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Welcome to the
Northsky Newsletter!
It's been a while since we last chatted with you and we've got a bunch to share. We're so excited about the progress we've been making on Northsky, but because so much has happened we are going to chunk our updates so we don’t overwhelm you with all the news at once!
You can expect a series of updates leading up to us taking our first users, and beyond!
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Reminder, What We Are
As you might recall, we’re a group of developers and community moderators working to build a safer digital space for 2SLGBTQIA+ communities. We’ve formed a non-profit worker-owned cooperative in Canada, and we’re volunteering our time to build out the infrastructure of Northsky: including the technology, the cooperative, and the moderation practices we plan on employing.
We thank you so much for your patience as we build a strong foundation for Northsky Social, and we’re excited to grow this community in dialogue with you!
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What We're Doing
Northsky Phase 1: “PDS Migration”
The first phase of Northsky is to migrate as many willing users (of our 2000+ signups!) as possible to our Personal Data Server (PDS) hosted in Canada and safely outside of the US. We anticipate more regulatory attacks on the 2SLGBTQIA+ community from the Trump administration aimed at our presence online, and as such we decided to tackle this existential threat first, before focusing on other goals. Some folks have asked why we’re not starting immediately with a new App / Appview and moderation tools, and this is why.
Migrating users to a new PDS is a big deal! You are putting your trust in us to steward your data, and we’re taking that seriously. That’s why we’ve been focusing on improving PDS backups to prevent data loss, as well as making a robust and easy to use Migration Tool while also ensuring we’re properly incorporated, insured, and legally compliant. We’re also working on an informational video to explain exactly what decisions you’ll be making when you move to Northsky, so you join us in this endeavor with informed consent.
When Phase 1 is complete, you’ll be able to move over to Northsky! You won’t notice too much different as a user right away. Your data will be secured in Canada on our infrastructure, you will have a new @handle (unless you use a custom one, which you can keep!), you will have generated a Rotation Key (identity recovery key so you are free to reclaim your ATProto identity at any time and from any host, ourselves included!), and your data will be robustly backed up via our backup system.
However, we won’t have our own App / Appview yet, so you can keep using Bluesky’s or you could use an alternative one like Zeppelin.Social or Deer.Social. In the future we absolutely plan on expanding our offerings to include our own custom App + Appview, as that ties into our moderation capabilities plan (and because we think our color-scheme is pretty ✨stellar✨)
On Northsky you will be able to communicate with Bluesky users like normal, you’re not giving up your connections or posts or anything aside from your ability to migrate back to Bluesky (a limitation they have acknowledged and might address at some point in the future.)
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Technical Development Progress
Our developers have been hard at work, preparing our infrastructure and PDS implementation, along with our migration tool, for your arrival!
PDS Infrastructure Upgrades
1) Migrated Northsky's in-development services out of DigitalOcean to OVH Cloud in Canada to ensure we don't host user data in infrastructure operated by a US-based company. (Meaning your content will be insulated from changing US regulations.)
2) Modifying the Bluesky PDS to support continuous backups, initially with the design located here, but now also with an approach that combines all actor databases into a single Sqlite database that can be backed up & restored easily using Litestream, aiming towards a fully-featured multi-tenant PDS implementation that supports guaranteed data durability with automatic continuous backups to an S3-compatible object store with a data loss window of seconds. (Meaning you will be better protected from data loss.)
Choosing a home for Northsky Social
Due to our commitment to not use US-based companies we launched a search to find a provider who could host Northskys infrastructure. We started out with the following criteria:
- Located in Canada
- Offers public cloud (not a VPS)
- Able to scale with traffic
- Flexible storage setup
- Not a US based entity
On paper, these looked like an easy task but ultimately we quickly discovered that providers in Canada who could cover these were incredibly difficult to find and when we did, were only price competitive for very small setups with costs exploding at scale.
We ultimately began looking at OVH Cloud as they offer a public cloud platform based on OpenStack with a managed kubernetes service, giving us the flexibility we needed to run exactly what we needed at the start then build up over time. After speaking with them we learned that each country is a completely separate legal entity with no overlap in resources (we contacted some folks in the US who handed us off to their Canadian counterparts as soon as they understood where we intended to operate), even user accounts can’t be shared between the Canadian and American platforms. With this knowledge on how seriously they treat data isolation we elected to move forward with them.
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What Our People Are Doing
ATmosphereConf & Ahoy! Social Web Day
ATmosphereConf was held in Seattle from March 22-23rd and from it emerged a greater sense of the importance of IndieSky efforts like Northsky. Northsky coop member Aendra Rininsland spoke at the event and spent a few minutes discussing why she thinks Northsky is important;
Watch her talk here:
 Aendra also spoke briefly about Northsky at Ahoy! Social Web Day in Hamburg in April 24. The conference brought together the European ATProto community and IndieSky was a significant discussion topic at both the conference and at a second event the following day focusing entirely on how the developer community can make IndieSky a reality. - The two conferences culminated in the creation of the IndieSky Working Group, which is now meeting fortnightly. For more info, please visit the AT Protocol Community wiki page:
Northsky is leading the way in discussions about the importance of creating federated infrastructure for Bluesky/ATProto outside of the United States. It's especially encouraging to see people in the academic sphere beginning to discuss the threat to free speech and academic freedom posed by hosting social media infrastructure in countries occupied by reactionary right-wing parties. There's been a lot of movement in this space the last few months, with non-Bluesky PBC relays and appviews such as deer.social beginning to sprout up. Stay tuned!
Volunteer Madeleine Muscari at North Bay Python 2025
At this year’s North Bay Python in Petaluma, our volunteer Maddy gave a 45-minute talk titled “It’s About Ethics in AI Alignment – Resistance in the Age of AI-Governed Speech.” The talk explored how reinforcement learning, centralized alignment protocols, and silent AI censorship are shaping digital discourse.
She traced the rise of oppressive AI governance, under-reported epistemic risks of generative AI systems, critiqued systems like OpenAI’s RLHF pipeline, and proposed alternatives grounded in autonomy, decentralization, and ethical praxis. The talk emphasized actionable strategies for building more accountable, user-governed AI systems.
🎥 Watch her talk here:
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Chat with us!
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. There are no guarantees we will build any of these, but we want to hear from you what's top of mind.
You can get in touch with us in these ways:
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What’s next?
Our next regular update will be discussing our Cooperative formation in more detail, and how we’ve designed our organization to be resistant against interference from within and without the coop. We’re in this for the long haul, because we don’t want our community to keep getting broken apart and scattered to the winds. We want Northsky to be a safe and stable online home for you for as long as you’d like to be a part of it.
Chat again soon,
The Northsky Team
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Have questions? Hit reply to this email and we'll help out!
113 Cherry St #92768, Seattle, WA 98104-2205
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