Blaine
@blaine.bsky.social
Sociotechnologist, activist. First employee @ Twitter, built that and pioneered social decentralization, created OAuth. Shy cloud-observer, mostly. Building Roundabout for local communities at @newpublic.org.
After AtmosphereConf I was hit with the realization that I couldn't continue working in corporate tech where I had could not see the impact of my or the companies work on communities. I've started a new venture, Eskahlay, rooted in my nubian culture to build sustainable community technology.
Eskahlay UG@eskahlay.com · 2w agoFocusing on community technology A waterwheel, a protocol, and the case for technology that communities can own.
Today feels like celebrating a twenty-year wedding anniversary, five years after a catastrophic divorce ended the relationship. For me, the relationship started well before the ceremony, and the fault lines of the relationship were visible soon after the honeymoon ended. bsky.app/profile/newp...
New_ Public@newpublic.org · 3w agoTwitter publicly launched exactly 20 years ago today! ⏪ What was that moment really like? New_ Public’s @blaine.bsky.social was working frantically to keep it up and running as demand exploded during SXSW 😅
I've had this poster hanging on my wall for well over a decade. It's not radical, it's common decency.
CrimethInc. Ex-Workers' Collective@crimethinc.com · last mo.Over the past quarter of a century, we have distributed hundreds of thousands of copies of this poster that the FBI cited as evidence in the Prairieland case. The poster hangs in countless grade schools. crimethinc.com/GenderPoster... They are making war on a society of millions. We can stop them.
I've just watched a presentation by one of the most incredible, thoughtful researchers I've ever had the pleasure of meeting. I hope I can share it, because I'm crying here. 😭 Living in a tiny community that's lived through a major wildfire is a vibe, y'all.
At Roundabout, we're very excited about this proposal for permissioned atproto data. Roundabout has been built on atproto, but has been on a separate network because there are some (many!) things that just aren't for the whole world. This will bring us a big step closer to being on main!
daniel holmgren 🫠@dholms.at · last mo.as a little pre-show surprise, here's an early draft of the permissioned data proposal! github.com/bluesky-soci...
Blacksky is building ~the intercommunal net~ where communities create virtual spaces collectively managed by their members -- from moderation policies to recommender algorithms. We're hiring a Founding Engineer (Rust) @ $180K base who will report directly to me and lead our atproto implementation.
Founding Engineer (Rust)
Systems, protocol, and infrastructure About Blacksky Blacksky helps communities create virtual third places where members democratically govern the recommender algorithms and moderation policies that ...
blackskyweb.xyz
My thought for the day: Don't confuse products with protocols, and vice-versa.
This is a good explainer. The one change I'd make is that the fiefdom thing is something that very explicitly came from Mastodon, as it was implemented in the world. ActivityPub is in many ways just "two-way, more efficient RSS"
dan@danabra.mov · 2mo ago"but where are all the bluesky instances?" i've heard this so many times that i wrote an explainer
This article calls out something interesting about the C-22 debacle. C-22 makes clear that no encryption back-doors should be in place, and it seems like the liberal ministers and law enforcement "just" want to be able to make secret metadata and data retention orders.
Leader of a national party, hanging out in cattle class. Love to see it.
Avi Lewis@avilewis.ca · 2mo agoAnother crammed Air Canada flight, delays and cancellations, grumpy people, crappy WiFi… But half of us are on cloud 9, peering at stuttering images from Vancouver, cheering wildly! What a game.
It was the best of governments / it was the worst of governments.
Boris@bmann.ca · 2mo agoWhelp. After rushing through voting on all amendments last night / this morning #BillC22 is passed www.parl.ca/DocumentView... What this means: in late September, it goes to the senate…who may do amendments but almost always give in if the House pushes. 🚨🚨🚨No more @signal.org in Canada by fall 🚨🚨🚨
Here’s @rude1.blacksky.team, Founder and CEO of @blackskyweb.xyz and Excellence Award Winner of the #OpenSocialAwards. Blacksky is a beacon of choice, community, and agency in a bleak social media landscape. They’re building the tools they need and sharing them with everyone.
This is such a farce. "They put slot machines in the libraries! That's probably bad!" / *Government does nothing for 20 years, enshittification of libraries continues* / "We must ban libraries, they're harming the children!"
News Eye@newseye.bsky.social · 2mo agoBREAKING: The UK Government confirms that Bluesky will be INCLUDED in the ban on social media for under 16s. The government said it will be BANNED because it is a “user-to-user platform who purpose is to enable social interaction.”
"We are so committed to fairness that we have lost sight of the unfairness of doing nothing." I feel like this quote, from this article about an indigenous project to address the problem of housing unaffordability in Vancouver, is true of so many things right now: www.nytimes.com/2026/06/15/o...
Opinion | One City Might Have Just Cracked the Housing Crisis
nytimes.com
More info here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzMx... Coming out June 28th to chrome stable: developer.chrome.com/blog/io26-we... Should work out of the box for gmail addresses, but you can run your own email provider / issuer: dickhardt.github.io/email-verifi... RPs: github.com/samuelgoto/e...
youtube.com
I just tried a thing that I've honestly been waiting for since ~2006. @sgo.to is a genius, and his persistence is a godsend. I'm told it'll be live in a few months-ish. Can't wait to share more widely, thinking about implications in the meantime. (Sorry to be coy, it's not easily demo-able yet)
Same, but in 🇨🇦 cc @avilewis.ca - we really need to get our geese in a flank, or we'll just mint Telus as the new Meh-ta.
Robin Berjon@robin.berjon.com · 2mo agoExpect to see more of this before it changes. The old European elite has figured out that there's money to be made repeating the same business strategies that have got us where we are but with a 🇪🇺 sticker on top. It'll take a bit of a time for people to notice that we also need new thinking.
Expect to see more of this before it changes. The old European elite has figured out that there's money to be made repeating the same business strategies that have got us where we are but with a 🇪🇺 sticker on top. It'll take a bit of a time for people to notice that we also need new thinking.
Maria Farrell@mariafarrell.eurosky.social · 2mo agoNGL it's frustrating living in a moment where <some> EU leaders are finally getting that tech dependence on a foreign power is a fundamental strategic error but default to subsidising a new set of locked in but 🇪🇺 flagged tech oligarchs. Competition, interop and tech diversity are existential.
We had so many amazing applicants to the #OpenSocialAwards that the jury asked that we acknowledge some of the amazing honorable mentions. First up: @stream.place brings a familiar Twitch/YouTube-style video experience to the open social web.
The ONLY bright spot is that … it seems like almost none of it is fully baked and being left to figure out AFTER the bill is passed Like C-22, I created an open collection on Semble for stashing links semble.so/profile/bman...
Michael Geist@mgeist.bsky.social · 2mo agoIn a bill titled the Safe Social Media Act, to what social media services does the law apply? The answer for the moment is none. The Safe Social Media Act leaves nearly everything for later with Cabinet or a future Commission to make the call. bsky.app/profile/mgei...
Really disappointed that Canada is joining the crowd in banning social media for under-16s. The *best-case* scenario is that it entrenches Apple and Google's control over our online identities, and will do very little to improve things for kids, let alone the rest of us.
I need to write more about this, but one of the core benefits of atproto is that it (dramatically) lowers the cost of coordination, both in divergence and convergence.
So much this. Listen to Rachel "wise web lady" Coldicutt.
Rachel Coldicutt@rachelcoldicutt.bsky.social · 2mo agoMaking a really good list is much cheaper than buying a chatbot and you're less likely to run out of tokens and find it suddenly costs £1m or set fire to the planet or risk totally random answers being returned that you have no control over. Good lists are really useful and they last for ages.
This Halifax Public Library vending machine at the Halifax airport is so cool! @hfxgov.bsky.social ❤️📚
🏆 Congratulations to @newsmastfoundation.org, @sill.social, and @blackskyweb.xyz, the winners of the first ever Open Social Awards! 👏👏👏 New_ Public, @publicspaces.net, and @waag.org are proud to award them in recognition of their excellence and innovation on the open social web. newpublic.org/OSA
An observation while I'm at #pubconf26: it's a little thing, but we use hashtags because Twitter never added support for properly tagging tweets as "part of a conversation" - there is nothing stopping us from doing this now. We talk about fun and functionality, so let's do it.
“The time for dialogue with these people is long gone.” @robin.berjon.com’s opening talk is a call to action to build collective power in opposition to extractive big tech. #pubconf2026
