"I hate y'all, I'd do anything to replace y'all."
— Kendrick Lamar, 2013 BET Cypher
I hate everything about the current racial and geopolitical climate of the United States.
At a time when we're seeing ICE blatantly step on court orders; ICE kidnap children, multiple children, in fact; when the current president of the United States is posting racist videos of Obama on a glorified, defederated Mastodon instance he created; and when multiple prominent figures and world leaders are implicated in a national sex trafficking ring, it's arguably inexcusable not to speak up about these atrocities and try to help vulnerable people in some way as a normal person, even if all you're able to do is get on a computer and repost people who are able to put their lives on the line. It's US-centric, sure, but our geopolitics spills out into other countries. The news coverage of the last month alone is saturating the open internet.
But if you're following me and know I repost all that already to try to get people informed, why am I leading with it in an essay?
In case you aren't up to speed, Blacksky, a Black-owned alternative to Bluesky that runs on the AT Protocol, or the Atmosphere, as I'll call it here, is implementing the ability for its users to make posts that only its users will be able to see. This is similar to Northsky's own proposal to private posts, for an LGBTQ+-owned PDS.
I've noticed some flack from a small, yet loud, vocal minority for saying it's good that Blacksky will have private posts, as I don't see an issue with people of color gatekeeping their own communities. I'm Mexican, so seeing people create their own safe spaces is incredibly important and needed, especially given, again, the current racial and geopolitical climate of the United States.
I've observed a pattern of Atmosphere developers and people who circle them on their alts advocating against this, saying, among other things, that Blacksky and Northsky are "signifiers for annoying politics," that they'd hide the Blacksky and Northsky PDSes with a labeller, and complaining that Blacksky's private posts are a form of "vendor lock-in." You're flagrantly insinuating that Blacksky is a semi-proprietary ethnocentric social network because it's going to have private posts, and it pisses me off to no end. (Aside: You shouted out selfhosted.social—what, do you think Bailey isn't close with the Blacksky and Northsky teams? selfhosted.social isn't the anti-woke PDS just because it doesn't explicitly cater to a marginalized community.)
If you're at all familiar with the racial and geopolitical climate of the United States, does the way this situation played out sound familiar?
It's, frankly, not that outlandish to say it's a colonialist mindset to push the idea that a Black-owned decentralized social media alternative is somehow an ethnocentric social network, fit for people with "signifiers for annoying politics."
By espousing these talking points, you're pushing the idea that Black and LGBTQ+ people who interact in their own safe spaces have "annoying politics," an overgeneralization that harms real people with real lives.
In my mind, the whole point of a decentralized protocol like the Atmosphere—the point that drew me in all those years ago to become a labeller operator and get to be friends with a ton of people I wouldn't have otherwise—is to give incoming users options like Blacksky and Northsky. If you were to, say, get suspended from the Bluesky appview, it won't limit you from pursuing different options as long as you have a rotation key from a service like PDS Moover. "Vendor lock-in," when it comes to things like threadgating or community-specific private posts, lets people of marginalized communities feel safer because they add a needed friction between them and their adversaries. And joking that you'd "lock open Blacksky by mass scraping posts [...] because the internet never changes" is in disservice and disrespect to the idea that people deserve the right to want to be left alone.
Not everything is for you.
Correction (2/7/26): I've adjusted certain links into archived links of posts. I've also edited other parts for factual accuracy, as not all people involved were Atmosphere developers.