Are we decentralized yet? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45077291 - August 2025

Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45018773 - August 2025

Introduction to AT Protocol - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44965233 - August 2025

> In the early days of Bluesky, Black users felt they were being pushed off. Blacksky became a platform for Black users to feel heard and seen. To create Blacksky, we wrote our own implementation of AT Protocol (called “rsky” and pronounced “risky”). An underlying premise of Blacksky’s rsky is to not only “seize the means of production,” as well as the distribution, but to also act as a “dual power” structure.

> Blacksky’s rsky guarantees our community a seat at the table, and ensures that we can leave and easily make our own table if we need to. That’s the true promise of decentralized social media. [My note: Most relevant part, the rest included for context]

> Clearly I think that decentralization is great, not only for the problems it prevents, but also the new possibilities it creates. But if everyone’s running their own servers, apps, and moderation teams, how do we do global social media? That’s where our vibrant open source developer community comes in.

> Blacksky runs our own global relay at https://atproto.africa, which we built from scratch. Every day, our relay stores its own copy of the hundreds of gigabytes of data of all known AT Protocol accounts — 36 million and counting. We also developed what we call our “moderation relay,” which lets us know about all of the moderation decisions ever made by all mod teams globally.

Think of Bluesky not as a Twitter equivalent platform, but a funded experiment and incubator for bootstrapping a protocol where multiple platforms can operate independently of each other. You can scale a community to tens of millions of users for under a few hundred dollars per month in tech spend (storage, compute, transfer). This is very accessible imho.

Broadly speaking, I understand that there might be speech out there that I find exceptionally distasteful, but that is the speech in many cases (but not all) I am willing to protect, because you don't know when the capability to censor will be weaponized. This remains in constant tension so long as humans are humans. There is no solution, only constant evolution.

While there is nuance between the government and a private benefit corp like Bluesky restricting speech, I'm rolling it all together for these purposes. I agree there is legal nuance (de facto vs de jure). As I mentioned, Bluesky is entitled to do so, as it is their platform. So, you take your speech to another platform operated on a distributed protocol. This is no different then creators posting their content to Rumble instead of traditional social platforms, for example (as Charlie Kirk did).

https://corp.rumble.com/our-story/

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/20/what-is-r...

> Founded in 2013 by a Canadian entrepreneur, Chris Pavlovksi, Rumble was designed to be an alternative to YouTube for small content creators. But it quickly began to pride itself on being the opposite of other tech firms.

> According to Rumble’s website, it is “immune to cancel culture” and aims to “restore the internet to its roots by making it free and open once again”. Pavlovksi has described it as “neutral”.

> Rumble is backed by the billionaire and prominent conservative venture capitalist Peter Thiel, who invested in 2021, and the conservative former Fox News presenter Dan Bongino, who has 2.9 million subscribers himself. The platform is valued at more than $2bn (£1.6bn).

("what's good for the goose is good for the gander")

That would imply that celebrating violence from those in power is fine, but celebrating violence from those not in power is a bad thing. Which is support for the powerful against the powerless. They probably wouldn't want this explicitly stated though.

That doesn't mean all government use of violence is to be applauded

I'm not who you are replying to but the demographics of bluesky is heavily left wing. The users are significantly less likely to make fun of people on their side being attacked.

Also, I've seen more comments in the last 24 hours saying Kirk deserved it than comments about Shapiro despite his attack happening months ago.

Lastly, I don't know much about Kirk, but I haven't seen a single comment he made where he advocating for political violence. Would you mind sharing a few?