Babesky is a new platform for NSFW accounts on the ATmosphere designed to give these accounts the proper tools to manage their social media presence and to connect them to audiences in a safer, more verifiable way. Sex workers deserve to have a platform on which they own their sensitive content and for a while I’ve believed that this is one of the more important use cases for the Social Web out there.

Online there’s an epidemic of non-consensual porn that’s always existed. People just don’t want to talk about it because we exist in a culture that has shamed these individuals for simply existing. We as a population don’t like to talk about sex, when in reality it is what drives so much of the world in which we live. At it’s core, it’s a power dynamic issue—NSFW creators on the internet have to hand over incredibly sensitive and intimate material to some centralized platform and hope that they care enough about that content to protect it…which doesn’t always happen.

Bluesky’s built an amazing platform on ATProtocol with an important feature that I imagine hits home for this kind of creator is the Personal Data Server, or PDS. Every user on Bluesky and all of the other networks powered by ATProtocol has their own PDS. For most people that PDS is hosted by Bluesky, meaning their data lives on Bluesky’s servers, but—very importantly—that doesn’t have to be the case. Users are free to migrate their PDS to any platform they choose, including their own, giving them total ownership of their data.

With ATProtocol and PDSs, NSFW creators finally have access to a platform that both has reach, and that they have ownership of. Babesky exists as a layer on top of this network to ensure that creators and fans are able to safely consume this content and know that it’s owned entirely by the creators. I’ve always found this intersection to be super interesting and I’m glad that there’s a platform out there built by NSFW creators for NSFW creators, giving them the tools to do their jobs safely and confidently. It takes an incredible amount of confidence to be able to publish intimate content in the manner that they do and I’m proud to be building alongside this project. The web is for everyone, and we should celebrate every win. And this is a big one!

Disclosure that I’m openly autistic, asexual, and non-binary, but I also present very masc, and so I can either be considered an outsider or the perfect kind of person to have this discussion, you’re entitled to feel either way about that, but I think this platform is important and I wanted to show my support of it in any way I could. Feel free to reach out if you think there are things I could frame/say better and I’ll make edits!