What are the differences between Bluesky and Blacksky? What does it mean to provide different services for the black community?
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.
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.
Don't need extreme measures to keep bad actors out if you're able and willing to throw out anyone who obviously doesn't intend on playing nice.
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.
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.