Northsky Update #4: Community Guidelines and Comms

Community Guidelines and Communications

Hi [BLUESKY_HANDLE GOES HERE],

We’re excited to bring you another Newsletter as we approach launching Northsky. This time we’ll be covering:

• Community Guidelines
• Cooperative Comms
• Alpha-Testing Progress

We’re so close to inviting our first round of folks from the queue, we can taste it! However, we won’t pull the trigger until we’re ready and our tools and PDS are well tested. We want you to have the smoothest migration experience possible.

Community Guidelines and Moderation

Northsky Social Cooperative exists to serve the 2SLGBTQIA+ community and other marginalized communities. Numerous events over the course of 2024 and 2025 have demonstrated that platform owners are willing to engage in censorship of our community on behalf of authoritarian regimes. Confidence has been shaken in Bluesky leadership and we are stepping up to meet the moment for our community. We’ve had our subscriber list triple from 2000 to 6000 since our last newsletter, and we’re working as quickly and diligently as we can to meet the demand.

Thanks to the design of ATprocotol, our Cooperative is able to host our own alternative that allows us to keep our community together and prevent yet another digital diaspora. We’re serious about never handing this platform we’re building off to new owners or selling it to the highest bidder. We want this to be a home for the 2SLGBTQIA+ community and our friends and comrades for as long as you want to be here with us.

Our stewardship is not just technical however, we need to moderate our community in a manner that honors the manifold idiosyncrasies of its members, and this can only be done via judicious human moderation that builds trust via wise decision-making over time. This means both taking action to prevent harassment, while also exercising restraint so that we don’t become the de facto arbiter of inter-community discourse. We can’t promise perfection, but we can promise to do a better job for our community than has been done so far.

As a step towards building trust we have already provided our Commitments to Our Community, as well as a forthcoming clear Migration Animatic of what deciding to join Northsky means for you and your account. We are also pleased to share a first draft of our Community Guidelines with you for your consideration.

• Link to Community Guidelines​

This document should address recent questions pertaining to NSFW content on Northsky, as well as how we plan to moderate behavior and content on the platform. We look forward to hearing your comments!

• ​Send us feedback on the guidelines using this form​

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Communications Policies

Apropos of nothing, Northsky Social Cooperative members got together to discuss what our standards of communication with our community will be. We are not a typical corporate entity with a clear hierarchy. We are a worker-owned cooperative where each member has one vote and we decide things democratically. Even our directors only get one vote, same as any other member. So what does this mean for how we communicate with our community?

Here are the guidelines we are following to discuss issues and announce decisions with the broader Northsky community:

• Official stances and decisions are communicated from the @transrights.northsky.social account with the agreement of a majority vote of members of the cooperative.
• Director/Member personal accounts do not speak for the entire cooperative, and don’t represent official positions (see above).
• Personal accounts are allowed to express opinions that dissent from the official position of the cooperative, but must take care to be concise and not let discourse spiral out of control.
• A quorum of members of the Cooperative may put a “gag order” on a member who is actively “crashing out” or “take the keys away” from a member who is misrepresenting the Cooperative using the main account (@transrights.northsky.social) with a simple majority vote.
• Members should not act on the impulse to “take a bullet” for other cooperative members.

These guidelines will hopefully create a clear way for the community to interface with our highly democratic structure, while also respecting the individual autonomy of our members. If you have feedback on these, you can get in touch using the contact info at the bottom of this newsletter.

Alpha-Testing Progress

Northsky’s PDS is already up and running and has migrated several real user accounts to it using our Downloadable Tool. We’ve taken on alpha testers of a variety of account sizes, as the number of posts and media blobs matters quite a lot. Larger accounts have to transfer a lot of data from Bluesky’s servers to ours, and there are several rate-limits built in to prevent spamming and DDOS attacks. We have overcome many of these technical limitations, and still have a few more hitches to smooth out.

Most of these migrations using the Downloadable Tool were under the close observation of the Northsky team, to ensure the tool was used properly and no loss of account or data occurred. The migration process is a non-destructive one, where a copy of your account is made on our server before your bluesky one is deactivated and the northsky copy activated. However, out of an abundance of caution we shepherded testers through the process. This approach doesn’t scale well however, and we’ve been hard at work on a web-hosted front-end experience for migrating users. This website will guide you through a clear flow where nothing can get messed up, and we can take users on quickly and in larger numbers.

We’re fixing the remaining issues with the website version of the migrator and ensuring it works with accounts of all sizes, and when that testing is done, we’ll be able to start inviting our first users off our waitlist! We’ll start with small batches, and then ramp up as we go. There is also a time cost to pre-vetting accounts before we send out invite keys.

All that said, we’re getting so close to being able to take on non-test users, and we’re so so grateful for the willingness of our alpha testers to spend their precious time with us in voice-chat figuring things out and sending log files to us. We couldn’t do this without you!

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:

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 community@northskysocial.com​

Chat again soon,

The Northsky Team