - Behind-the-scenes collaboration on protocol problems

• 38:54 - AT Protocol architecture breakdown: PDS, moderation servers, custom feeds, relays, app view

• 39:41 - Blacksky now biggest independent entity in AT Protocol ecosystem

• 39:55 - More friction with AT Protocol ecosystem than with Bluesky itself

• 40:20 - Why Blacksky needed its own PDS: .blacksky.app usernames, data safety if Bluesky suspends you

• 41:05 - Account migration challenge

• 42:00 - Became the largest independent PDS & Built a relay independently

• 42:47 - App view announcement: the hardest piece

• 43:47 - Only entity besides Bluesky to have a fully functioning app view

• 45:10 - "They kinda caused this problem for us, but they're also helping us figure out the things"

Part VII: Advice for Building on AT Protocol (46:00)

"Any words of advice for others who are trying to build what they see as a sovereign community within an ecosystem like this?"

• 46:14 - First: have real users who care — people who would be sad if you disappeared

• 46:47 - Having people who yell at you when things break is important

• 47:00 - AT Protocol cold start problem

• 47:27 - Second: don't get distracted by other people's problems

• 48:36 - Business model: community donations could support a comfortable living

• 49:24 - Permissionless interoperability as a core value

• 50:17 - Being a team player: shouting out other projects, promoting the ecosystem

• 50:56 - Lean into protocol-level interoperability

"Why are you building for a community if you don't yourself have community? Having people who will yell at you if something breaks is just very important."

Part VIII: Looking to the Future (51:24)

"How are you thinking about the year ahead now that Blacksky has a bit of a flow going and some real scale?"

• 51:42 - Goal: grow the atmosphere independent of Bluesky

• 51:54 - Change narrative around AT Protocol as Bluesky-centric

• 52:08 - Wants more creatives, artists, creators

• 52:36 - The open challenge: how do you explain all this to people who don't care about a protocol?

• 53:17 - Bridging the gap: bringing "alien technology" to aligned organizations

• 53:23 - Protocol still not 1.0 — open questions on private data

• 53:46 - Launching Blacksky Cash: fintech on AT Protocol

• 54:05 - DID-to-DID payments

• 54:13 - Peer-to-peer payments; bringing back the PaperTree vision

• 54:28 - Social feed for conversations + moderation for safety + people's assembly for decisions + money as lifeblood

• 55:01 - "The promise of what DAOs kind of should have been, but for normal, everyday people"

"Blacksky is trying to create digital third spaces... where your community has complete say and control over it."

Part IX: Onboarding & Existing Challenges (55:38)

"What are the practical pathways to bringing more of these different types of people and different causes into the ecosystem?"

• 56:30 - Need differentiated services beyond Bluesky

• 56:44 - Skylight could capture TikTok refugees; Reddit alternative could capture Reddit blackout users

• 57:28 - Most devs don't want to do their own moderation

• 57:37 - Blacksky: one of the first to fully separate from Bluesky moderation

• 58:35 - Social media burnout: organizations and individuals tired of managing another page

• 59:26 - What people actually want: intimacy, community, personal connections, keeping up with friends

• 60:01 - TikTok didn't come out of nowhere — massive paid promotion and ad burn

• 61:00 - Meeting the moment: more intimacy, less virality

• 61:14 - AI social networks as antithetical to human connection

• 61:25 - Real innovation: find ways for people to meet up offline

"No one's really offering intimacy on AT Protocol right now. Everyone's just like, 'What is centralized big platform? Let's create decentralized big platform.' And that's not meeting the moment."

Part X: 2026 Goals & Aspirations (1:01:52)

"Do you have any specific hopes for the project or for the ecosystem for the next year?"

• 62:04 - Blacksky to make its first million dollars

• 62:11 - AT Protocol to reach 100 million users

• 62:21 - Wants the same or more AT Protocol projects than 2025 — no decrease

Part XI: Works that Rewired Rudy’s Worldview (1:02:40)

"What is one piece of work, could be literally any medium, that has genuinely rewired the way you see the world?"

• 63:27 - Recommendation 1: Working in Public by Nadia Eghbal — on what it's like to maintain a popular open source project

• 63:38 - Most people don't know what open source means; communication is key

• 64:07 - Recommendation 2: Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness by Simone Browne

• 64:24 - NYC lantern laws: free Black people had to carry a lantern if not accompanied by a white person

• 64:50 - Connection between lantern laws and NYPD stationing floodlights in front of buildings

• 65:00 - Living under constant surveillance: cops posted on his block, standing in his building

Outro (1:06:00)

Further Reading & Resources

Go deeper on anything mentioned.

Blacksky

• Blacksky Official Site — Overview, mission, and services

• Blacksky Documentation — Technical documentation and list of services

• Blacksky on Open Collective — Transparent financials and donation page

• Blacksky GitHub (rsky — Rust implementation) — Open source codebase

• Rudy Fraser's Blog — includes "Blacksky: Expressing the Black Everyday in a New Digital Space"

AT Protocol & Decentralized Social Media

• AT Protocol Official Overview — The technical overview of how AT Protocol works

• Federation Architecture — Bluesky Docs — Deep dive into PDSes, relays, app views

• AT Protocol Community Wiki — Community-maintained wiki with reference docs on core architecture

Political & Intellectual Context

• Intercommunalism (1974) — Viewpoint Magazine — Huey Newton's original text

• Huey P. Newton's Late Theorizations — Viewpoint Magazine — Context and analysis

• Cypherpunk — Wikipedia — History and key figures of the movement

• Movement for Black Lives — Organization Rudy is in conversation with about infrastructure

• Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society — Where Rudy is a fellow

Community Infrastructure & Mutual Aid

• Open Collective — Fiscal Hosting — How fiscal hosting works for unincorporated groups

• Mutual Aid Hub — Directory of mutual aid groups

• How to Create a Mutual Aid Network — AFSC — Practical guide

• Pol.is — Official — The democratic deliberation tool Blacksky is forking

• The Computational Democracy Project — Deeper context on Pol.is methodology

Black Social Networks — Historical Context

• BlackPlanet — Wikipedia — Omar Wasow's pioneering platform

• Omar Wasow on Building Online Community — Chantel Marcelle — Interview with the founder

• The AOL-era Black Internet — IDPI Podcast — Omar Wasow on the early days

Web3 & Crypto Context

• IPFS — Official — InterPlanetary File System

Ecosystem Projects Mentioned

• Skylight — TikTok alternative on AT Protocol (backed by Mark Cuban) @skylight.social

Episode Glossary

Key terms and references explained.

Crypto & Web3 Terms

• Web3 — A broad term for decentralized internet technologies built on cryptographic protocols, including blockchain, cryptocurrency, and peer-to-peer networks. Rudy came to AT Protocol through this world.

• DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization) — An organization governed by smart contracts and token-holder votes rather than traditional corporate hierarchy. Rudy describes Blacksky Cash as "the promise of what DAOs should have been, but for normal, everyday people."

• Cypherpunk — A movement from the late 1980s/90s advocating for strong cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies as tools for social change.

• IPFS (InterPlanetary File System) — A peer-to-peer protocol for storing and sharing data in a distributed file system. IPFS (via Protocol Labs/Filecoin Foundation) has provided funding to Blacksky. ipfs.tech

• LocalBitcoins — An early peer-to-peer Bitcoin marketplace where buyers and sellers could trade directly, often meeting in person or using bank transfers.

• SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) — A startup financing instrument where investors provide capital in exchange for the right to future equity.

• Network States — A concept (popularized by Balaji Srinivasan) of digitally-native communities that eventually acquire physical territory. Rudy references this as an example of getting "too ahead of the people."

Organizing & Political Terms

• Mutual Aid — A practice of voluntary, reciprocal support among community members. Distinct from charity (which implies a power imbalance), mutual aid is rooted in the idea that communities take care of their own. Rudy's organizing career started through mutual aid work in Brooklyn.

• Susu (also sou-sou, tontine) — An informal rotating savings arrangement common in Caribbean, African, and other diasporic communities. Members contribute regularly to a shared pot, and each person takes a turn receiving the full amount. PaperTree ran a digital version of this.

• Community Fridge — A publicly accessible refrigerator stocked by community members for anyone who needs food. They proliferated across NYC during the 2020 protests and became a symbol of mutual aid infrastructure. PaperTree was partly inspired by the concept of a "digital community fridge."

• Fiscal Host / Fiscal Hosting — An arrangement where an established nonprofit allows unincorporated groups (like mutual aid collectives) to receive tax-deductible donations under its umbrella. Open Collective provides this service.

• Intercommunalism — Huey Newton's late political theory: since the U.S. empire is so powerful that true national sovereignty is impossible, the path forward is uniting communities around the globe rather than building separate nations. Rudy traces a line from this to Blacksky's model.

• Black Radical Tradition — A broad intellectual and political tradition encompassing thinkers and movements from abolition through the Black Panthers to contemporary organizing, emphasizing self-determination, community sovereignty, and building alternative systems.

• People's Assembly — A democratic decision-making process where community members deliberate and reach consensus. Used at Occupy Wall Street and now implemented digitally by Blacksky using a fork of Pol.is.

• Abolition — In this context, the political project of abolishing policing and prisons, with the core challenge being: "What do you have instead?" Rudy frames Blacksky's infrastructure-building as the practical answer to that question.

Tools & Platforms Referenced

• Open Collective — A platform that provides transparent financial infrastructure for communities and collectives. It combines a web app with fiscal hosting services, allowing unincorporated groups to receive donations and manage funds. opencollective.com

• Pol.is — An open-source tool for large-scale democratic deliberation. Participants submit short statements and vote agree/disagree, and the system maps clusters of opinion. Blacksky is building a fork of this for their People's Assembly feature. pol.is

• Signal — An encrypted messaging app. Rudy advocated for organizers to use it for secure communications.

• Flock Safety — A company that sells automated license plate readers and surveillance cameras to law enforcement and neighborhoods. Mentioned as part of the modern surveillance infrastructure that organizers face.

• ShotSpotter — An acoustic surveillance system that uses microphone sensors to detect and locate gunfire. Deployed in many U.S. cities, often in predominantly Black neighborhoods.

• Palantir — A data analytics company that builds surveillance and intelligence platforms for government and law enforcement. Named as part of the technological apparatus that makes 1960s-era organizing tactics insufficient.

• Skylight — A TikTok-style short video app built on AT Protocol. Rudy discusses it as an example of how differentiated apps could bring new user populations into the ecosystem.

People Referenced

• Aaron Swartz — Internet activist, programmer, and co-founder of Reddit who advocated for open access to information. Died by suicide in 2013 while facing federal charges for downloading academic papers. Rudy notes the limits of his political ideology: "It doesn't talk about racial equity."

• Linus Torvalds — Creator of Linux, the open-source operating system kernel. Rudy uses him as an example that scale of technological impact doesn't correlate with personal wealth.

• Omar Wasow — Founder of Black Planet, one of the earliest Black social networks. Rudy has consulted with him on Blacksky.

• Huey Newton — Co-founder of the Black Panther Party. Referenced for his late-period theory of intercommunalism.

• Ruha Benjamin — Princeton professor and author of Imagination: A Manifesto. Rudy draws on her work about imagining future possibilities rather than A/B testing the present.

• Simone Browne — Author of Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. One of Rudy's two book recommendations; explores the historical connections between slave-era surveillance and modern policing technologies.

• Brian Newbold — Member of the Bluesky team whom Rudy considers a friend. Represents the working collaborative relationship between Blacksky and Bluesky.

• Bailey Townsend — Community developer who built PDS Mover, the account migration tool that enabled thousands of users to move to the Blacksky PDS.

Places & Cultural References

• Bed-Stuy (Bedford-Stuyvesant) — A historically Black neighborhood in Brooklyn, NYC. Central to Rudy's personal and professional life; he deliberately brings collaborators there for meetings.

• Key Food — A grocery store chain in NYC. The Key Food on Marcus Garvey Boulevard is where Rudy stood with a laptop offering to pay for groceries — the origin of PaperTree.

• Fulton & Nostrand — A major intersection in Bed-Stuy, used by Rudy as shorthand for his community's everyday spaces.

• Bushwick — A Brooklyn neighborhood. Rudy participated in Bushwick mutual aid organizing and was inspired by how groups like Bushwick Ayuda Mutua ran their operations.

• Vibe Coded — Slang for software built quickly and loosely using AI tools (like coding copilots) without rigorous engineering. Rudy uses it to describe a broken AT Protocol migration tool.

Technology & Protocol Terms

• AT Protocol (Authenticated Transfer Protocol) — An open, decentralized social networking protocol developed by Bluesky. Think of it as the plumbing underneath social media apps: instead of one company owning the whole stack, different entities can run different pieces (data hosting, moderation, feeds, etc.) and they all interoperate. atproto.com

• PDS (Personal Data Server) — In AT Protocol, your data (posts, likes, follows) lives on a PDS rather than being locked inside a single company's servers. You can host your own or use someone else's. Blacksky runs the largest independent PDS. AT Protocol Docs

• Relay — An AT Protocol service that aggregates data from many PDSes into a single stream. Think of it as a firehose that collects everything happening across the network so that apps can build timelines and feeds. Blacksky built their own relay independently.

• App View — In AT Protocol, your data (posts, likes, follows) lives in your own personal server, like a digital locker. An AppView is a service that reads everyone's data and assembles it into something usable — like turning millions of individual posts into a feed with like counts, threads, and timelines. Multiple AppViews can exist over the same data, so you can switch apps without losing anything, kind of like how you can search the same internet through Google or DuckDuckGo.

• Custom Feed — On AT Protocol/Bluesky, anyone can create an algorithmic feed. Blacksky started as a custom feed that surfaced Black content. Unlike platform algorithms, you choose which feeds to subscribe to.

• DID (Decentralized Identifier) — A unique, persistent identity tied to a user on AT Protocol. Unlike a username, a DID stays the same even if you move to a different server. Blacksky Cash would enable DID-to-DID payments.

• Bluesky — The largest social media app built on AT Protocol, with ~40 million users at time of recording. Founded by Jack Dorsey, now independent. It's both a company and the biggest node in the AT Protocol network.

• Protocol Portability — A core promise of AT Protocol: the ability to move your account (data, followers, identity) from one server to another. PDS Mover is the tool that made this practical for Blacksky users.

• PDS Mover — A tool built by community developer Bailey Townsend that allows users to migrate their accounts between PDSes. It's mobile-friendly and web-based, and has moved thousands of Blacksky accounts.

More from Rudy & Blacksky

Other interviews, articles, and links from Rudy & Blacksky.

AT Protocol:

@rude1.blacksky.team

GitHub

Harvard Berkman Klein Center

LinkedIn

Rudy's 2025 Reading List

Podcast Appearances

• Tech Policy Press: "Building Middleware for Bluesky: A Conversation with Blacksky Founder Rudy Fraser"

• Dot Social: "Architecting a New Era of Community, with Blacksky's Rudy Fraser"

• DevTools.fm #125: "Rudy Fraser — BlackSky — Next Generation of Social Media"

• There Are No Girls on the Internet (iHeart): "Can BlackSky Fix What Twitter Broke Using Bluesky Tech?"

• Nodestar / Computer Says Maybe: "Building Blacksky w/ Rudy Fraser"

• We Distribute — Decentered S1E6: "Beautiful Blacksky with Rudy Fraser"

Articles & Profiles

• Nonprofit Quarterly: "Building #Blacksky"

• Noir Press: "Rudy Fraser on Black Sky and the Fight for an Independent Internet"

• New Public: "How Blacksky Grew to Millions"

• TechCrunch: "A World Without Caesars" (AT Protocol community feature)

• Flipboard: "Blacksky and the Future of Community with Rudy Fraser"

• Rudy Fraser's Blog: "Blacksky: Expressing the Black Everyday in a New Digital Space (Part 1)"

Talks & Events

• University of Maryland: "From #BlackTwitter to Blacksky" — Workshops & Talk

• AT Protocol Tech Talk: "Implementing AT Protocol in Rust for Blacksky"