# “No One’s Coming to Save Us. Why Communities Must Build Their Own Internet” -Rudy Fraser, Blacksky - Channel: [Ethereum Cypherpunk Congress](https://streameth.org/ethereum-cypherpunk-congress) - Date: 2026-01-09 - Duration: 20:33 - Topics: web3, privacy, now, crypto, cryptography, blockchain, data, security, human right, rights, tech, technology, internet, open source, free, freedom, ethereum, hackers, ethics, cypherpunk, dev, developer, dapp, decentralization, bitcoin, computer, surveillance, cyber, peer2peer, p2p, love, solidity, zk, zero knowledge, education, academy, w3pn - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-Pjzfc8UCjAk - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pjzfc8UCjAk ## Description Rudy Fraser, Founder & CEO of Blacksky Algorithms shares how Blacksky grew into the largest Black community on the decentralized web, with custom feeds used by over 2.5M people. He explains how their toolkit lets communities control algorithms, moderation, governance, and pooled funds while staying connected to a global social media ecosystem. Rudy talks about mutual aid roots, open-source development, community-written guidelines, the impact of US politics and free-speech crackdowns, and why privacy-preserving, community-run spaces are essential for Black autonomy and modern cypherpunk organizing. Timecodes 00:00 – Rudy intro: Blacksky Algorithms & community-owned social spaces 00:30 – What Blacksky is: largest Black community on decentralized web 02:35 – Origins: collectivist roots, mutual aid, first Bluesky custom feed 04:10 – Lessons for builders: social dynamics, community as growth engine 05:22 – Why community matters: reciprocity, trust, bottom-up decision making 07:07 – Involving people: open source, PRs, moderators, community-built tools 08:35 – People’s Assembly: 600+ participants shaping Blacksky guidelines 09:43 – Political reality: migration waves, free-speech crackdowns, age laws 12:05 – Privacy challenges: public firehose, surveillance, need for safer spaces 15:26 – Cypherpunk today: self-determination, mutual aid, diverse movement 17:22 – Future internet: safe organizing, data freedom, stronger real-world action 19:10 – Final vision: using secure networks to empower on-the-ground movements ... This conversation is part of Privacy Academy Interviews – a peer-to-peer knowledge project exploring the most important ideas in Web3, privacy, and digital freedom. Learn more: https://academy.web3privacy.info/p/interviews A W3PN Media House production. Directed by Federico Marchi https://x.com/BabyBitProd Interview by Peter Farbey https://x.com/0xfarbey Let privacy be with you! ## Transcript Hey y'all. I'm Rudy Fraser. I'm the founder and CEO of Black Sky Algorithms. And we are building a toolkit to allow communities to create online spaces that they control from the moderation to the governance [music] to the financial tools necessary to pull funds together while still being connected to a global uh social ecosystem. Hi everybody. Happy to see you here. >> Yeah. Uh hi people. Uh so for those who don't know about you, can you say a few words about you and Black Sky as well? >> Yeah. So I'm Rudy. I'm the founder and CEO of Black Sky Algorithms where we build uh tools to allow community builders to create online spaces that they and their community control fully but are still connected to a global social media ecosystem. Uh you can think of us as the Reddit for protocol. Um yeah, we started as a single community uh the Black Sky community which is kind of the namesake and is the community that we're using to lead the way. was the uh it's the largest black community on the decentralized web. Uh our custom feeds have been used by over 2.5 million people. Um we have the you know to to to facilitate that and to create this toolkit we uh have implemented the app protocol in Rust. Um we have a relay, a personal data server, etc. uh and and yeah, so the we're trying to create this toolkit where communities can control the the algorithm that surfaces content in their spaces, can control the moderation uh for their community, can have governance and and you know have their community decide the rules of that space and then also can pull funds together um as a way to keep their community sustainable. Um and yeah, I've been working on Black Sky for 2 years now. Uh I'm also a fellow at the applied social media lab at the Burkeman client center uh at Harvard University. Um as well as doing various other mutual aid organizing work with folks like we the people NYC and uh packed collective. >> Wow that's very impressive and I personally adore like black sky. It's great that what you are doing and the amount of people the users that you have already wow very impressive. Uh, how did you come up with this idea and how like you started to do that? What was the initial inspiration? >> Yeah. Um, I feel like I understand community better than a lot of folks. I feel like community to me is not just a a broad demographic like the sneakerhead community for example. I think of community as this reciprocal relationship uh mutual accountability between the individual and the group. And so um I myself uh in my upbringing relied on community a lot. Uh I grew up in with a kind of a collectivist kind of uh foundations and principles in just my family and my culture. U my family's from Guyana in South America and uh yeah and so I wanted to when I struck out to kind of do my own startup I wanted to work on something that felt true to myself and so that led me to working on projects like Paper Tree which is now underneath um Black Sky. Paper Tree is like this community banking project um that led me to working with mutual aid groups. And so yeah, so the mutual aid organizing influences my work with Black Sky and kind of vice versa in in some ways. Um it initially the very first thing was you know I signed up with sign up for Blue Sky with the intent to be a developer on the platform at like user 50,000 or something. Um I launched the first custom feed there and it immediately took off and uh community form and identity formed around it. Now so much so that you know with our latest round we we did a a polless um we we call it our people's assembly uh asking folks like can other communities use the name black sky and everyone was like no like not like they have to ask permission first. So like there's this thing that I created that now you know tens of thousands of people are they feel so strongly uh connected to the identity of it. >> Yeah. Um maybe you can share some lessons learned like uh especially like your success story of like obtaining such a great amount of users in such a period amount of time like just in two years like what would you recommend to builders or to community builders like any lessons from your uh story? Yeah, I think I always u say that I think if you're building social networks and uh or social media projects, you should have a good understanding of social dynamics uh and what why people do the things that they do. Um you know, I think there's what's really exciting about app protocol is there's a lot of different theories of change out there. There's folks working on germ network for like encrypted NN encrypted uh DMs and that their their idea is like friends will have like basically like the group chat um the group chat people will will want to use uh app protocol for their group chats that'll be their theory of growth. My theory of growth is community you know um I think uh you can like people will want to uh find uh that kind of connection with their community. They'll meet online and then they'll meet in real life. Some people are like maybe we need like you know their skylight they're working on the viral engine of growth. Um I think you should have an understanding of like you know blue sky is like breaking news like you should have an idea of the persona and user that you're looking to build for and understand why they're going to take time out of their day that you know time is finite. You have to understand what is going to bring them to your thing and and keep them there. And that's is if you're in the social media space that's something you know there's some deep thing there uh that that person that you're you're kind of acting on. So that's a thing that I learned. Um and in that like for me even realizing that community was my kind of a engine of growth and community is definitely not to be taken lightly. You know if you um I think open source projects you know see this a lot. You know I was just watching this documentary about Python and the change from Python 2.6 7 to Python 3 and how that was a breaking change and you know there was just a a big backlash from that. You you want to as much as possible you want to have your community feel involved um you know and and be listened to. You know they're not top down changes you'll find that folks rebel against you and you ultimately lose trust and we're kind of in the business of of trust. >> Here comes a question. How do you involve them or like how do you do that? Not like t button but like button up more and more organic or is there any ways to do that? >> Yeah, I think from the technical side we you know we build open source so we gave the code away for free from the very beginning and in that way that engenders trust because you can just see you can see the algorithm uh and then we accept pull requests. So if you have the technical skills to change things, you can you can build. Uh we we're very welcoming. I also give credit to the community because people often have this idea of tech founders as this like you know this individual who through sheer force of will and I guess luck is what makes them successful. Now I've always credited the community with our success. you know, folks from the early days, you know, it was I never did uh growth marketing or anything like or ran ads somewhere else to to promote Black Sky. It was always word of mouth. So, right there, I'm grateful to the community. I show that gratitude. Um there were folks who wanted to build, they had certain ideas like, hey, like we could make the the algorithm more uh you know, communally governed. You can have your um instead of just you Ruby taking down posts from the feed, like you could have other people control that. So someone built a tool to do that. Boom, let's promote that. Let's, you know, shout you out for that. Um, people wanted to get involved with the projects. The moderators, we recruited our moderators from our community. Um, so it was people who were deeply invested already and had trust and safety backgrounds who we brought onto the team and then compensated them for their moderation work. So really rewarding your community. You know, there are folks who are like, "Hey, I want to see, you know, it's great what you're doing." Um, you know, there were folks who made a fellowship, the Emojia Fellowship. Um, shout out Linda. Uh, she created this fellowship to get folks from the Black Scot community into the atmosphere conference at Protocol's first conference. So, like getting your community involved, listening to them. I think those are very important. And now in a very formal and practical way, we have a fork of polus called our people's assembly. and we've ran that over the course of the last two weeks and over 600 people have participated in that process. Over 22,000 votes, 200 statements written um to decide on what our community guidelines are. So our community is literally drafting the guidelines for our community. Um and so yeah, I think that we're always trying to make that more this more democratic um process for how the platform is is ran. >> Wow. But I'm even more impressed now because it seems really organic and really healthy the way you grow. Uh wow job. Um but now like the the reality is uh uh how do you feel um the current political situation like does it affect you and like like sky uh or you still remain more like um untouched by that? >> Yeah definitely. Um, so you know, in general, US politics, uh, for for Black Sky as the as the Black Sky community, I always make the distinction between Black Sky algorithms, the company, and Black Sky the community because I I speak for as a CEO of the company, but not as that for the for the community. Um and uh but for the community there was always during the US uh you know presidential elections there was you know if if we were going off of like traditional growth metrics those are actually our peak times like if something big happened in the news there would be people coming to the black sky feed to like have conversations about it and see what folks were saying. Um, and then with the, you know, Trump's, uh, Trump's, uh, win in the the last election, he had a big migration, um, and an influx of users. Uh, now we're seeing free speech really get threatened, you know, since the the situation with with uh, the assassination of Charlie Kirk. There's been sharp crackdowns. We're seeing celebrities um, lose their jobs, like Jimmy Kimmel's show got pulled. Um, you know, there are Washington Post journalists, black women journalists who are getting fired for their posts that they make on Bulls Sky. Um uh there's law, state laws around age verification which you know it's hard to take the stance of like you know like the the the the laws are brought about to say like to protect children and it's obviously hard to take the stance of like you know being against protecting children. But really the the problem is the way those laws get implemented. you know, some of them deputize uh parents to be able to sue a company directly if there's any content that is adult content anywhere on their site. Um, you know, we saw we saw Blue Skies response to that. They shut off access to Mississippi. You know, we were able to say that in our client, we're not tracking location. So, you know, we we we simply won't, you know, we can't comply with this law because we don't track anyone's geoloc. Um but yeah, so there's lots of I think the political climate is very uh it's very uh you know tricky right now. Uh and so it definitely affects us. We've had call especially because of the crackdown on free speech. We've had calls to create more private spaces for for black sky which was always the plan because there's always when black folks speak truth to power there's always a a backlash on the on the back of that. And so uh that was already in our in our plans but now it's even more urgent to to do that. >> Yeah. So here comes a question about privacy like and its role and how do you see it implemented or like how do you use it now and how how important that like preserves it freedom and freedom of speech. >> Yeah. Um I think privacy is a tricky one because there are so many different end user expectations of privacy and uh ad protocol for for those who don't know is uh primarily it's public data right now. So every action that a user takes every follow every post every like is published to a fire hose of information that is permissionless and accessible by you know just about anyone. And so that is that in itself is a bit of a surveillance nightmare. Um you know the feds are definitely listening to the the app protocol fire hose. Uh and so keeping stuff off of the fire hose has become more important. How we implement what those things are. I think there's like you have to assess the level of paranoia. you know, if you want to create there, we had conversations in the basically there's like working groups set up for this now of like how do we as a protocol and community roll out these solutions but you know if you want to start the blow up NYPD squad cards you know group then you probably want something end to end encrypted uh if you know most people's expectation is at least like a Twitter style Instagram style private account where you can hit private account and then people have to ask your permission to see your content by like requesting to follow you and that you know everything you have is locked down. That's also kind of difficult with the protocol design today because if you even if you had something that did that, you know, your posts are already out there. They're already in somebody's database. So it's not like you can ask for those things back. um you know so there's there's uh so privacy I think the implementation of it all everyone has to kind of assess like what needs they're trying to meet and then try to like you can't do I think I don't think you can do everything but you know people want some people want a circle like you know like Google circles like not just your followers maybe this like collective of people can get have access to your stuff maybe you need end to end encrypt encrypted stuff maybe you just need like some kind of like uh privacy aware like access control lists, you know. So, um, and for us, we're trying to find that balance of we can't wait like the urgency is so much and the user base is there. So, we can't wait for everyone else to figure out something for us. We have to like just kind of ship things and do as much harm reduction or like risk reduction as we can up front. Um, and then kind of evolve that over time with the rest of the ecosystem. >> Okay. Um yeah I mean there are so many things I would like to discuss with you but unfortunately we we have just few minutes so we need to round up so it's like two more short questions. So first one um your take on cipher punk like what do you think of it in general and what does it mean to be a cipher punk now comparing to 80s when it emerged? >> Mhm. Uh yeah. So my take on I I really like the idea of um I know some someone Kylie from uh from NOSA was saying yesterday like no one's coming to save us. Like that's kind of how I I feel about it. You know, I have very like anarchistic tendencies again with the mutual aid organizing that I do. I believe in communities being able to, you know, rely on each other in order to uh be able like not not necessarily libertarianism, but like libertarian socialism like uh being able to organize horizontally and take care of one another. And I I really look to the the power building movements of the past like the Black Panthers and stuff and and that kind of uh black autonomy uh and self-determination. And so I think uh the idea of uh using cryptographic princip uh primitives in order to achieve that to be able to build up your spaces and your systems and you know be able to do uh you know build up your economic power and community and then knowing that that in itself especially for like black folks doing that kind of work will make you a target of the state. and then being able to have these like systems in place for like privacy preserving stuff uh so that you can you can minimize risk and so I think I think it's what's changed is that it's a much more diverse set of folks right um who are participating in this there's a the the uh the average consumer is much better educated on this stuff I think we can all be cipher punks you know I don't even think it has to be like a a fringe movement they laid the groundwork uh a lot of their early visions have been implemented and now we have to like we we do have to meet the current moment. Um and I think we can bring a lot more people along for that and I think you can see um you use a lot more interesting technologies uh and and paradigms for how we build those things in >> 100%. So and the last one. So imagine uh just some years from now and we have the internet that we want now we want we have it private, secure, diverse, how it will look like this perfect internet uh future. >> Mhm. I think what's funny is what happens is when no one there's never like a across the finish line and like uh everyone cheers. I think you find that problems are resolved and then you you kind of immediately go on to the next thing. Uh and so I think if if this base is there, you know, like we see this with like Black Sky like we set out to like our moderation was to eliminate antilack harassment and misogyny war and you know and we did that. So the feeds are free of racism and harassment. Now the next thing is like okay, how do we co how do we exist with each other now that we're not worried about the racist? how what are what are our guidelines like how do we process things? How do what's okay? What's not okay? When is sexual content okay on the feed? Um you know and so I think if we have the internet that we want where you can you know you're not worried about someone shutting down your bank account, you're not you can speak and organize freely with your friends in an online space. Um you can if you have to you can move around your data as much as you'd like. Maybe you have this like you have these uh verified credentials like that replaces like a passport of some kind. I don't know. Do we have we abolished the nation state at this point too? like there is like you know maybe that's the thing that happens or maybe there's just much more powerful like the mutual like the mutual aid organizers the folks like stop cop city maybe they don't get a RICO and maybe we do actually have I what I want to see is that once we have this like internet base of operations we can then do things in the real world that um allow us to fight back against the like you know because the internet won't protect you from the men with guns but so you got to do stuff in real life but once you have those things where you know you're not worried about your your the money being taken or like like people like looking looking to connect all these dots um especially under this like really fascistic uh government in the US. I think you can you can do more powerful on the ground movements and so I would like to see um es especially in at least in the US I mean maybe it's also like uh movements around the globe get more connected but then uh and then these kind of uh bad governance are governments are put more in check by the people that's like oh that would be awesome so thank you for coming really appreciate it a beautiful talk I'd like to talk for one more hour Unfortunately, we don't have it. Uh, thanks for watching. Ciao.