Northsky: A Haven for the Trans Community, or a Trap
Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2026 6:10 am
If you know me, you know I'm the "misandry isn't real" and offline closeted trans woman whoms't doesn't know if I'll ever return to transition, unless by some miracle I fall into a supportive circle again. A supportive circle that doesn't dissolve or abuse and then mulch me for having opinions like, "Trans men being denied entry into spaces for trans women isn't oppression, or the mythical concept of 'misandry', you dolts." Or, "I like to mess around with LLMs, and I am quite aware this pisses people off, I don't care. I'm not in high school anymore, and neither are you."
Never-the-less, and despite running my own PDS either standalone, or via a Wafrn instance for the past year or so, I was a little optimistic about Northsky. In fact, I've been on its wait-list for a year? Year and a half? Two years? It's hard to count now how long its been since they announced this thing.
And I've been baffled the whole time, because ... hosting a PDS is like a 10 minute setup process. Putting a labeler or two online is also pretty straight-forward and simple. Building a website that connects all of it together? Maybe more difficult, but definitely not something that should take two years. And an appview? I could almost understand this taking a really long time ... but I'm still pretty certain I could make an appview myself that has at least basic functions in way less than two whole years.
No matter what kinds of different excuses I read on why it's taking longer than GTA6, or why they need a wait list, or why they'd make some people wait two years without an invite, while others get in virtually immediately, is well beyond my comprehension. And the only conclusion I can draw is that someone is lying about how this is all working behind the scenes, despite their reasoning of "keeping out known abusers."
I would question what their metric for "abuser" even is. Are we talking Laurelai Bailey? Or, are we talking about people who've had disagreements and the aggressive types who shoot you into a dogpile for even a slight mismatch in opinion?
But you need that metric, because if you're like me and you've been around trans community politics and spaces for two decades, you know that communities like this are erected and then collapsed just as quickly, because random people time and time again, many of whom who are traumatized, hardly ever make good moderation decisions, or are even capable of running a community that doesn't turn into a War of the Sychophants.
See: The Contraption
(A lot of this goes back to my initial skepticism of allowing users to make and share blocklists, because, if you have any internet history at all, you know that Twitter's 2013 "The Block Bot" was widely used a tool to silence dissent from non-abusers who were asking questions, or whom the operator simply didn't like.)
And that's exactly what you'll find being talked about on Bluesky if you do a search for "Northsky moderation", and I'm not going to directly link to any one account speaking about anything, due to not wanting to direct any anger or harassment their way.
It's just that ... I'm seeing pointed posts about transmedicalism in their leadership, and abuse of their moderation labeler. Abuse? Coming from their moderation team and labeler? Before the thing has even launched?
Why the community at-large keeps doing the same things, over and over again, I'll never know. Maybe it's because nobody writes about these things outside of disjointed short-form social media posts, and then when five years go by, it happens again, and people go, "If only we could have seen this coming."
It's happened on Mastodon and the Fediverse more times than I can count, and now what's left is a large contigency of misogynist trans men roving the network looking for trans women they can silence, just like they currently do and are on Tumblr (search the term 'trans man' on Tumblr and have a look at all the GamerGate era misogynist vitriol being regurgitated and cloaked in trans community politics, or the pizza.enby.city admin who regularly posts warnings to do with Nazis, and occassionally throws in trans women with calls for fediverse-wide silencing based on, you guessed it, transmisogynistic ideals).
It begins to look as though every community-lead experiment and project eventually leads to collapse, and a replacement by and for people who are even worse, and you start to think, "Maybe relying on other people to curate spaces that are safe for me, is a bad idea, and I should make my own spaces independent of strangers who will never have my best interests in mind."
But perhaps that's the cynic in my speaking, or the me who has already seen the waterfall of bad news about Northsky's moderation policies through simple search terms, and knowing that, apparently, even being critical of them will get you labeled.
And I have to say, I am tired of people putting themselves into positiions of social power online, and then destroying communities. It's the number one reason I run my own blocklists wherein I'll put anyone on them, even if they so much as give me a little bit of a bad vibe: Because bad and disingenous people are rampant, and protecting your peace, yourself, is the most important thing you can do if you want to stay sane on the internet.
It's just a real big shame that, apparently, this is the same direction Northsky is taking. And it's wild, ridiculous, and sorta crazy, that it's moving in this direction, before they've even launched something that people who have been waiting on them for two years can even access!
Never-the-less: Run your own PDS, launch a Wafrn, even. Pay 5 dollars a month for a Contabo server, and just build your own spaces. Like I've been saying. For years. And if you do that, it'll take you inside of an hour to get it all running, and you too will be asking, "Why does every development task that Northsky announces take them months to implement when they could've already had something up and running for the trans community to use in as little as a day? Something that isn't even more closed-off and exclusive than Bluesky's original 'invite-only' mode of operation?"
I don't know. I'm just the bad one who gets angry and is totally wrong all the time, if the people who only know how to communicate via harassment would have you believe them.
-----
Originally published at NovaLandia: https://mkultra.monster/fediverse/2026/08/04/whats-a-northsky-anyway/
Never-the-less, and despite running my own PDS either standalone, or via a Wafrn instance for the past year or so, I was a little optimistic about Northsky. In fact, I've been on its wait-list for a year? Year and a half? Two years? It's hard to count now how long its been since they announced this thing.
And I've been baffled the whole time, because ... hosting a PDS is like a 10 minute setup process. Putting a labeler or two online is also pretty straight-forward and simple. Building a website that connects all of it together? Maybe more difficult, but definitely not something that should take two years. And an appview? I could almost understand this taking a really long time ... but I'm still pretty certain I could make an appview myself that has at least basic functions in way less than two whole years.
No matter what kinds of different excuses I read on why it's taking longer than GTA6, or why they need a wait list, or why they'd make some people wait two years without an invite, while others get in virtually immediately, is well beyond my comprehension. And the only conclusion I can draw is that someone is lying about how this is all working behind the scenes, despite their reasoning of "keeping out known abusers."
I would question what their metric for "abuser" even is. Are we talking Laurelai Bailey? Or, are we talking about people who've had disagreements and the aggressive types who shoot you into a dogpile for even a slight mismatch in opinion?
But you need that metric, because if you're like me and you've been around trans community politics and spaces for two decades, you know that communities like this are erected and then collapsed just as quickly, because random people time and time again, many of whom who are traumatized, hardly ever make good moderation decisions, or are even capable of running a community that doesn't turn into a War of the Sychophants.
See: The Contraption
(A lot of this goes back to my initial skepticism of allowing users to make and share blocklists, because, if you have any internet history at all, you know that Twitter's 2013 "The Block Bot" was widely used a tool to silence dissent from non-abusers who were asking questions, or whom the operator simply didn't like.)
And that's exactly what you'll find being talked about on Bluesky if you do a search for "Northsky moderation", and I'm not going to directly link to any one account speaking about anything, due to not wanting to direct any anger or harassment their way.
It's just that ... I'm seeing pointed posts about transmedicalism in their leadership, and abuse of their moderation labeler. Abuse? Coming from their moderation team and labeler? Before the thing has even launched?
Why the community at-large keeps doing the same things, over and over again, I'll never know. Maybe it's because nobody writes about these things outside of disjointed short-form social media posts, and then when five years go by, it happens again, and people go, "If only we could have seen this coming."
It's happened on Mastodon and the Fediverse more times than I can count, and now what's left is a large contigency of misogynist trans men roving the network looking for trans women they can silence, just like they currently do and are on Tumblr (search the term 'trans man' on Tumblr and have a look at all the GamerGate era misogynist vitriol being regurgitated and cloaked in trans community politics, or the pizza.enby.city admin who regularly posts warnings to do with Nazis, and occassionally throws in trans women with calls for fediverse-wide silencing based on, you guessed it, transmisogynistic ideals).
It begins to look as though every community-lead experiment and project eventually leads to collapse, and a replacement by and for people who are even worse, and you start to think, "Maybe relying on other people to curate spaces that are safe for me, is a bad idea, and I should make my own spaces independent of strangers who will never have my best interests in mind."
But perhaps that's the cynic in my speaking, or the me who has already seen the waterfall of bad news about Northsky's moderation policies through simple search terms, and knowing that, apparently, even being critical of them will get you labeled.
And I have to say, I am tired of people putting themselves into positiions of social power online, and then destroying communities. It's the number one reason I run my own blocklists wherein I'll put anyone on them, even if they so much as give me a little bit of a bad vibe: Because bad and disingenous people are rampant, and protecting your peace, yourself, is the most important thing you can do if you want to stay sane on the internet.
It's just a real big shame that, apparently, this is the same direction Northsky is taking. And it's wild, ridiculous, and sorta crazy, that it's moving in this direction, before they've even launched something that people who have been waiting on them for two years can even access!
Never-the-less: Run your own PDS, launch a Wafrn, even. Pay 5 dollars a month for a Contabo server, and just build your own spaces. Like I've been saying. For years. And if you do that, it'll take you inside of an hour to get it all running, and you too will be asking, "Why does every development task that Northsky announces take them months to implement when they could've already had something up and running for the trans community to use in as little as a day? Something that isn't even more closed-off and exclusive than Bluesky's original 'invite-only' mode of operation?"
I don't know. I'm just the bad one who gets angry and is totally wrong all the time, if the people who only know how to communicate via harassment would have you believe them.
-----
Originally published at NovaLandia: https://mkultra.monster/fediverse/2026/08/04/whats-a-northsky-anyway/