What does it look like when a community builds its own social media on its own terms? Rudy Fraser, technologist, community organiser, and founder of Blacksky Algorithms, has been doing exactly that.
BlackSky is an alternative social network that specifically focuses on the Black community and its allies. What makes it distinctive is how it came to be: not from a corporate office, but from the community itself. Users actively shape decisions around moderation, features, and the direction of the platform. Built on AT Protocol — the open, decentralised protocol that also underpins Bluesky — BlackSky makes use of shared identities, feeds, and data storage, while carving out its own safe and sovereign space on top of that foundation.
Fraser sees BlackSky as more than an app: it is an experiment in digital self-determination — a place where the community sets the rules, not algorithms or shareholders. In his keynote, he shares what this means in practice, and what the broader open social web can learn from it.