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Change happens. Get used to it. For those of us for whom the status quo is far from ideal, there's some comfort in that. I do not own rose-tinted spectacles through which to view the past. In moments of revolutionary ire, when there are calls for a return to the 'good old days' I ask, good for who, exactly?
Not all change is progress. Resistance can be easier when there is a defined enemy, or when we pinpoint egregious injustice. What we recognise less often, is that many changes involve complex trade-offs. They are rarely linear, often cumulative, a series of tiny meandering steps, rather than huge strides towards disaster. Worse, we are complicit in the small changes, having co-signed many of the steps along the way. Too often it's only with hindsight that we realise what's happened. And what we have lost.
Few today would bemoan the awful, annoying and at times dangerous experience of getting home after the club in the 00's. Readers of a certain vintage will remember the drivers lining up outside of a club plying for trade. You would name your destination, a driver would offer a price, other drivers would verify or offer cheaper, you'd pick one and hope they could drive, and the vehicle was roadworthy. There will be some aghast at such risky behaviour — organising deals in real time, in the street at 4am after a few drinks, dynamic pricing in operation without an app in sight, cash-in-hand, skirting the boundaries of legality.
Not many would be up for driving to Zone 4, so it was not long before I was regularly being driven home by people I recognised. After a while they would look out for me and I them. Both driver and passenger reassured by experience. There were a couple of drivers with whom I built up a rapport. I even started to look forward to our conversations on the drive from central London back home. And then came Uber. The answer to all our prayers, right? It was cheap and convenient, and safe … then it operated a virtual monopoly, and we found ourselves paying more and drivers earning less. In the interim, all of those local minicab offices, and the Saturday night entrepreneurs, making ends meet in that informal economy, were consigned to history.
Things changed but in the calculations of a trade-off, I had not factored in my connection with the drivers; I miss our conversations. There are now fewer moments of interaction with older, working-class Black men in my life. The taxi app streamlined my journey home, and de-personalised the service, deeming that connection unimportant.
No time for the incidental meeting. We allow tech to offer a response to our expressed needs, to make the support turn into a dependency, and convince us that convenience and efficiency are paramount, and the trade-offs minimal. Dating apps that diminished the bars and clubs, also diminished the chances of us finding that bar, 'where everyone knows your name'. Today's epidemic of loneliness and increasing levels of disconnection is related to the loss of space to connect with each other. In an attention economy, now that we are more efficient, we have more time to make money for billionaires, scrolling through an endless sea of headless torsos, having lost the skill of the chirps. We see you, on the dancefloor with Grindr open messaging that guy 0m away.
Last week, we sat down to do something that should be simple. We wanted to know who our community is. Not in the abstract — we know who we are. But practically: who are we reaching, who engages with our work, who is missing out? Who are the organisations and individuals that make up the network around BLKOUT? We wanted to map these relationships so we could build better connections, share resources more effectively, and understand the ecosystem we're part of.
We started with the platforms where we've spent a decade building community.
X said no
We tried to download our followers from X (formerly Twitter). The platform where @BlkOutUK has been present for over ten years. We stayed when it was taken over and undermined by the inadvertently Nazi-salute making billionaire, Musk. The basic question — "who follows us?" — now costs $200 per month through their API. Every free tool and browser extension has been locked out or paywalled. Three different technical approaches returned zero data.
Our own followers. A decade of community building. Behind a paywall.
Instagram said no
Meta was marginally better. We managed to extract 43 of our followers through an automated tool before it was blocked. Forty-three. Instagram will tell us that 38% of our followers are in London and that most are aged 25-34. It will happily let us pay to advertise to "people like our followers." But it will not tell us who those people actually are.
Our community, described to us in percentages. Individual relationships — the actual humans — are Meta's product, not ours.
YouTube said no
YouTube won't even tell channel owners who subscribes to them. This is by design. The people who chose to follow our work are invisible to us by platform policy.
Then we looked at what we actually own
While every social platform told us our community relationships were not ours to see, we had something they couldn't lock away: twelve years of email correspondence. Actual conversations. Consented relationships. Real context — who we've worked with, who's reached out, who we've supported, who's supported us.
From our own email, we mapped 802 contacts in a single afternoon. Not followers — relationships. People with names, organisations, histories of collaboration. We could see the partnerships, the funders, the community members, the allies. We could see who reads our newsletter, who replies to our campaigns, who we've built things with.
The richest map of our community came from the one place no platform controls: our own infrastructure.
This isn't just a BLKOUT problem
Every community organisation in the UK is building on the same rented ground. Every QTIPOC group that's grown a following on Instagram. Every Black-led charity that uses X to reach its community. Every LGBTQ+ organisation that relies on Facebook Events to promote its work.
These platforms are happy to host your community — as long as they own the data, control the reach, and charge you to access relationships you built.
When Twitter became X, communities lost control of their spaces overnight. When Instagram changes its algorithm, event attendance drops. When Facebook decides your page isn't "engaging enough," your community stops seeing your posts. You built it. They control it.
This is not a neutral arrangement. For communities that are already marginalised — whose spaces are already contested, whose visibility is already conditional — platform dependency is a structural vulnerability.
We're not alone in this
A growing movement is asking the same questions. Data, Tech & Black Communities (DTBC) — a UK network I connected with recently — is building collective understanding of how data and technology shape Black communities' lives. In the US, Data for Black Lives has built a 20,000-strong network treating data infrastructure as a civil rights issue. In Detroit, the Community Technology Project trains residents to build and own their own internet infrastructure — community-governed networks in predominantly Black neighbourhoods. In Kampala, Pollicy is developing Afro-feminist data governance frameworks that explicitly include queer communities — in a country where who controls that data can be a matter of safety. And at Edinburgh, researcher Kevin Guyan is asking a critical question for our communities: being counted isn't inherently good for queer people — it depends entirely on who holds the data. And in the US, Eli Pariser and the New Public team are calling for a revolution that disrupts the attention economy — arguing that the platforms we depend on need democratic accountability, not just better algorithms.
These aren't fringe projects. They represent a fundamental rethinking of who technology serves and who it extracts from. The question isn't whether community-owned alternatives are possible — they exist. The question is whether we build them together or continue renting space from landlords whose interests diverge further from ours every year.
What community ownership looks like
Over the past year, BLKOUT has been building an alternative. Not because we have the resources of a tech company, but because we believe community infrastructure should be community-owned.
Our events calendar at events.blkoutuk.cloud aggregates Black queer events from across the UK — without an algorithm deciding who sees what. Our newsroom surfaces stories our community votes on. Our AI assistant, IVOR, is built to serve the community, not to extract from it. Our CRM — the system that now holds those 802 relationships — runs on infrastructure we control, using data people consented to share with us.
None of this required venture capital. It required intention, cooperation, and the conviction that our relationships are ours.
The ask
This isn't a pitch. It's an invitation.
If you work in or with QTIPOC communities, Black-led organisations, LGBTQ+ services, or any part of civil society that depends on social platforms to reach the people it serves — you have the same vulnerability we discovered. Your community relationships live on infrastructure you don't control, and the landlord's terms are getting worse.
We're not suggesting everyone needs to build their own platform. But we are suggesting that the sector needs to have this conversation — about data sovereignty, about community-owned alternatives, about what happens when the platforms we depend on decide our communities aren't profitable enough to serve.
Three things you can do:
1. Share this article with a colleague or partner organisation. The conversation starts with awareness.
2. List your events on events.blkoutuk.cloud. It's free, it's community-owned, and it means your events reach Black queer audiences through infrastructure that centres their needs. Submit an event
3. Talk to us. If you're interested in how community-owned digital infrastructure works in practice — what it costs, what it takes, what we've learned — we're open to sharing. Reach out at rob@blkoutuk.com.
The platforms told us our community wasn't ours to know. We proved them wrong in an afternoon. Imagine what we could build together.
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*"Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within."* — Ruha Benjamin, *Race After Technology*
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*Rob Berkeley is Co-Director of BLKOUT, a community-owned cooperative platform for Black queer men in the UK.*
*BLKOUT is a Community Benefit Society registered with the FCA. Our digital infrastructure is built on open-source technology, hosted on servers we control, with data stored in databases we own.*