Phase One: PDS + Migration is now on auto-pilot, so we’re moving onto exciting new endeavors for Phase Two, including our own App, Moderation Labeler, Private Data and more!

We have sent out ~1,050 invites and have ~280 users on our PDS so far. That’s an migration rate of around 26%. Of the migrated, we’ve had a number of support requests for for migration assistance and all were either resolved or are in the process of being resolved. (If you still need help, use our support form.) 

We’ve been able to improve the clarity and simplicity of our migration website over time, and have been able to reduce support requests quite a bit finding that now less than 5% of users need migration assistance. 

We’ve also released the source code for our migration frontend and backend on GitHub. 

We’ve got 6,123 more waitlisters (and growing) to vet and invite, and we’re moving on that as fast as we can, sending out invites each week! 

We don’t currently have the spare bandwidth to let everyone know what position they are in the queue, but if you feel you’re at imminent risk of your account being taken down by Bluesky, let us know using this form and we will consider accelerating your migration. 

Now that we have migrated a number of users, we made a simple chronological feed (powered by Graze Social) to see what the community on the PDS is posting! Click here to pin the Discover Northsky feed. 

If you’ve migrated and don’t want to be included in the feed, let us know here. 

Some of our keener users might have noticed that we’ve been ramping up our own moderation labeler over the last 6 months. We’ve been refining our label definitions, defining the scope of what we can cover, applying labels (775 reports resolved at time of writing), and having conversations internally about our standard operating procedures when it comes to moderation and enforcement of our Community Guidelines. What’s more, we’ll be working with Blacksky to further refine our moderation practices and adopt their Acorn platform for community moderation. 

We’re excited to announce that we’re ready for more users to adopt our labeler, and we highly recommend all Northsky users subscribe and configure how labels behave according to your preferences. Adopting our labeler is optional, but the more users we have using it and sending in reports, the more we can fulfill our mission of making Northsky a safer and more enjoyable social media experience for 2SLGBTQIA+ and other marginalized people. Not a Northsky user yet? You can still subscribe to our labeler! 

Our labeler covers various forms of bigotry and unacceptable behaviours that are outlined in our Community Guidelines and label definitions. It also covers content enforcement to keep us compliant with Canadian law while protecting our users from stumbling across particularly egregious or traumatizing content. 

Anything not listed in our label definitions is currently “out of scope” for our moderation service. So, reports of AI content, spam/scam, and the like will likely be ignored unless it originates from a Northsky account. This is an issue of scale and expertise, as all our moderation at time of writing is done via the human labor of volunteers and label application is not automated. We may explore rules-based automation of labels in the future to help expand our coverage, but we acknowledge the harm that false positives can cause, so we would approach any endeavour with caution and discuss with the community before doing so. 

What happens if one of your posts is labeled by Northsky? If you’re on our PDS, you’ll receive an email explaining why your content was labeled, what guideline was broken, and how to start an appeal or ask followup questions. We usually encourage users to take down posts voluntarily as a gesture of good faith and mutual understanding, however we also reserve the ability to take down posts originating from our PDS. We will always exercise this option when content violates Canadian law, as that puts the entire Northsky community at risk. 

We do not have a “strike system,” and we do not believe this is the way forward for Northsky. As we’ve seen recently from Bluesky’s moderation, strike systems can be enforced arbitrarily, with multiple strikes being levied in a single incident and long or permanent bans being applied with no warning up front. 

We will instead moderate in accordance with our Commitments to our Community and our practices of dialogue, restorative justice, and plain explanations. We believe this is the most pro-social way to build trust and safety in a community. If a Northsky user demonstrates a pattern of guideline violations and disinterest in participating in the restorative justice process, we will facilitate their exit from the PDS. 

So, what can you do to keep our community vibrant and safe? 

* prior volunteer applicants need not re-apply, we will reach out when we’re ready to add more members to the volunteer moderation team.
 

Many of you have been asking, will Northsky have it’s own app? Yes! We’re going to have an app that is similar to the Bluesky’s experience, but we’re going to do a bit more than that too. 

In this forum, we discuss the need for a shared and maintained community app codebase that is kept up to date with ATprotocol changes, but also allows for more componentization of features, more experimentation. Developers through the ecosystem could experiment more with features and lexicons, without having to maintain their own app frontends. 

We figured, since we’re going to be offering and maintaining our own app as part of our mission, we might as well do so in a way that invites collaboration from others looking to try experiments tweaking the app interface and offering new features. We’re calling this initiative IndieApp. 

Beyond IndieApp, we’ll be releasing our own Mobile Apps in time so you can use Northsky more conveniently from your portable devices, and also standing up our own Appview (backend) so that we all can talk to Link again, and be more fully independent from Bluesky moderation. Similar to Blacksky our long term goal is to be able to operate independent of the Bluesky ATproto infrastructure to serve our community if it comes to that and these two services make significant strides to get us there. 
 

Recently Evelyn, one of the Northsky Directors, published a post on why private data is so important for communities and described our planned model for “shared private microblogging” where users are able to make posts that are private and only visible to specific groups. We’re continuing to work on developing Stratos and wanted to take the opportunity to talk about how it would work for Northsky. 

The plan has diverged a bit from what was outlined in the post as we are building this for the broader ATproto community as a whole in a way that allows anyone to run their own stratos service that an appview can use to display private posts. Currently we plan to implement support for “arbitrary” boundaries that we call domains which can be defined by either a list of users (sourced from a user list) or PDS. A PDS domain in our case would be Northsky and so in practice, when you make a post with the Northsky app you would be able to declare your post for Northsky only and as a result, anyone on Northsky would see it while those not on the Northsky PDS wouldn’t be able to see it even if they had the ID for the underlying record. This means we are targeting true data privacy rather than hiding in plain sight by using a different lexicon. If you’d like to know more keep an eye out for a session by Evelyn at Atmosphere Conf where she will share further details on Stratos!
 

We want to hear from you! As we build out Northsky and think about the future, we want to know what things you're interested in having us build. We're committed to building in the open and that involves listening to our community to determine what's most important for all of us. 

Start a discussion on GitHub: https://github.com/orgs/NorthskySocial/discussions (good for proposals, FAQs, and feature requests) 

Skeet at us @transrights.northsky.social on Bluesky. 

E-mail us at [email protected]​ 

Chat again soon, 

The Northsky Team