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.

I think there are existing 4chan like social networks where you can post away although no one much may notice. Open protocols like the internet provide a way to say what you want but not a way to force people to listen to it.

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")

Some users may be too young to remember this, but up until the 2010s, liberals were generally opposed to all censorship by anyone, and wanted the First Amendment to be interpreted liberally to apply beyond just government actions. It wasn't until about 2017 that you started to hear liberals say, "They're a private corporation; they can do what they want," which you would have heard only from conservatives before that.

Now that some corporations appear to be shifting again and can't be trusted to censor only conservatives anymore (most notably Twitter after the Musk purchase) we're seeing the 20th-century expansive interpretation of free speech making a comeback on the left. Feels comfy, like an old pair of slippers.

That doesn't work in practice when platforms like BlueSky serve as the defacto public square.

Marsh v Alabama found that private owners might not have the ability to refuse protected speech on their publicly accessible property, so it's not so simple as just being able to declare they're a private entity and that is that.

"In Marsh v. Alabama (1946), the Supreme Court ruled that a privately owned company town could not prohibit individuals from exercising their First Amendment rights to free speech and religion"

I'm not saying bluesky is the exact same, but it seems pretty damn similar to the private sidewalk that the Gulf Shipbuilding Corporation privately owned.

"Freedom of speech" exists separately as a philosophical concept, not as legal doctrine implemented by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. The latter is something I have always considered a shockingly Americentric view. I have seen people go so far as to say that the First Amendment defines what free speech is — which is kind of like saying that the Second Amendment defines what a gun is.

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

> People are calling for violence against left wingers at large

I have seen nothing of the sort, and I have access to beyond-the-Overton-window right-wing sources. What they have been doing, instead, is pointing out the Bluesky users that TFA concerns itself with.

I'm inclined to think that a gunman without a coherent motive wouldn't write slogans on the bullets, for one thing.