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Decentralized social media built for community power, culture, and collective freedom.
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Many older bsky.social accounts aren't loading properly due to backfill backlog, also currently going through a major spam bot crisis as Blacksky team is taking forever to take them down
Excellent job creating this app and excited for what's to come in the future
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Money for mutual resilience: Introducing Blacksky CashBlacksky didn’t begin with a pitch deck or a promise of disruption. It began with something much older and more enduring - a principle of mutual aid. Mutual aid is how communities have survived for generations. Long before the term was coined by anarchist theorists, it existed as a practical ethic of care: neighbors sharing resources, redistributing risk, and enduring together under conditions of extraction. Today, many community organizers know it as a necessary response to capitalism’s failures. This principle has guided everything we’ve built here at Blacksky and will continue to build. From Mutual Aid to Papertree Before Blacksky was our first project, Papertree, which emerged from this ethos and from working alongside local community organizations. Its goal was simple: reimburse Bed-Stuy’s (a neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York) residents for groceries. Anyone could contribute when they had capacity; anyone could draw from the pool when they needed support. No applications, no proof of hardship - just trust. This experiment showed us that when people are given tools rooted in dignity and autonomy, they organize care for themselves. That insight pushed us toward other deeply rooted traditions of collective finance. Learning From Susus In partnership with the nonprofit GatherFor, we rebuilt Papertree to support susus - rotating savings circles originating in West Africa and the Caribbean. In a susu, members pool funds and take turns receiving the larger pot, based on need or a collectively agreed rotation. Susus aren’t just financial mechanisms; they’re social agreements built on trust and accountability. We designed the platform so GatherFor’s neighbor teams could manage these circles autonomously and democratically, without intermediaries controlling access to funds. Between both efforts, Papertree has been running for roughly 3 and a half years, helping facilitate over $250K in community funds to date - and still continues to be used by GatherFor and its engaged network of Neighbor Teams today. Enter Blacksky Cash Two years after launching Papertree, we’ve built Blacksky - a participatory community that began as a safe space for Black users on Bluesky, which has grown into a broader ecosystem for collective organization. Blacksky Cash is the next step. Every day, people support one another online through conversation, amplification, and care. At the same time, material need is increasingly visible. Requests for help circulate constantly. GoFundMes are everywhere. But money is scarce, trust is fragile, and digital solidarity often feels risky or transactional. Blacksky Cash is our attempt to close that gap - to let communities that already support one another socially do so materially, without turning mutual aid into charity or reproducing extractive financial models. This work raises three essential questions: How do we translate communal, often Indigenous traditions of money-sharing into a heavily regulated financial system? How do we make sharing money online feel meaningful rather than suspicious? How do we frame financial support not as charity, but as an investment in mutual survival? Designing for Accessibility and Power At launch, Blacksky Cash supports private, peer-to-peer payments, alongside collaborative group payments. This means individuals can send money directly and discreetly, while groups can pool funds together in ways that reflect how communities already organize. These group tools are intentionally designed to support closed, trust-based structures like susus - where members collectively contribute and take turns accessing shared funds - as well as small, grassroots organizations that need to raise money, make decisions together, and while gathering input from a broader network of supporters. Designing this wasn’t straightforward. One of our core challenges was figuring out how to use the existing social connections on Blacksky to foster a genuine sense of community in Blacksky Cash without compromising privacy. Financial activity is deeply personal, and mutual aid only works when people feel safe. We focused on keeping payments private by default, while allowing groups to choose how visible or participatory they want their collective spaces to be. Another major challenge was group fund management itself. From our own organizing experience and from conversations with community groups, we know that governance is rarely clean or static. Group dynamics shift. Membership changes. Needs evolve. Our earliest designs tried to encode every possible governance mechanism into the product, but we quickly realized that rigid structures don’t reflect how people actually work together. Instead, we scaled back. We chose to lead with governance that is simple, flexible, and grounded in trust - prioritizing dialogue and collective decision-making over overly prescriptive rules. The goal isn’t to automate solidarity, but to support it: to give groups enough structure to hold money together, while leaving room for the relationships and conversations that make mutual aid possible in the first place. As far as costs, while we are still pre-launch, we can share that we are planning for no subscription fees for individuals or group accounts. We believe that communities should not have to pay to support themselves. The only costs that may surface at launch would be small withdrawal fees for fast or instant deposits, and optional custom setup fees for groups with highly technical needs that require custom builds. Ultimately our goal is to help build power, not extract it. Limits, Risks, and What’s Next At launch, Blacksky Cash will only be available only to U.S. residents transacting in USD, and in English (Spanish to follow), to meet banking requirements. We see this as a starting point, not a boundary. Over time, we plan to expand internationally, support more languages and currencies, and introduce tools like microlending and financial education. We’re also clear-eyed about risk. Online scams and bots are increasingly sophisticated. While we will actively work to flag suspicious activity and prioritize real communities, users should remain cautious and avoid sharing personal information or engaging with unverified solicitations. Trust is collective work. Measuring What Matters Success for Blacksky Cash isn’t just about how much money moves through the platform. It’s about whether care circulates sustainably. We look for: Ongoing participation in groups Repeat contributions (demonstrations of trust and support) Funds circulating within communities over time Collective decision-making around need For us, these are signals of mutual resilience we’ll be using to define success. Blacksky Cash isn’t a replacement for systemic change. It’s one tool, shaped by old traditions and lived experience, for helping communities survive right now. Mutual aid has always been about more than money. But money, shared intentionally, can be a powerful expression of solidarity. This is us building toward that future. We want to extend our sincerest gratitude for all of those who have been a part of this journey - first, our community members in Bed Stuy for participating in and promoting our initial effort, Teju and the Neighbor Teams at GatherFor for being incredible partners we continue to learn from, and the Center for Cultural Innovation - AmbitioUS for their generous support for this chapter ahead. Reply on Blacksky here to join the conversation. Comments
Jan 30, 2026AnniversaryMi lion you fi build a likkle roof over yu headYou fi put a likkle roof over yu head - Sister Nancy, Roof over mi head, 1982 Concurrent to my building Blacksky has been a deep dive to the bottom of the crates for roots and dub reggae. According to Spotify it was one of my top genres this year. Although it's en vogue right now to hate "algorithms" as mechanisms for discovery, when they work well and perhaps in contexts where it would be hard to cause harm, they're really good for things like finding a reggae song you hadn't heard before or finding out someone saved a PNG file using a bird as data storage. The song itself is about autonomy and improvisation. If you can't find a brick, use a bag of stones. A little after that, you'll have a house of your own. The landlord can't come kick down your door. You built a little roof over your head. The song struck me as a message to me, and my own message to others: you should take whatever steps you need to gain autonomy and safety. It also felt like a message I had heard and continued to hear this year in my conversations with folks like Timnit Gebru and Omar Wasow. It also felt like the first DM I got from Blacksky's first investor, Mekka Okereke, ~1 year ago to this day as I write this. He asked what I would do if I had the funding and freedom to build anything I wanted. And so I banded together a little party to go on this adventure which wasn't hard since they had all found me in one way or another or were already there. That's the thing about real community, if you have it you don't go wanting for help or support. And so I'm grateful to the 1100+ individuals who've contributed their funds to our mission. I'm grateful to our 2 investors Dietrich Ayala and Mekka. Grateful to every engineer who's opened a PR to any of our open source repositories (and the eagle eyed security folks who give us the heads up on things). And I'm especially grateful to Dr. Kay, JD, Rishi, Marisa, and Clinton for trusting me and contributing their visions and expertise to what we're building. All the places Blacksky & Friends showed up IRL this year. This anniversary feels like the right moment to share what we've been building. cash by blacksky algorithms "How long do you want these messages to remain secret?" Randy asked, in his last message before leaving San Francisco. "Five years? Ten years? Twenty-five years?" After he got to the hotel this afternoon, Randy decrypted and read Avi's answer. It is still hanging in front of his eyes, like the afterimage of a strobe: I want them to remain secret for as long as men are capable of evil - Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon (a sci-fi novel about a group of hackers who build an underground data haven to facilitate anonymous Internet banking using electronic money), pg. 55, 2000 One of the stops on the Blacksky World Tour 2025 was Berlin, where I spent a fair bit of time with my fellow Cypherpunk Fellows and some soon-to-be collaborators at Landgut Stober. Decentralized identity, cryptography, and infrastructure nerds shooting arrows and conspiring to make the world a better place. That same world that every day feels more and more like the America depicted in "One Battle After Another" with the little too on-the-nose depiction of a militarized, fascist police state. On the left: Sean Penn as Colonel Steven J. Lockjaw. On the right: USBP Chief Patrol Agent of the El Centro sector, Greg Bovino, stands on a street corner with federal agents after patrolling several tourist districts in the downtown area of Chicago, Sept. 28, 2025.Jim Vondruska/Reuters I live in a world where one of my best friends has been a target of the NYPD. And I need to live in a world where I can privately send that friend money for anything from groceries to car repairs without it being woven into some criminal conspiracy narrative and without having to explain blockchains and wallet addresses. I live in a world where running certain kinds of servers or programs can give you power or independence. So I need to live in a world where it's easy to spin those up. You shouldn't need Linux sysadmin skills to form communities or have freedoms online. I live in a world connected by the internet, and from the beginning the internet was anti-Black. And so I needed to live in a world where I can be globally connected without being exposed to anti-Blackness. I need these things the way you need food, clothing and shelter. You have to have shelter to be safe from the elements. And I have to live in a world where these things exist. So, we build and we keep building. One of the next things we're excited to build—something missing from the atproto ecosystem—is decentralized payment rails. Screenshot of a user's home screen when viewing cash by Blacksky. Their account has transaction history and a balance. We've put together a team of product folks, engineers, trust & safety professionals, UX designers & researchers, lawyers, experts from other protocols and a regulated banking partner to introduce the first fintech product to AT Protocol. With financial backing from the Cypherpunk Fellowship and the Center for Cultural Innovation (CCI) we'll also be publishing this payments model as a spec with example implementation code in Rust for backend services and in Typescript for UX design examples. The product will be: Open Source - With code examples provided so you'll know exactly how it works AT Protocol Based - You'll login using the same account you use for services like Flashes, Blacksky.Community, and Bluesky Privacy Preserving - Neither us nor our banking partner will know about your transactions United States Dollars - The kind you can withdraw and use at the grocery store Interoperable - Developers will be able to build their own payment products (e.g. Skyshop for Skylight Social) while using our payment rails. Users will have the option to use Cash with alternative payment providers as well (3rd party as 1st party). User profile on Blacksky Cash. Note the web of trust signals such as "you follow each other" which is made possible by using the follow graph from atproto identities. We expect to launch blacksky.cash in Q2 of 2026. We've already conducted user research for the peer-to-peer payment flows and are seeking out groups who would be interested in the collective economics side of the product. For groups this could be a loose-knit mutual aid group, susu or giving circle to anything like governance structures as formal as cooperatives and anything in between. If that sounds like you or your group/org please reach out to hello@blacksky.app. But payment rails aren't our only new product line for 2026. We're also working on infrastructure. blacksky.tech People don’t want to run their own servers, and never will... Even nerds do not want to run their own servers at this point. Even organizations building software full time do not want to run their own servers at this point... The companies that emerged offering to do that for you instead were successful... - Moxie Marlinspike, https://moxie.org/2022/01/07/web3-first-impressions.html As Mozilla has been saying, we need to decentralize the internet. Decentralization necessarily requires running your own servers and as mentioned above by Moxie, founder of the beloved Signal protocol, no one wants to run their own servers, and never will. If you take seriously that both are true, how do you square the two? I frequently reference when asked about Papertree, the project that 4 years later has evolved into Blacksky Cash, how we went about building non-crypto "multi-signature wallets" for users that didn't know what a browser was. In a conversation I recently had with Erica Stanley, I realized and then explained that I take a lot of joy in building complex things in a way that are accessible to everyday people. When we got thousands of people to "leave Bluesky" and migrate to or create new accounts on our PDS, it wasn't from capitalizing on anger. People have been angry at Bluesky before and simply left the ATmosphere altogether. We took their needs seriously, built things in a way that worked for them (simple language, works on mobile web, etc.), did a lot of hands-on troubleshooting rapidly learning and iterating on what was broken, and leveraged community support to explain things. Sharpie and Clinton made video explainers. Dr. Kay and myself wrote out documentation and FAQs. But we pretty explicitly don't want to be the only server in town. At the first ATmosphere Conference I said Blacksky would build a way to launch a PDS with the click of a button: "Own Your Infra" slide from my Beyond Horseless Carriages talk where I allude to being able to deploy your own PDS. I'm excited to say: promises made, promises kept. Clinton has built a mobile-friendly web app that will allow users to create a new PDS that is truly one-click and will be hosted on Blacksky's infrastructure. The goal is to make it as easy to run a server as it is to create an account on Blacksky. It'll have an easy to use interface, handle DNS and SMTP configuration (for things like send two-factor authentication codes), and provide an admin console for creating invite codes and managing repos + environment variables. Screenshot of deploying https://pds.determined-bardeen.blacksky.tech with one click. The reference to "bluesky-pds" is because this is the Bluesky maintained PDS distribution as opposed to rsky-pds. Our ambitious goal with this is to offer hosting not just for PDSs but Ozone/Moderation Service instances and Tangled Knot servers as well. Maybe relays and Slices app-views down the line too. We expect blacksky.tech to go into an alpha phase soon and are looking for testers. If interested, please email hello@blacksky.app. A year ago, Mekka asked what I'd build if I had the freedom. This is the answer. And we're just getting started. Reply on Blacksky here to join the conversation. Comments
Dec 27, 2025SupportSupport
Sep 27, 2025Mentions
mmhmmmm blacksky.community/profile/did:...
5/20/26, 6:08 PM
Thanks to @blackskyweb.xyz's Acorn service, healthcare workers are about to have a unique PDS and their own entire platform on the Atmosphere. Follow @medsky.network to find out when you can sign up.
5/19/26, 9:20 PM
I did see it with a few accounts to folks (blacksky.community/profile/did:... is one but they deleted). They might be finding folks' passwords in public leaks and hammering accounts (I'm not sure exactly)
5/19/26, 8:42 PM
