After having been in touch online for many years, it felt like a special occasion to be able to finally meet my namesake Jonathan W. Gray IRL in London.

Jonathan W. Gray is another of the research Jonathans (there are many of us), based at City University of New York (CUNY) and author of Civil Rights in the White Literary Imagination: Innocence by Association.

He was in London to give a talk on “Rebuilding a Commons: From Black Twitter to Bluesky’s Blackademics” (abstract copied below) at the Digital Humanities Today: Critical Inquiry with and about the Digital conference.

We’re exploring ways we might collaborate around our overlapping concerns and commitments at the intersections between culture and technology. 🌌✨

Jonathan Gray - Rebuilding a Commons: From Black Twitter to Bluesky’s Blackademics

This paper tracks the recent evolution of the Black digital commons. After Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter in March of 2023, millions of users — including the influential international online Black community known as Black Twitter — sought a new space where they might reform. While some landed at Spill and others at Mastodon, a critical mass of Black Twitter ended up at Bluesky after they opened to the public in 2024, thanks in part to the efforts of Rudy Fraser. Working with the permission of the founders while Bluesky was still an invite only network, Fraser set up a community moderated vertical known as Blacksky. Due to this preparation, Black users fleeing Twitter during Musk’s election year antics quickly found a home for themselves at Bluesky. During this 2024 influx I asked Fraser to allow me to set up a space within Blacksky for Black Academics, hoping to reproduce the kinds of transformative conversations that once distinguished one corner of Black Twitter. Both Blacksky and the #Blackademics feed have successfully recreated an online digital commons for Anglophone social media users of African descent, though its influence has yet to approach the heights of Black Twitter. This paper will detail the transformative political and social power of Black Twitter, tracing its influence through the Arab Spring to Black Live Matter to #BringBackOurGirls to #FeesMustFall to the George Floyd protests before tracing the mostly futile attempts to recapture that potential in other online spaces. Blacksky has recreated the sense of promise and freedom that distinguished Black Twitter without reproducing the outsized political impact of that collective. But as a former member of Black Twitter that has worked to create a new home at Bluesky, I see a number of generative ways forward.