Podcast: Rudy Fraser on Building Blacksky and the Future of Middleware

Audio of this conversation is available via your favorite podcast service.

On the Tech Policy Press podcast, we regularly engage with questions about redesigning social media networks to make them more democratic, pluralist, and prosocial. One hypothesis people have about how to do that is through the decentralization of platforms and the introduction of middleware—tools built to give users more control over their social media experience and, thus, more autonomy in how they engage in public discourse.

In this episode, you’ll hear a discussion with one entrepreneur building middleware for Bluesky: Rudy Fraser, the founder of Blacksky Algorithms and a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Rudy Fraser:

I'm Rudy Fraser. I'm the founder of Blacksky Algorithms, and I am a fellow within the Applied Social Media Lab at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University.

Justin Hendrix:

So Rudy, you and I are almost neighbors in Brooklyn, New York. Tell me about yourself. Tell me about how you came to be a technologist working in Brooklyn, working on Blacksky. What happened before?

Rudy Fraser:

I think I was always interested in technology. I, like a lot of folks my age and my generation, I played video games a lot as a kid. I would say I was always a bit of a smart alec, my mom would say, but it was always encouraged to be clever. And my reward for getting good grades was a video game. If I got an A, I got a video game. That was the way that I tried to... I always tried to get As to get new video games. I played a lot of games growing up. And then I think I really got into computers because I wanted to, with early game consoles, you could use cheat codes.

And then, once you got into more Xbox 360s and playing online, they didn't have cheat codes, but they had glitches, and they had mods. And so I got into video game modding. So hex editing games, doing Call of Duty 10th Prestige lobbies, things like that. I think that's what... And then just being able to impress my friends with having some crazy colored gamertag or having everything unlocked after a day or something playing the game. That was my reward system and motivating factor for a while. And I thought I could maybe figure out a career out of that.

I think I was seeing around this time too, as a teenager, there was enough evidence to see that you could be in technology. There weren't people that looked like me, and so I wasn't necessarily encouraged to go into tech. My mom wanted me to be an accountant or a doctor or a lawyer or something. But I was like, hey, I played Mortal Kombat, and in the behind-the-scenes credits, they were like, these people who make the games make six figures. Maybe I could do that. So yeah, that just got my mind really set on that, no matter what happened. We faced a lot of housing and food insecurity growing up. We moved around a lot. I think in the city though, I probably lived in 16 different places across Brooklyn and Queens, and lots of different family members' houses and stuff.

So as I mentioned before, before we started recording, I graduated high school early, but I didn't apply to any colleges because I didn't think we could afford any. And I was staying at my aunt's place at the time. Me and my mom ended up moving up to Canada, and I was fighting to just get back to the city so I could go to a CUNY school. So I ended up going to City Tech. And lots of stuff was going on again. Life was chaotic. So I didn't end up finishing school, but I was very determined, like I mentioned. I wanted to get a foot into the tech industry.

And I ultimately ended up landing at a sports tech company doing a kind of sales development job. But the promise was that if I could automate the job, then I could work on tech stuff. And so I ended up automating everything that the job did, and they created a role for me as an IT operations kind of person. And I've basically been in enterprise. I spent basically the next 10 years in enterprise IT and rising up the ranks. The last job I was at, before Blacksky and Paper Tree, which are my two projects, I was the senior director of business technology and IT for an automation company. And then they exited, and then I took that as an opportunity to go out on my own and do my own thing.

Justin Hendrix:

And City Tech of course has that great program on gaming and media and technology. Was that some of the start in terms of where you got to do some of your first work on computer science?

Rudy Fraser:

Yeah. At City I went for computer information systems. The tech classes were kind of the only ones that I really excelled in at the time. I didn't really pay attention to anything else. Notably failed physics. But web programming, I had a lot of fun there. I think I scared my teachers a little bit because I was always a bit edgy. For my database programming fundamentals class, I did a presentation on SQL injections and hacking databases. But yeah, so I had fun.

Justin Hendrix:

Left them guessing.

Rudy Fraser:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Justin Hendrix:

So let me ask you, where does the community organizing piece come in, the kind of concern about politics, culture, society? Was that always there or did that come when you had the opportunity perhaps to reflect after being so busy building your career in enterprise IT?

Rudy Fraser:

I think for me, naturally, community care was always just there. It was how we survived. It was, I mentioned housing insecurity and food insecurity, there was always someone there to look out for us, and we reciprocated that when we could. And so I learned very early on that in community you have all that you need. And I thought that was very normal. And then I think as I grew up and went out on my own, and I found that don't... When I was growing up, I spent a lot of time outside, I spent a lot of time in my neighborhood, and you make these connections. And then now I live in an apartment building. And it wasn't until my building got a WhatsApp group, that any of us even knew what each other's names was. And I found that to be extraordinarily strange.

Yeah, the community organizing stuff, I think I was always that. Even at the company I was working at before, I was one of the founding members of the Black Employee Resource Group and I was their head of marketing and communication for that group. Yeah, because even in that, even trying to be immediately recognized as a Black person in tech, there's not a lot of folks. You should figure out how to build community with each other and lean on each other as you try to navigate your careers. But even then I started to get disenchanted with Black Faces in High Places could really make the kinds of change that I wanted. I think I recently read someone talk about diversity being the low-hanging fruit, and we couldn't even really get that. And there's tons of folks trying to push on those efforts, and we've now seen where that's gone over the course of time. But I was already seeing that... A lot of that stuff was like PR from the very beginning.

So I think when I struck out on my own, I originally started trying to do whatever the traditional YC kind of startup, find a problem, solve it, build a business model around it, kind of advice. And it just felt like it wasn't working for me. And it was, honestly, just making me pretty bummed out, trying to... I felt like I was still trying to fit into a puzzle and not being the right-shaped piece. And that was the same way I felt when I was at this other organization.

Yeah, I was like, "Most startups fail. If I'm going to fail, I'm going to do it in a way that feels right to me at least." And so what is an idea or a thing that I want to see more of in the world, versus what is some problem that I think is a big problem that has a big market share? And the thing that I thought of was community fridges. During the protests of 2020, the George Floyd uprisings, I saw community fridges everywhere, all around Brooklyn, right? And I was like, "Why aren't there more of these out in the world? It's been a few years, there should be more, not less, if it was working. And if it wasn't working, what stopped it from working? What was the barrier?"

And then I just got really interested and obsessed with that idea, and started looking into, okay, who was actually running the community fridges? Okay, it's mutual aid groups. What is mutual aid? What are the challenges those groups face? And then I started volunteering. I got known for volunteering with a bunch of different mutual aid groups in central Brooklyn, until I found the one that I've stuck with for years now, We The People NYC. That's my chosen family right there.

But yeah, we saw interesting challenges. I see this now, people assume that social justice organizations are very different from corporations, but in a lot of ways they have a lot of the same challenges, but they solve them differently. And in some cases they just don't have the kind of infrastructure that a corporation may have. Like mutual aid groups encounter conflict internally, but don't have HR departments, and decision-making is non-hierarchical.

The project that I still work on now and felt really called to do was called Paper Tree. And it was after I was part of a mutual aid group who… there was a large balance. A lot of these groups got a ton of donations back in 2026 figures. This group had about $80,000 that they're managing. Again, all volunteers. And there was a request from someone, could we pay someone's rent? They were going to be houseless, out on the street if we didn't pay their rent. And this group of volunteers is trying to be a good fiduciary of these funds that were donated to them. And what you ended up having was a bunch of 20-somethings working like volunteer, trying to ultimately decide does this person get to stay in their house or not? That context felt problematic. It felt like it shouldn't be that way.

And then the folks that were saying, "Wait." Where I think we landed at that day was, okay, maybe you partially pay for the rent. But you don't get to partially pay for rent, you either pay for the rent or you didn't pay for rent. And so from there I was like, "It would be interesting if you could have a bank account that was shared amongst people and then ultimately anyone could contribute funds and anyone could use it." And that was the v1 of Paper Tree. So what if your neighborhood had a bank account and anyone could put money into it, and then anyone can make use of those funds, no questions asked? As long as everyone was tightly scoped. So for Paper Tree, it was for food and groceries. So as long as you uploaded a receipt for groceries, it would be verified, and then you would be able to use those funds. And that would be in replace of SNAP benefits or something, or in addition to SNAP benefits because things come up.

Justin Hendrix:

So it sounds like you're plumbing this intersection of ownership and mutual aid community decentralization. It makes sense then, of course, that you'd be interested also in these decentralized protocols around social media and how those are coming along. It looks like you were an early user of Bluesky, I saw in Wired, number 51,921. But when you got on there, did you immediately think, "I've got to build something here"? What appealed to you about Bluesky as a phenomenon? Were you a big Twitter personality or user? Did you feel the loss of Black Twitter the way so many did, including individuals I've had on this podcast who discussed almost mourning essentially the loss of that environment? And I'll come back to this, I think, but also don't overly glorify it like it was never great or perfect in many ways. People staked out their own claim on Twitter. But I guess maybe, I don't know, did you feel like you were there at the beginning of something new, as a fresh space, something to grab?

Rudy Fraser:

So, to start with, I was working on Paper Tree, and then basically, one thing led to another, and the Paper Tree Bank account got shut down. Everything ground to a halt at that point, and I needed something new to do. And, as you mentioned, I was already adjacent to these decentralized Web3-type technologies. And people were making a buzz about AT Protocol, which is the underlying technology behind Bluesky. I saw some cool stuff in their documentation about algorithmic choice, people being able to choose what they see on social media and decentralized content moderation. And I thought at the beginning of new technologies is always the opportunity to do something really cool and interesting, so I signed up for their beta, and that's how I got in.

And I was never a big Twitter user, to be honest. I had Twitter, I realized, since 2012, but I did not use that account. That said, I think what I found, how I looked at it was... And I find it so very funny nowadays that sometimes the weirder trolls that we encounter, Blacksky is segregating itself from the network. And every social network I've ever used, if I go to the algorithmic For You page or Explore page on Instagram, all I see is Black content. And so I just wanted to replicate that, but with not having to train it or somehow explain to the algorithm, that's the kind of content I wanted to see. What if that was just, you could just start there.

And so when I joined... you couldn't make a custom feed yet. And so I had to wait a little bit. And then I had launched Blacksky in a very hacky, very MVP way, before custom fees were even visible in the app. And then when I did it, the reason I probably stuck with it is that it was immediately the most popular thing I've ever built. Paper Tree now probably has about a hundred users. You build any enterprise thing for a company, even a 500-person company, you'd be lucky if 50 people use it. Usually their managers have to force them to use it basically for the most part. But Blacksky immediately, a thousand people used it within seconds. And so I was like, "Okay, this can have a big impact, and I can just keep iterating and working on it from here."

And it was something that I was genuinely interested in using, right? Because like I mentioned, I like being on social media platforms and engaging with Black content and building community in addition to that. So it felt like a really good fit. And then problems started arising and I felt like there were solutions that were available to me. So I think Blacksky launched May 24th, May 23rd, 2023. By July we had people trolling the feed and kind of attacking... Not even directly attacking the feed perhaps, but just making up weird narratives around Blacksky as a group. And it was very clearly threatening people. There were mass blocking campaigns, all kinds of things were going on. And so it made it clear that they needed to be more protections for Black users in particular.

And in my opinion, having this space, this community space, and having a kind of guarantee or at least a dedicated group of people and resources at the problem of keeping Black users safe is what has helped Blacksky grow to be as big as it is today. It was a tough journey for a couple of years. In the beginning, it wasn't always... Now Blacksky has been used by over a million people. It's tens of thousands of people who post on the feed every day. 350,000 monthly active users of the feeds. But in the beginnin,g it was very small. The narrative was always that Blacksky will never replace Black Twitter. People are going to go to all these other apps before they ever come here. Yeah, we're in the whole time though, we're just building.

Justin Hendrix:

Early on in that period of, or the original sort of exodus from Twitter, some folks were headed to Mastodon. Bluesky seemed to pick up a little later. And certainly, the large movement of people occurred even more recently, perhaps. But even early on, both Mastodon and Bluesky, I've talked to various experts, including a podcast like this one with a fellow named Dr. Johnathan Flowers, who talked about some of the kind of almost structural and cultural sort of obstacles to Black people feeling comfortable in these decentralized platforms. He was talking particularly about Mastodon.

But even early in the day or early in the Bluesky days, there were some prominent Black intellectuals. I remember Tressie McMillan Cottom coming, for instance, and essentially deciding to leave the platform very shortly after joining it because of the kinds of trolling and responses she was receiving on Bluesky. Has that improved, do you think, since Bluesky has grown greatly? Clearly, you're working on this problem, so you could say, yes, I'm part of the answer. But on the whole, is it your view that with scale, some of those dynamics have either been addressed by Bluesky or maybe have somehow evened out in a way? I don't know. What would you say about the overall environment?

Rudy Fraser:

This goes into my own personal worldview and perspective, but it's my belief that anytime Black folks gather or congregate anywhere, it is perceived as a threat, and it will make people uncomfortable. And especially if those folks build up some way to have influence over the rest of the network, I think it is always seen as a threat. So in that capacity, if the problem is measured by trolls, that has just scaled with the rest of the network. But in my opinion, if it is measured by how the average Black user on Bluesky feels, then I think that has greatly improved. And I do think that Blacksky has contributed to that.

I think client in-app features that Bluesky has created around reply gating and anti-toxicity features has helped with that as well. Those did not exist when Tressie was there. You couldn't remove a quote tweet, you couldn't stop people from replying to you, you couldn't lock a thread. Even in the very beginning of Bluesky, you couldn't block people. A lot of that stuff just didn't exist. And labelers, like the Blacksky moderation service that we're now talking about, I only launched that in October. The labelers, they got rolled out in the beginning of January, and I watched and observed the challenges with community moderation over time. Because I knew when I did roll out community moderation, it would get a lot of traffic, visibility, usage, and I wanted to do it from the beginning. And so I waited before I launched that. So none of those things were in place. And so it was really the Wild West at one point, and trolls certainly had their way.

It was also smaller. So if there was an issue, even within a couple handfuls of people, everyone, the whole app felt it. We're talking about user 50,000, and so a hundred thousand users, if three people are arguing, all a hundred thousand people are hearing about it. Especially the custom feeds, those launched later, and they weren't always... adoption of them didn't happen right away. So, people were still using the default, it was called What's Hot, which was what preceded the Discover feed. And that was a very different experience that people still laugh about it. A lot of Blacksky users now, they say, "You can make Blacksky your default feed now." You couldn't do that before, and so you always landed on Discover, and you always felt, wow, this is not me, this does not reflect me. It's acting like it's a recommendation feed, but it's showing me stuff like anime women and stuff that maybe I just don't care about.

I think there's certainly been a lot of improvements. But the other thing to keep in mind is that the threat will always exist, and then it's just like how do you mitigate that threat? And I think the systems that are in place and that we're building, contribute to that and are uniquely possible on the network.

Justin Hendrix:

Let's dig into that a little bit. So for my listeners who may not be on Bluesky, I'm sure there are many, what exactly are you building? How would you describe it to them? What's the elevator pitch? And then, I suppose, how does that work as a business or as an organization that can sustain itself? What does developing Blacksky mean for you and as an enterprise?

Rudy Fraser:

I'll preface this by saying I'm bad at elevator pitches. I'm working on it. I'm the technologist that likes to be quiet for the most part and very much believe in show, don't tell. But yeah, what we're building is I think the real goal is we're trying to create a home for Black users on the network that is safe and self-governable and self-sovereign. And so what that means is we should be able to have a community space that is not separated from anyone else. I explained it as like dotted lines. It's not a hard separation. Anyone can view the Blacksky feed. Anyone can post into the feed, but I wouldn't recommend it. Blacksky as a community has been very on point about who they let amplify content via the Blacksky feed.

And that's another important distinction for folks who are not familiar, feeds are not like subreddits, so you're never exclusively posting to one. Your posts can show up anywhere. So it really is an amplification and aggregator of content when I talk about the Blacksky feed. But yeah, so we're creating this space that is self-governable and self-sovereign. And what that looks like for us is that, A, there's the space you can go to you can see the content of Black users. If you encounter anti-Black content or misogynoir, which is the intersection of misogyny and anti-Black harassment, anywhere on the Bluesky app, you can report that content to the Blacksky moderation service. You can choose us as your moderators and we'll take an action. You could report it to JustUs, you could report it to us and Bluesky, and we have the agency to take an action, and then we can block accounts on your behalf to a degree. And we can also label and hide content from you so that you never encounter it.

And we're doing that both from manual reports, so stuff that people send into us. Maybe there's a troll, and one person encounters that troll, they can report it to us. We have a team of moderators that are going to review it, determine if this is anti-Black harassment or not. Label the content or take some action on the account. And then everyone who's using us as a moderator is now protected against that content. Because we operate both the feed and the mod service, we can say, hey, this user is banned from the feed. They can't see any content from Blacksky, so now they can't use the feed to interact with people. They may be automatically blocked. Their account is labeled. It's essentially as close to taking someone's down without us being able to take down their account as we can get to.

And we also do this automatically. So because of the open nature of the network, we have automations that basically listen for every single time someone makes a post or updates their profile or their handle. And then if we detect a slur in any of that content, we can proactively label that content. That way, if there's some egregious account, like using any anti-Black slur, we'll action it before anyone even sees the content. And so that way it leads to the network feeling a lot safer for people.

And so when we talk about that measure of how people feel versus the existence of the content on the network, we're not really taking down content. Bluesky themselves will take down some content, but importantly, they're not taking down all of it. But the conversation, when you talk about Dr. Jonathan Flowers, I remember, as he was a long-time user of Bluesky and Blacksky, and the conversation was always around, "Bluesky is anti-Black." Now the critique that we may get with Blacksky is, "Oh, there's too much sexual content." That's really the biggest concern now. It used to be like, oh, it was dry, it was boring. There wasn't enough going on because there weren't enough people. So, I view that as a measure of success. If the complaint is that they're not racist trolls, when we have the most popular custom feed, and it's about Black community building, then I think we're doing something good there.

And then I think the other piece, so the piece of building a business on this, there's always the risk and concern that Bluesky could just pull the rug from under us, right? That is where we really need, that's where the self-sovereign part comes into play. And it's really technical, but we basically have built our own independent implementation of Bluesky's underlying technology called AT Protocol. And so if the time ever came, Blacksky users would be able to migrate their data over to our implementation, which we built from scratch and are able to continue maintaining. And so there'd be that continuity of the network. It's called Risky, but it's de-risking that issue with relying too much on Bluesky and their own services.

So now we have this space that we're self-governing, hoping to curate this vibe and this community. We're protecting it from threats. And we have a safety measure if the company that we're building a lot of this stuff on tries to... or just anything happens, right? They could be the target of censorship. There's been all this stuff in the news about how Bluesky is this leftist haven, and that drew in a bunch of right-wing trolls as a result of that, which gave us more work. So yeah, anything could happen, so that's the fallback.

And now I think we are trying to figure out the finances of this and how we can keep it sustainable. Blacksky, all of the code is open source and it was originally fiscally hosted by Open Source Collective. I just launched a corporation, Black Sky Algorithms Inc., and got our first seed investment from our angel. I'm trying to raise additional funds for a seed round right now from other angels, potentially accelerators or incubators. But for the revenue, what we were trying to continue is, the way I've thought about this is both servicing intra-community and extra-community. So intra-community is just within Blacksky. I think some folks think that we build just for Blacksky and we handle only external threats. So we're building just for Black users, and then we're handling just anti-Black trolls as the kind of content we moderate. But the reality is we're building for Blacksky, and we may host sub-communities of Blacksky for free, but we're also charging other folks who want to use AT Protocol services and have us manage it for them.

And then, yes, we're handling anti-Black trolls from outside of our community, but there's also where there are daily conflicts that we also have to manage of this large, growing internal community. But yeah, on the revenue side, so we've gotten donations, we get monthly subscribers, and I think there's been lots of talks about ads on Bluesky. One of the kind of cheeky things that I did was people were saying ads weren't possible, so I built ads into the Blacksky Feed. But the ad is for a donation to Blacksky. And so every time you view the Blacksky feed, there's like a 0.001% chance that you'll see a pop-up that is, "Hey, if you're enjoying the feed, please contribute." Similar to what Wikipedia does was the thought process.

Justin Hendrix:

It does strike me that there's a big opportunity here for researchers to study what you're doing and to study various other efforts in this layer of decentralized services that are popping up on Bluesky. I assume that's one of the reasons why you Applied Social Media Lab up at... Berkman Klein was interested in working with you as well. Are you already working with researchers? Are there folks that are reaching out to lend a hand? Generally, I would think this is a good opportunity to extend some of these ideas about protocols, not platforms, that a lot of people have been knocking around for a while.

Rudy Fraser:

So one group, I don't know that I can say the names as of yet because we're still in talks and stuff's not fully finalized, but one group, they have a cause that they're trying to amplify, and so they're interested in using the same moderation services we do, right? So we do moderation, and we label content as anti-Black. Some folks have taken that... Because when you put that label on an account or a post, you see a little badge on it. Our badges say anti-Black harassment because that lets you know what it is. Some people have taken that and used it as a badge for saying if you're a Virgo or your pronouns, and so it's a badge on your account. And so there's a group who wanted to use that same technology and implement it to amplify a cause. We're hosting. We implemented that for them, customized it to their needs, and then hosted the service for them.

The other group, they're doing research on health misinformation in Black and Latinx communities, and they wanted to work with us to study the social graph of certain users and identify if they were following certain accounts that promoted health misinformation. And so we're trying to tailor something for them to automatically detect misinformation based on keywords on the network, and then also tying social graph information. Their goal is to then reach out to folks who may have been exposed to misinformation online and then ask them to participate in certain studies to see if they can get them to change their opinions on those things. And they were previously working with... They typically work with the centralized companies to do things like that, like they would work with Twitter in the past.

And then with the Applied Social Media Lab, so I just started that fellowship and it's been really cool. Everyone's super nice, super smart, and super willing to get me tapped in and introduced to different connections. I think a thing that I'm exploring there or what's interested me is AT Proto, we're a very small dev community. We're pretty insular. I think everyone that's on the... We all fit on one Discord, basically. And so folks researching other protocols, I think when you interact with people in researching decentralized social media, they're usually working with other protocols. So I've been taking that opportunity as a part of the fellowship to connect with folks who are working in other ecosystems and see if there are opportunities for Blacksky to spread in and connect with those ecosystems.

We already see interesting stuff today. Folks have projects like Bridgyfed that bridges Mastodon, Nostr, Bluesky. Interesting, a funny kind of thing that happened yesterday was that same automatic labeler that we have that detects slurs, detected a slur from an account that originally posted that on Nostr, and then it got bridged from Nostr to Mastodon, from Mastodon to Blue Sky, and then our slur detector detected it. And then we're now labeling content from Nostr. That's just a funny thing with open social networks and open protocols, how they can all work together. But yeah, and then I also see opportunities for AT Protocol is good for big-scale social networks. And there is a need for alternative kind of mediums like group chats and encrypted messaging and stuff like that. And so I'm interested in working with folks on that.

Justin Hendrix:

I want to ask you a little bit about the organization. Have you got folks who are working with you on Blacksky? Are you able to support that yet? Is that part of what the investment will bring? I don't know. And who are you looking for?

Rudy Fraser:

Yeah. So we have a team of eight volunteer moderators, which is super tough work. Although they're volunteers, I believe in paying folks for moderation. Moderation is not fun. We're an all-Black team moderating Black content, and so it is heavy, traumatic work. And so I want to compensate and have been compensating folks for that work. That group has scale... Again, we launched moderation back in October, and so it quickly went from a one-person mod team with 10 reports per day to an eight-person mod team with which we get about 200 reports per day. We've done over 20,000 moderation reports since October. So just trying to scale that up a little bit more. I think we're probably going to go to 10 folks, that will give us coverage for probably the foreseeable future.

And we're looking for folks with trust and safety backgrounds. It moves so quickly. Everything is under development right now, so it's a little tough to bring in folks who do not have the experience with the kinds of both train them up on the software and how content moderation should work and as we figure out our own policies and things. So we're getting a lot of the systems in place to hopefully scale that up a bit more. And so we're getting standard operating procedures in place, how-to guides, et cetera.

And then the code is open source for the underlying code, Risky. And so we have four open-source contributors who've been contributing code to that effort and putting in a ton of work. Folks who want to see an alternative implementation, the trans community on Bluesky wants to be able to migrate to their own PDS, that is their own home server essentially, that is independent of what Bluesky has going on for their own reasons. And all that code base is built in Rust. So if you're a Rust developer, all this stuff takes interest to you, then certainly check out our GitHub and contribute there. And I think we'll probably... I think the two roles that I'd like to see for folks who are full-time and committed would be probably a Rust developer and a trust and safety person. I think those are the two needed right now.

Justin Hendrix:

Rudy, I appreciate you taking the time to tell me about all this. And I hope that we can maybe talk in a year's time perhaps and see where things have got to, what types of opportunities have opened up, what types of challenges you faced. I'm sure there will be some in the near term. Because anytime you're trying to do something as complicated as intervene on social media platforms, where speech and ideas and politics are involved, of course, I'm sure that won't always be easy.

Rudy Fraser:

I mean, it hasn't been so far. It has been a wild journey. I say to folks regularly that all the problems I thought I would have or all the problems people told me I would have are not the problems that I have. But it felt so rewarding that people tell me regularly that they've met people through Blacksky, that this is some of the most positive experiences that they have had on social media in a long time, and it's very affirming. And all that makes me feel really good. So the challenging stuff, I'm able to push through it. I feel supported and have a big community behind me, so it's been great.

Justin Hendrix:

Where can folks go to learn more?

Rudy Fraser:

You could check out Blackskyweb.xyz. That's our website. I'm on Bluesky at rudyfraser.com. And the Blacksky account and moderation service is at Blacksky.app over on Bluesky.

Justin Hendrix:

Thank you so much.

Rudy Fraser:

Thanks, Justin. Appreciate it.