Bluesky CEO Jay Graber On Building A Better Social Ecosystem

Yahoo

21-05-2025

Wired Senior Writer Katie Knibbs interviews Bluesky CEO Jay Graber about the burgeoning social platform and its future. Director: Justin Wolfson Director of Photography: Mark Simon Editor: Richard Trammell; Louis Lalire Host: Kate Knibbs Guest: Jay Graber Line Producer: Jamie Rasmussen Associate Producer: Brandon White Production Manager: Peter Brunette Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark Camera Operator: Howard Shack Sound Mixer: Jim Sander Production Assistant: Dexter Shack Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin Post Production Coordinator: Stella Shortino Supervising Editor: Erica DeLeo Assistant Editor: Fynn Lithgow
- Bluesky's for everyone.
When we think that over time the broader public conversation needs to be on an open protocol, which is what we're built on.
- I'm Wired senior writer Kate Nibs.
Today I sat down with Bluesky, CEO Jay Graber.
We discuss how influencers are joining the platform, Bluesky's relationship with news media and whether she would welcome President Trump to Bluesky.
This is "The Big Interview."
[upbeat music] Jay, thank you so much for joining me today.
- Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
- So last time we talked in December, I believe Bluesky had just surpassed 24, 25 million users.
Where are you today?
- 34.6 million users.
- What milestones are you hoping to hit by the end of 2025?
- There's a lot of new features that we're launching and we're excited to expand a lot.
I think getting in some of the things we've been talking about for a long time.
Like communities.
- Or what does that look like?
- Yeah, communities is a way that people are already using feeds.
A lot of people don't realize that Bluesky is a bit like Reddit and Twitter at the same time because you can build feeds that are essentially communities like the science feed is run by scientists, moderated by scientists and has its own rules.
And so this is something that you can do, but you have to go outside the app to do it right now.
And so we've talked to people who are running these feeds and they would like better tooling for making these into communities in the app.
And so that's the big idea, which is essentially just making it easier to create and run a custom feed, which is an interface you can install into the app that's like your own timeline and run that like a community of your own.
- When you say you have to go outside of the app, what does that mean?
- There's third party services that have built feed builders services like Sky Feeds or Grays.
They let you create feeds without knowing how to code and you can say, I want this list of people to contribute to my feed.
You can post into it with this hashtag or this emoji and then you run it essentially like it's a service that you're providing other people, other people can install it, subscribe to it, pin it to the homepage of their app.
- Any timeline for when this is coming?
- Well, you asked about the end of the year, so I think that's the, the most concrete timeline we can give at the moment.
- And I know that you recently rolled out video as a feature, which we're very excited about.
I think a lot of people already conceptualize Bluesky as sort of a X competitor, but now are you gunning for TikTok too?
- We are, as you know, built on an open protocol and so other apps are starting to fill in these open spaces.
There is an app called Skylight that has just gotten 150,000 users and this is more of a straight TikTok alternative.
It lets you post short form videos, you know, edit them in app, create them.
There's these other apps springing up now on the same protocol like Skylight, like flashes for photos that do different things.
And the great thing about this being an open protocol means that you can move from Bluesky over to Skylight Social and keep your followers.
So they go with you across these applications.
- So when you say they go with me, if I'm going to port my followers over or even just join these new apps, how would I do that?
Like do I actually go into the app store and download something new or how does it work?
- Yeah, you download Skylight from the app store and then you log in with your Bluesky username if you wanna link them together.
If you don't want to link them, you can create a new account, but if you link them, you have the same number of followers and the photos or videos that you post to Skylight will also show up in Bluesky or vice versa.
And like over time the apps can decide is everything going to, you know, be shared across or is there gonna be some stuff that's separate?
But right now it's sort of just a shared data layer where you can have people seeing your videos on Bluesky, even if they're posted on Skylight.
- And so does the Bluesky team have anything to do with the development of Skylight or is it totally separate?
- It's totally separate.
- Do you know know who developed it at all?
Like what are your relationships like with the people who are developing different apps on the protocol?
- There was recently a conference called the Atmosphere Conference.
We call the atmosphere the broader ecosystem of applications around the AT protocol, which is the layer Bluesky is built on.
And we met a lot of folks there who are building even apps we didn't know were being built.
So there's private messengers being built, new forms of moderation tools.
There's a lot of ones out there that are innovating on new forms of social built on this shared layer because they can immediately tap into the Bluesky user base and just add features on rather than having to start from zero.
So that's the benefit to developers of building in an open ecosystem.
You don't have to start from zero each time you start over and now you have 34.6 million users to tap into.
- So I know there's Bluesky the app and then it's built on this app protocol and that's how all of these people are developing these new cool video and photo apps and everything.
So the teams are separate.
As the CEO of Bluesky, like if one of the video apps were to go mega viral and surpass Bluesky wildly, et cetera, would that help you or would it just sort of be a wash for you?
- It would help us because these are shared backends if you recall.
So that means that all those videos would be being able to be viewed on Bluesky too.
It'd probably change the way that people could interact over on Bluesky because all this content would be coming in from another application, just like all the content created on Bluesky can be borrowed over there.
We can borrow from the other apps as well.
And then it means that, you know, if they're building on our services over time, one of the pathways to monetization we've mentioned is developer services.
So building out infrastructure for new apps to get started.
Sort of like a fire base for social, if you will, where you get new apps off the ground and then you know, provide infrastructure to them.
- So I've noticed that there has been sort of an influx of big creators onto Bluesky, but right now there's no direct way for creators to monetize their work on Bluesky in the way that there is on say YouTube.
Are you working on ways to change that?
- Yeah, one things that we've seen is that we're not giving creators money but we're giving them really great traffic and that can convert to money because if you are a YouTube creator or you have a Patreon and you're posting your Patreon link, one big thing is we don't down rank links and so you're getting higher link traffic on Bluesky, even with a smaller follower count.
This is true of small creators and even news organizations have been reporting this difference in engagement and click-through numbers.
We've heard from large news organizations that Bluesky is giving better click-throughs and subscription rates and so this converts to money once you get people onto your site.
So I think this is one of the big benefits we're leaning into right now is just giving people that direct traffic, that direct relationship with their audience and giving them the ability to monetize however they want.
Down the road we might introduce other mechanisms, but right now it's just about being the best platform to serve creators needs in terms of giving them attention, giving them engagement and giving them the ability to move with their followers right?
So as I mentioned before, if you're a video creator and you do some content on Bluesky to build up a following and then you download Skylight and you start posting different kinds of content over there, you can have that follow graph just go with you and start building on it.
So it's cumulative rather than also as a creator starting from scratch each app you move to.
- I love that as someone who's jumped from app to app in the past, that sounds very helpful.
And when you were talking about traffic for traditional news organizations, I know that traditionally the news media and social media have had sort of an antagonistic relationship.
Like it's been obviously a huge driver of traffic for news outlets, but then they're sort of beholden to people like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk and what they wanna do to the news.
Do you have a broader vision for how you want Bluesky to interact with like the information ecosystem or the news media?
- Yeah, we want to create a more direct relationship again and be the place where we make those relationships happen.
And so rather than being the single feed that all user attention passes through where small algorithm changes can affect how much traffic a news organization is getting, we want to give direct traffic to news orgs and even let them do things like build their own feeds or link their domain directly as their username, clicking that just clicks you directly through to your site.
You can also right now create verified news feeds.
Some people have been building these in the community and so users can just scroll through all the news articles being posted.
This means that you're getting direct traffic because you're not depending on the algorithm, which might be at any given moment showing more or less news to a given user.
If the users are interested they can just subscribe to a newsfeed and see all the articles being published on Bluesky in one place.
- So recently there's been a pretty noticeable influx of bigger name celebrities on the app, including some of the biggest names in democratic politics like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton just joined for instance.
Are you doing anything to court the celebrities or really famous influencers?
- We're doing some community outreach.
We've had a very community driven growth strategy and so we're seeing a lot of growth in sectors with maybe not as big celebrities, but a lot of traction in areas like you know, sports media.
For example, Mina Kimes, a sports reporter came on and she created a starter pack which got a lot of follows very quickly because when you create starter packs, which are essentially lists of accounts that bundle together everyone in a given field, when new people come on through that link, they're following all of them at once.
So that's been a way that communities have been onboarding outside of, you know, politics or like even large celebrities, we have game devs, we have sports, we have science.
Lots of these different interests are kind of starting with people building custom starter packs and then bringing on folks directly into their community.
- Some of these bigger name people who are joining, you know, they do tend to be liberal politicians when they're politicians.
I'm wondering, would you welcome President Trump if he was debating joining Bluesky?
- Yeah, Bluesky's for everyone, you know, and we think that over time the broader public conversation needs to be on an open protocol, which is what we're built on because that lets people choose their own moderation preferences.
It lets people choose their own feed preferences and things can evolve without it being a binary choice, which is like everyone has to adhere to this set of moderation rules or that one you can have customization both within the app and outside of it.
Right now, you know, it's people who feel that there's more direct benefits to being on here if you are a creator or somebody who wants to have a direct relationship with your audience.
But over time the benefit of this protocol based approach I think will extend to all sorts of social media users.
- So right now we're in this moment where free speech is under threat and free speech on the internet is under threat.
I'm wondering how you envision Bluesky's relationship to speech, including political speech and what your obligations are to your users and I guess to the internet at large.
- I think building on an open protocol like we've done is the most enduring foundation for speech because what we're doing is creating a digital commons of user data where you really get to control your own identity and your data.
And then we're building, you know, infrastructure that I hope stays around for a really long time because Bluesky, the app is just one site where speech can happen and all these other apps are showing that you can have an ecosystem of a lot of different applications.
This is like the web itself.
Early on we had AOL and accessing the internet happen through AOL and if the AOL web portal wasn't showing you something, it would be a lot harder to find and then more unopinionated browsers came along and these just linked you out to the broader internet and now anyone can put up a blog and host their own views online.
And then there's larger websites if you want to, you know, be on Substack or Medium, but you can either self-host or choose one of these, this is the kind of ecosystem we're building, anyone can self-host.
And then the question of, you know, freedom of speech not reach is made very tangible because then the sites like the sort of mediums of the world that host a lot of blogs get to choose their moderation rules, but if individuals are unhappy with that, they can start a new site or host their own blog.
- For people who might not be familiar with the phrase freedom of speech, not freedom of reach.
Could you explain it?
- Yeah, this was a principle that old Twitter talked about early on and when we were spinning out of Twitter, I never worked for Twitter, but we opened up this new design space around Bluesky, which was how do we embed that into a protocol layer?
So the freedom of speech is embedded in the protocol.
Anyone can do the equivalent of standing up a new blog and then the sites like Bluesky, which are the applications, get to decide, you know, how are we going to prioritize reach, you know, we do have a default algorithm but you can choose any other algorithm you want.
And so we don't necessarily show everything in the algorithm or the default service, but if you want to find something elsewhere, you can go elsewhere in the ecosystem to find it.
That means that you have the pathways that the apps are deciding what is going to be most accessible and then if you want to change the rules you can build another thing and that's guarantee of freedom of speech is being always able to build your own thing or find your own space that serves you the most.
- So as you're scaling up, I know that you hired additional moderators to tackle some of the necessary moderation challenges like CSAM.
How challenging is it as as you're scaling up to sort of balance offering this level of customization with just the sort of basic things you need to do as a social network for everyone?
Like you know, keep pornography off for example?
- Yeah, I mean we're running a foundational moderation service, so we get to choose the rules within the Bluesky app and like I said, you can fork off do your own thing, but within the parameters of Bluesky we're setting what the rules are and so we employ moderation team to do this.
We face some of the same challenges as centralized social apps because to run a centralized moderation team you're doing a lot of the same kinds of work.
And so I would say it's, it's very similar at the base layer and then we have this extra options that we've layered on top for users to choose their own spaces.
And in some cases that means that users are able to resolve things more locally.
So for example, within the feeds that run a bit like communities, you can moderate things, resolve things locally, but still it's a broader Bluesky application has its own set of rules.
- How many countries are you operating in right now or do you have users everywhere?
- We have a lot of users in different countries.
Some of the biggest are the US of course, Japan, Brazil, and various countries in the EU.
- Are there unique challenges in certain locations and if so, what are they?
- Each place has their own regulatory guidelines and you know, we try to be in compliance and that's part of being a global company is just learning to operate in different places.
I think over the long run there will be applications just like Skylight is targeted towards video, maybe there's applications targeted towards different markets.
Early on we saw several Japanese users build Japan focused applications before we had gotten internationalization into the app.
So you know, different languages depending on where you're based, people built their own apps to do that.
So that's an example of how you can customize things to your own local market.
- Speaking of local markets, we're in Seattle, which is where you are based, but is Bluesky currently remote forward workspace?
How are you guys set up?
- We're a fully remote team and part of the reason for this is we wanted to hire people who care deeply about the mission and are really aligned in what we're doing.
Have some of the experience in social, have experience in open protocols and that combination is rare and hard to find.
So if we tried to hire all in one city, we wouldn't be getting the best people out there.
But as it is, we've hired from several different countries all over the United States because there's people all over that are interested in the vision of what we're building.
- And what brought you to Seattle originally?
- I moved here during the pandemic.
I was previously in San Francisco and it's a really nice city.
I mean the nature, the water, the mountains, it's a place where nature is really accessible and I really like that.
- And I understand that you have a background in crypto.
I know that the largest investor in Bluesky is a venture capital firm that sort of specializes in crypto investing.
Does Bluesky have more in common with a crypto startup than one might like originally suspect?
- Well the term Web3 got very associated with cryptocurrency, so it's not a good word to use for what we're doing anymore because there isn't a blockchain or a cryptocurrency involved.
But if you wanna think about Web3 as evolving the social Web2 version forward, that kind of is what we're doing.
We're evolving forward social media that was based in centralized companies into something that is open and distributed and that was some of the goals underlying the Web3 movement that had a lot of blockchains involved.
We just didn't build on that technical foundation of a blockchain because we didn't need it.
You can achieve a lot of the same things using open web principles and more Web 1.0 kinds of technology, which is, for example, our identity system let's you use a domain name as your username so you can be like wired.com as your username.
That's just a web 1.0 technology brought into a social media sphere.
And so I think our investors really saw that vision and they're also excited about building out the broader dev ecosystem, which is something we really wanted alignment on.
We want investors who care about seeing this entire world of social media come to life, not just one application Bluesky succeeding.
- Yeah.
What would building out the dev ecosystem look like?
- It's starting to happen.
So the Atmosphere Conference, which I mentioned was started and run by the community.
We heard about it partway through and sponsored it, but they found other sponsors as well.
And it's something that's taking off sort of as a movement of people to reclaim social and Bluesky and the Open Protocol is a great place to do a lot of this building.
People are getting in and starting to build different applications, starting to propose new ways the protocol could be evolved.
Private data for example, is not something that we have in Bluesky at the moment as part of the protocol, but people are proposing new ways to do private data for their applications that they're building.
And so moving forward the app protocol, I don't think all the development will just be within the Bluesky company.
It'll be other people building their own applications and then modifying the protocol and suggesting changes that meet the needs of what they're trying to do.
- And when you say the Bluesky company, like would you be the CEO of all of this or just the platform?
- I am just the CEO of Bluesky Social.
So we have built out the app protocol and we maintain the Bluesky application.
So we'll always maintain the Bluesky app, but the app protocol is going to take on a life of its own.
Pieces of it are going to be standardized, pieces of it are going to be stewarded by the community and it's going to evolve in different directions as the new people who are getting involved shape it.
- Right now you do have some investor money.
Is your stance on advertising still the same?
Where are you with subscriptions?
Basically this is me asking you how are you planning to make money?
- Yeah, subscriptions are actually coming soon as well.
So that got delayed for a few months last year doing our growth spurt, but we're re-approaching how we're gonna do them and I think the next steps down the road are also to look into what kind of marketplaces can we build that span some of these different applications.
There's other apps in the ecosystem that are experimenting with say, you know, placing sponsored posts in feeds and things like that.
I've mentioned before, I think ads eventually in some form work their way into an attention economy, but we're not gonna do ads the way traditional social apps did because we don't have a single feed and the traditional ad model is usually getting everyone to spend as much time engaged on a single feed as possible and then putting ads in there.
Since we have lots of different feeds.
Even if we did that, you could switch away and use a different feed because this one has too many ads.
And so it kind of constrains the open model of what we've done, constraints what we can do.
We'll just let people experiment and see what comes out of it.
- Some people watching this video might not be super familiar with Bluesky.
What do you want people to know about this platform?
- I'd want them to know this is a choose your own adventure game so you can get in there and customize the experience as much as you want.
And if you're not finding what you want within the Bluesky app, there might be another app out there that is still part of the Bluesky at protocol ecosystem that will give you what you want.
Like if it's you know, videos or images or maybe a different kind of feed experience, like let's say the Discover Feed isn't giving you what you want, you can install a different one and find the stuff you want and if you can't find it, you can build it.
And so the options are really endless.
I think it takes some time to get in there and really set things up the way that you like it, but then once you do, it's a great place to be because you don't get this level of control anywhere else.
- I mean you've kind of sold me on becoming an app developer for this protocol.
I might be making a career pivot soon, so thank you.
- Yeah, I think there's lots of technical folks who watch, you know, Wired interviews as well and I would just love for them to know that this is an open field to build on.
This is like early social era where you can build anything on fully open APIs.
- Well thank you again for joining us.
- Thank you.
[cameras snapping] [upbeat music]