The Nexus of Privacy
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thenexusofprivacy.net
The Nexus of Privacy
@thenexusofprivacy.net
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A newsletter about technology, justice, equity, and strategy -- including privacy, AI, and social networks. Posts by @jdp23.thenexus.today
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thenexusofprivacy.net
At the end of the day, though, what really matters here is Blacksky's amazing progress.

And while Rudy deserves every bit of the credit he's getting for this success, as he consistently points out it has been very much a team effort -- and they deserve every bit of credit too!
A slide with the title "[they] can't stop this 2-3 zone", followed by avatars labeled 1st invites, 3rd most rsky commits, moderation how-tos, created Umoya Fellowship, building SAFEskies
September 11, 2025 at 5:17 PM
thenexusofprivacy.net
And ATmosphere development is thriving in general. These projects are learning from each other, building off each others' successes, and working together to improve the platform.
Meanwhile, the developer ecosystem in the ATmosphere (the ecosystem of software built around the AT Protocol, including Blacksky and Bluesky) is thriving with a lot of collaboration and synergies. Northsky Social (in Canada) focusing on the 2SLGBTQIA2S+ community – and is currently testing a PDS migration tool as well. Skylight Social, Streamplace, and Spark (in Brazil) are focusing on video. Gander (also in Canada) is planning on launching this fall. There's a lot of energy behind Eurosky. The AT Protocol dev community, after several successful conferences on multiple continents and both coasts of North America, is starting up a working group on bringing private data to the ATmosphere, a project that Rudy added to Blacksky's roadmap several months ago. Smoke Signal (events), Flashes (an Instagram alternative), Leaflet and Offprint for long-form text ... The list goes on and on and on, and Laurens Hof's weekly ATmosphere report keeps getting longer and longer. That's a good thing!
September 11, 2025 at 5:08 PM
thenexusofprivacy.net
Blacksky has continued to progress by leaps and bounds in the months since I first wrote "'Decentralization' and erasure last December -- expanding the team and excuting on @rude1.blacksky.team's vision
Blacksky is now hosting almost all of their own infrasctructure. Hundreds of people have set up accounts on the blacksky.app and blackskycomra.de PDS (personal data server) – including me. The blacksky.community app has the outstanding Blacksky Moderation service enabled by default, and the also-outstanding Blacksky: Trending as the feed for new users instead of Bluesky's crappy Discover feed). Behind the scenes, the Blacksky feeds use the Blacksky relay at atproto.africa, which extends relay functionality by including a "mod relay" - and other ATmosphere software is starting to use it as well
September 11, 2025 at 5:07 PM
thenexusofprivacy.net
Here's the summary from DAIR's page at www.dair-institute.org/tigray-genoc...

#tigraygenocide #contentmoderation
The 2020-2022 Tigray war is reported to be the deadliest armed conflict of the 21𝑠𝑡 century, with an estimated 600 to 800,000 documented deaths and more than 100 thousand victims of rape as a weapon of war. Social media platforms were instrumental in spreading genocidal content during the conflict, and failure to effectively moderate hateful content resulted in the murder of civilians. This work investigates the expertise and processes required to effectively moderate such genocidal content, and compares these findings to the expertise and processes prioritized by social media platforms.
April 10, 2025 at 12:27 AM
thenexusofprivacy.net
65+ Civil Society Groups Urge Democratic States to Protect Individual Data, Privacy Under Trump

Yeah really, sounds like a great idea to me!

www.fightforthefuture.org/news/2025-02...

Thanks @accountabletech.bsky.social @fightforthefuture.org and @ultraviolet.bsky.social for organizing!
“By tracking our every click, hover, and movement on and offline, Big Tech companies represent a powerful weapon for carrying out the Trump administration’s surveillance, prosecution, degradation, and deportation of people,” the organizations write. “To counteract the dangerous alignment of Big Tech and Trump’s authoritarianism and extremism, it is of the utmost urgency for your state to pass legislation to erect a firewall between government and Big Tech, safeguard our sensitive personal data, curtail Big Tech’s incentives for the collection and retention of data, and empower people with control over their own data. These are universally popular measures for data privacy and consumer protection that will impede President Trump’s agenda to punish political opponents, deport millions of people including citizens, restrict access to reproductive care, and undermine LGBTQ+ rights.”
February 13, 2025 at 3:55 PM
thenexusofprivacy.net
Here's an excerpt from the section on grounds for concern about Bluesky in the medium-to-long term.

Actually the moderation philosophy relates to a huge short-term concern as well: how will scaling impact rapid safety? Composable moderation is an interesting idea, but still just a prototype ...
- Bluesky and AT are a surveillance-capitalism friendly, all-public, architectures. - While in principle Bluesky and the ATmosphere's approach doesn't necessarily centralize power, in practice power today is completely concentrated. Bluesky runs all they key servers and controls the open-source implementaions as well as the protocol. As the network expands, it's likely to be extremely expensive to have other full-network Relays and AppViews, making the ATmospere as a whole dependent on Bluesky's infrastructure. Today it's possible to host your own PDS's (personal data stores) but Bluesky currently puts a lot of restrictions on them and in practice almost nobody does. It's not clear that will change. - The Protocols not Platforms paper that inspired Bluesky advocates a libertarian approach to free speech, and highlights that a benefit of this approach is that fascists like Alex Jones aren't banned and can still reach their audience (although hopefully "those who don’t wish to be bothered with his nonsense need not deal with it") – and Mike Masnick, the author of the paper, was Jack Dorsey's replacement on the board. Unlike Dorsey, Masnick does understand the value of content moderation and the threat of fascism (plus he's a lot smarter than Dorsey), so it's certainly an improvement ... but this is still very likely to remain Bluesky's philsophy.
November 18, 2024 at 12:22 AM
thenexusofprivacy.net
As always, it's important to think before you engage or share. "5 ways to fight post-election disinformation on Bluesky and the Fediverse" ,on the @iftas.org blog, is a deep dive into tactics.

about.iftas.org/2024/10/29/5...
Don't amplify disinfo! Think before you engage or share. Avoid headlines that include the disinfo. Be careful! Reshares and comments amplify it even if you're debunking!
November 8, 2024 at 8:01 PM
thenexusofprivacy.net
Bluesky's a fediverse too, as well as being part of the ATmosphere and (thanks to @snarfed.org and Bridgy Fed as well as Friendica) the ActivityPub Fediverse.

Here's the terminology I'm using. See "There are many fediverses" in privacy.thenexus.today/bluesky-atmo... for more,
There are many fediverses. a fediverse (a portmanteau of "federation" and "universe") is a decentralized social network of federated (i.e. interconnected) servers, and the people and organizations with accounts on them, that communicate through one or more protocols, bridges, and hubs. Participants in a fediverse can be social networks (either centralized or decentralized) in their own right; participants can also be part of multiple fediverses. "the Fediverse" is a fediverse whose boundaries, culture, software, protocols, change over time. and mean different things to different people but typically include a network organization based on instances, a specific kind of server . Since 2018 or so most people have used "the Fediverse" to refer to an ActivityPub-centric fediverse – but that's not the only fediverse out there!
October 22, 2024 at 6:57 PM