WAFFLES Or: Are the Skies Bluer Elsewhere?

Originally published on demongrrl.com/dispatch

Update (8 October 2025): Since I published this I’ve learned more speficics about how the AT Protocol works, and now know that moving off Bluesky’s PDS wouldn’t be a full solution. Regardless, I decided to move the PDS on which my personal accounts sit over to the Blacksky hosted myatproto.social – which is a PDS available for all to join. I want to ensure that even if – for some reason – Bluesky take moderation action against my account, my account data is out of their hands. I have also recently learned about Northsky – a similar project to Blacksky focused on creating a safe community for the queer and trans community.

So something I’ve been thinking about recently is just how shaky the foundations of the platform and community I’ve managed to build are. I managed to get my hands on an early access invite to Bluesky back in 2023, and it’s coming up on nearly 2 years since I created my account. It’s the biggest platform I’ve ever managed to build, with over 2k followers there, and the reach I have there has had a material impact on my life.

However, with the CEO of the platform, Jay Graber, having a very normal time of it recently, and other senior staff at bsky hq being actively hostile to the good-faith concerns of trans people, it’s obviously raising some red flags about the future viability of the platform for an out and proud trans person like myself.

Bluesky previously felt like a haven. A social media site with a strong, well connected, active trans community where their influence on the site’s culture was so pronounced that being transphobic practically made you persona non grata. People would follow and engage with trans art, specifically, in a way I’d never seen before. Sure there are the occasional transphobic lesbians whose true colours were shown when their self-image of being a ‘good ally’ was threatened by trans people pointing out how their actions harmed them, but I’d take that over the constant unending harassment trans folks on Twitter are facing.

The problem I’m chewing over lies in the other platforms. Twitter’s dead husk - whilst still maintaining significantly higher users/day than Bluesky - is a transphobia factory and bot paradise. Mastadon and other fediverse platforms are too technical for average users, with awful reach. Threads (also kinda sorta ish a fediverse platform) is owned by Meta, and has far too many content restrictions for me. Then you have instagram and TikTok - where I’d have to engage in an entirely different style of posting (or content creation) to get any engagement, whilst also facing restrictions on what I can talk about. I can’t remember the last time Tumblr was relevant anywhere, and Reddit is, well, Reddit.

So other than my website (and how am I supposed to facilitate interaction comparable to a social platform with this thing?), where else am I supposed to go? I got very lucky with Bluesky and building the audience that I have, and have landed in a really amazing community that I don’t want to lose. The cost to build a platform elsewhere for me is exceptionally high.

The closest thing I can think of to a solution is setting up my own AT Protocol personal data server (PDS), which is a highly technical and by all accounts pretty janky process. What does that actually mean? Well, pretty much all Bluesky accounts (even those with their own domains) sit on ‘bsky.social’ - which is why most people’s usernames look like @\<user>.bsky.social. All their posts, their custom feeds, followers and following, etc, exist on Bluesky’s own servers, all of which link back to the domain bsky.social.

So yeah, making my own one of those is theoretically possible, and in theory I’d be able to control the moderation of the accounts on my PDS, and maintain sovereignty over my data (which is all currently sitting on Bluesky’s servers). But holy shit do I absolutely have no idea how to do this, and by all accounts getting it working smoothly can be tricky. But even then, visibility and discoverability remain at the whims of Bluesky themselves.

So what’s the solution? I have absofuckinglutely no idea. From where I’m sitting there are no good options. There are far smarter and better connected people than I who are actively discussing these issues (do yourself a favour and go follow Ana Valens if you aren't already). All I can hope is that as a community we can put our collective brains together and think of something…