Infrastructure for Interdependence: Building technology in service of collective power

last updated: 2025-07-31

TL;DR

[Blacksky Algorithms] builds infrastructure for social groups to control how they show up online: how their feeds work, how harm is addressed, and how costs are covered. Instead of one-size-fits-all rules set by a company with growth targets, Blacksky enables groups to govern themselves, and pool resources to create digital spaces aligned with their values, safety needs, and political commitments.

Vision

Imagine a social internet that doesn’t ask “What’s good for engagement?” but instead asks: “What’s good for us?”

In this future, people don’t rely on a few companies to define what’s acceptable, what spreads, or what gets funded. Instead, groups of users, linked by shared values, needs, and histories have the tools to define how they relate to each other and to the wider network.

In this world, the tools for moderation, governance, and sustainability are in their hands, not a boardroom’s. And participation in a broader network doesn’t mean giving up the ability to shape your corner of it.

This future is impossible to reach through platforms designed for global scale, profit extraction, and control. But it’s within reach when the incentives are flipped, and the infrastructure is built to serve groups first.

Team

Blacksky was created by people who needed these tools and couldn’t find them. Our founder comes from over a decade of organizing and systems architecture. We’ve built a network from scratch that now serves millions, without outside funding, ad revenue, or VC mandates.

Created with the same mind and mission, Papertree is a decentralized financial management platform that has been used by real-world communities in Brooklyn. Honoring indigenous methods of financial interdependence, and principles of mutual aid, Papertree was built uniquely to give communities the tools to support one another and carry out collective plans with transparency.

What makes us different isn’t just our tech stack, it’s that we built Blacksky with the understanding that the collective matters more than the individual, and that safety and autonomy aren’t add-ons. They’re the foundation.

[Rudy Fraser] is a technologist, community organizer, and founder of Blacksky Algorithms, where he builds decentralized social media infrastructure that prioritizes community-driven safety, data ownership, and interoperability. As a Fellow at the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, he advanced research and development on technology that empowered marginalized communities, particularly Black users.

[Dr. KáLyn Coghill] is an organizer and educator who has a decades-long background studying and teaching topics such as digital misogynoir, online gender-based violence, Black Feminism, and Black Girlhood Studies. Their work encompasses community organizing around issues such as Reproductive Justice, Disability Justice, and Survivor Justice.

[Clinton Bowen] is a software engineer from California with experience in information security, backend software, and infrastructure development. Clinton is passionate about building fubu-ism technology. One hobby of his is transcribing and translating the laws and ordinances controlling the enslaved during the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade for slavecodes.org

[JD Lauwerends] (they/them) is a cultural strategist and Trust & Safety practitioner with a background in platform moderation, community integrity, and accessible systems design. They build safety frameworks rooted in care, accountability, and the lived experiences of vulnerable communities online.

[Marisa Rando] is an organizer, academic, and Founder/President of Pact Collective, a 501c3 that acts as a fiscal host to nearly 20 mutual aid organizations in NYC. Marisa has years of marketing and product experience in the tech world, and is currently doing her PhD in Sociology at the University of Cambridge researching tech/labor.

[Rishi Balakrishnan] is a software engineer from the Bay Area with experience building privacy preserving software and backend infrastructure. He graduated from UC Berkeley with a major in Computer Science and a minor in Global Poverty and Practice, and is dedicated to creating technology that supports care and democratic decision-making.

Problem

Today’s social networks are organized around one principle: growth. Not growth for people, but for shareholders. This creates a dangerous contradiction where platforms claim to serve everyone, but must prioritize scale and ad dollars over users’ experiences and wellbeing.

Especially for marginalized and impact-focused groups, these social media platforms create active barriers - censoring their activity and allowing false and/or discriminatory content to spread faster than they care to stop it. Their fundamental design hinders relationship building and collective organization which is at the core of our work.

We’ve seen that people don’t lack the desire or ability to shape safe, vibrant digital spaces, or to organize. What’s missing is the infrastructure to do it, without relying on platforms that profit when things go wrong and make it virtually impossible to leave.

Why Incumbents Can’t Do This

Big platforms can’t offer local control or meaningful collective governance tools because doing so would slow their growth, threaten their ad model, and make them legally responsible for decisions they’d rather ignore.

They can’t support thousands of small, self-governed collectives making decisions on their own terms, because their systems are built to centralize, not decentralize. In addition to contradicting their incentives, they have created hostile environments that thrive on click-bait over connection, making the level of trust necessary to have financialized interactions/collaboration uniquely difficult.

In short: they won’t, because they can’t.

Our Approach

We don’t build one platform. We build tools so that any group can build their own corner of the network.

Customizable moderation and governance rules (ex. preventing abusers from view feeds, filters for misogynoir, etc.): built in collaboration with real users who maintain them.

Shared funding infrastructure: where people can pool money for hosting, moderation, and projects; no ads, no extraction.

Open standards: that let these groups remain connected to the wider network while keeping local control of their data.

Open source: our tools are not only accessible to all, but are freely licensed so that other communities can fork or branch off using Blacksky as a starting point

We call this infrastructure for interdependence: tools that prioritize shared responsibility, local norms, and collective care.

Proof We Can Do It

We’ve already done what others said wasn’t possible:

Built a social network from scratch that reached over 2 million people, without spending a dollar on growth.

Developed moderation tools that responded to actual harm, designed and used by the very people most affected.

Codified governance practices with volunteers recruited from the user base, who write the rules they live by.

Designed financial governance tools used to operate a $200K community budget amongst dozens of participants.

What we proved is this: people will choose safety, clarity, and shared responsibility when the system is designed to let them.

Business Model

Groups pay into their own shared fund to carry out collective initiatives and support the tools they use. Blacksky earns a small facilitation fee for hosting, support, and ongoing development. No ads. No data resale. No dark patterns. This model scales by enabling more groups, not by growing any single feed.

Market Size

Blacksky was born out of necessity. The demand for democratic, interoperable digital infrastructure isn’t theoretical -- it’s visible in every group that has been pushed off mainstream platforms or forced to choose between visibility and safety.

We’ve shown that it’s possible to reach and retain over 2 million users with zero ad spend. But our vision isn’t about user growth alone, it’s about strengthening a growing ecosystem where collectives govern themselves.

Our focus now is onboarding aligned groups (organizers, creators, language publics, and mutual aid circles) who have between 100 and 25,000 members and are ready to move from survival tools to self-determined digital infrastructure.

Moat

Blacksky’s community platform, governance tools, and financial rails allow groups to pick and choose what tools they need. But the user experience that comes from these tools integrating deeply with each other means that once users use one, they’re more likely to reuse their decentralized identity with the others.

Once a group starts using Blacksky’s infrastructure to make decisions, manage conflicts, and fund themselves, leaving means losing more than a feed, it means losing shared history, norms, trust, and the architecture that sustains it.

That’s not lock-in, it’s culture.

Milestones (Next 12–18 Months)

Launch one-click setup for shared governance, pooled funding tools and sovereign data infrastructure.

Establish relationships with partner banks to develop payment rails

Release customizable governance and moderation templates to help new collectives avoid reinventing the wheel.

Expand moderation tooling into more languages and contexts through partnerships with user-organized rule-making bodies.

Risks & Mitigations

Trust at scale: We mitigate by designing for legibility, not anonymity, accounts are persistent, accountable, and recognizable by means of signals like reputation scores or verification.

Funding fatigue: We use transparent budget tools and group decision-making to reinforce the value of contribution so partner orgs aren’t reliant on external funding that may dry up.

Regulatory hurdles: We start with compliant, low-risk rails and prioritize trust-based giving over speculative finance.

Conclusion

Investing in Blacksky positions you at the leading edge of a fundamental shift in internet infrastructure. Blacksky isn’t chasing explosive growth or short-term returns; we’re building enduring infrastructure for collective life online. At a moment when the web is collapsing under the weight of extractive business models and failing public trust, we offer something different: a working alternative that is actively being sought after.

What we’re building already powers real groups with a shared purpose—giving them the ability to define their own norms, support one another, resolve conflict, sustain their work, and stay connected. We’re not predicting a shift toward democratic digital governance. We’re making it possible, and we’re already doing it.

This isn’t speculative. It’s necessary. And Blacksky is uniquely positioned to deliver.