Latest news with #JayGraber
Fast Company
a day ago
- Business
- Fast Company
Bluesky is most definitely alive and kicking
Last weekend, an ugly rumor of a tragic death spread began rocketing around Bluesky. What made it odd was the identity of the dearly departed: Bluesky itself. It's not entirely clear what prompted this discussion, which ultimately seemed to be dominated by Bluesky fans rejecting the possibility that the social network had died (or at least jumped the shark). According to one theory, a story by Semafor's Max Tani ignited the debate by mentioning Democratic congressional staffers who'd given up on Bluesky 'after their bosses kept getting yelled at by Democratic users angry at their impotence.' That doesn't sound like evidence of death to me. Another contributing factor might have been slowing user growth after millions of disaffected Twitter users arrived en masse in the wake of the U.S. November presidential election results and Elon Musk's Trump boosterism. The service grew from 11 million users to 25 million between late October and mid-December, but has added only about 10 million more since then. Again, not a sign of rigor mortis or even a dreaded vibe shift. For a social network, being prematurely written off is a rite of passage. It's even a compliment of sorts—a sign that people are paying attention and care. Way back in 2014, for instance, when Twitter was still ascendant, I wrote about the fact that cranky users had started predicting its demise less than a year after it launched in 2006. So when I chatted with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber this week, I wasn't surprised that she didn't seem fazed by the debate on her platform and saw the parallels with early-days Twitter. 'Reports of our death are greatly exaggerated,' she told me. 'It's a similar thing, because with social sites, it's not straight up all the time. [Growth] comes in waves, and at each stage, there's a new era of communities being established and formed. We're still seeing a lot of community formation, and one of the most exciting things is how structurally different this is. It's not just another social site that has to be a singular winner takes all in an ecosystem with existing incumbents.' I spoke with Graber backstage at the Web Summit conference in Vancouver, shortly after she'd been interviewed by Wired's Katie Drummond during the event's Tuesday night opening session. (I should note that she's also appearing at a Fast Company event next week.) Her assertion that social networking's days of corporatized centralization are over seems manifestly true to me, and it's a phenomenon bigger than Bluesky itself. In November, I stopped posting to Twitter and began using a wonderful multi-network app called OpenVibe to post to three alternatives. Bluesky is one of them. So is Mastodon, an even more grass-roots operation that makes Bluesky, with its 25 employees, look like a tech giant. And the third—Meta's Threads—actually does hail from a tech giant. I've had rewarding experiences on all three, though Threads, which has around 10 times as many users as Bluesky, feels too much like a purposefully sterile planned community to me. I prefer havens for wandering conversations and playful weirdness, which Bluesky and Mastodon both provide at their best. All three show every sign of remaining relevant for the long haul, unlike some of the Twitter wannabes that didn't make it (RIP, T2 and Post) or turned out not to matter all that much (hello, Substack Notes). Like The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel, I'm surprised that so many reasonable people remain active on Twitter, which has come to resemble a dystopian carnival ride. (Exhibit A, for the moment: The bizarre recent incident in which Musk's Grok bot wouldn't shut up about supposed white genocide in South Africa.) But I wouldn't argue that Twitter is dying—just that it's a disfigured shell of its former self. I don't expect any social network to replace the Twitter of yore as the internet's uncontested go-to destination for real-time chatter about current events and pop culture. Bluesky, however, is still making progress in its quest to fill the hole left by Musk's dismantling act. A new Pew Research Center study confirms that the presidential election results led to a major influx of news influencers at Bluesky, though even more are still on Twitter. Moreover, Bluesky is beginning to build functionality to cultivate conversations around the day's events. Earlier this month, for example, the service began beta testing a feature that lets the NBA use its Bluesky profile picture as a portal that sends users to live content. The company says the WNBA account will also get the capability, which—if deployed more widely—would be pretty useful for anybody who offers live video, including individuals on YouTube and Twitch. In a roundabout way, this new Live Now feature reminds me of Twitter's pricey 2016 gambit to turn itself into a live-event platform by streaming NFL games. Except all Bluesky is doing is facilitating users leaving the service to consume video elsewhere, which is both infinitely cheaper than buying sporting rights and more in line with its philosophy of knocking down social media's walled gardens. 'We are a pass-through so that, as a content creator, you can get users onto your site more easily,' says Graber. If Bluesky is still in the process of becoming as conducive to community as Twitter once was, it's also avoided some of the problems that have long dogged the older service. The Pew study showed that its news-influencer presence skews to the left, a finding that won't startle anyone who's spent time there. Any broadening of its political spectrum could result in its tenor growing more fraught. Already, it can have a snappish quality, as reflected in the congressional drubbing reported by Semafor and software kingpin Adobe's hostile reception after it began posting in April. (Overly brand safe Bluesky is not.) What happens if Bluesky ever gets overrun with trolls, as Twitter was years before Musk took charge? I asked Graber about its approach to moderation, especially in a period when Meta seems quite proud of its Twitter-like decision to dramatically scale back attempts to keep the conversation on its platforms accurate and civil. 'We've always stayed lean, but we've always had human moderators, and we think that humans always need to be in the loop,' she told me. 'Because ultimately, you're dealing with humans. On the other hand, there are automated systems that are constantly attacking social networks and you have to have automated systems to keep up with that. So we use a combination.' The company also leverages the work of third parties who use open-source moderation tools to block spammers, she says. One other challenge that Bluesky has not yet fully confronted is monetizing itself. Onstage at Web Summit, Graber emphasized that it's working on subscription services, a healthier revenue source than stuffing feeds with ads, though potentially a tougher one to scale up to sustainability. The company announced a $15 million Series A funding round last October. Graber isn't the type to declare her intention to crush the competition. In a previous conversation I had with her, she said nice things about Mastodon. Even her digs at Meta are a principled stance against social media being dominated by a few monolithic companies. But neither is she satisfied to operate a social network that may never grow to the size of a Twitter or Threads. In both her onstage interview and our subsequent chat, she was at her most passionate when discussing the company's aspiration to decentralize social networking via its open AT Protocol. It powers Bluesky—and variants such as the Pinksky photo-sharing app, which she praised onstage—but could also provide the infrastructure for further-flung social experiences. Maybe even ones catering to folks who have zero interest in participating in the Bluesky community. 'The goal is to really get through that this is a choose your own adventure and Bluesky's just the beginning,' she says. 'The sky's the limit.' Whether she'll fulfill her grandest ambitions, I'm not sure. But I already like this era of social networking better than the one when a handful of winners really did take all.
CTV News
3 days ago
- Business
- CTV News
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on Vancouver, customization and the future of social media
On opening night of the much-anticipated Web Summit conference's first year in Vancouver, the convention centre's main event space was jam-packed with attendees eager to hear from a tech superstar. Jay Graber may not be a household name, but the CEO of the Bluesky social media platform is one of the most high-profile women in the tech world and has a bold new vision for the future of social networking that could revolutionize how we connect with other humans – and maybe even make it fun again. CTV News had a few moments to speak with Graber backstage after her centre stage discussion on 'The Next Era of Social Media' and quickly discovered the Seattle resident is not stranger to Vancouver. 'I actually love it,' she said. 'I find it so interesting how it's this other city on the other side of the Salish Sea and there's a lot of similarities to Seattle, but it's also very different.' The entrepreneur has become a heroic figure for some social media users weary of the deterioration of online discourse and enthusiastic about her platform, which has been hailed as a potential 'Twitter Killer.' What is Bluesky, exactly? Any time Graber speaks about her company, she inevitably has to describe how Bluesky is different from other microblogging platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Threads. The structure of the technology puts it in a position for other developers to design new interfaces or themes or areas of focus with the same user profile and followers. It's this flexibility and 'sky's the limit' ideology that Graber believes could usher in a whole new era of social media where users have more control over what they see and how by choosing algorithms built by different developers, for example. 'The long-term vision is that the atmosphere, the broader ecosystem of all these apps being built around Bluesky – some of them interacting with Bluesky, some of them being built more on top of it, and some of them being completely their own thing – can all start to flourish and kick off an era of innovation in social that we haven't seen in a long time,' she said. New users flock to the 'sky' It's a huge goal for an app that had been invite-only until last year, but new users signed up in droves after the U.S. election, and the platform continues to gain momentum. One of those new sign-ups was an account for Mark Carney, which popped up when he was still the Liberal leader. While his staff continue to use X, he is now the first Canadian prime minister to use Bluesky just as often, and Graber acknowledges that has helped add to the platform's legitimacy. In fact, her staff flagged the account for her early on as they sought to make sure it was, in fact, associated to the real Mark Carney. 'Now we have verifications and the delegated verification system, which means that we're able to start verifying more folks,' Graber said. 'I think it's becoming a better and better place for breaking news and a lot of this is why there's notable people joining.' So does Graber think Bluesky has the principles, flexibility, and foundation to fix or maybe rehabilitate jaded users' relationships with social media? 'We hope so, that's what we're trying to build,' she explained. 'Anyone who decides that, you know, Bluesky out of the box isn't completely what they want can go in and customize it under the hood.' Considering that's not easy for the layperson to do, Graber has an open invitation to fellow entrepreneurs and coders to come up with their own take on the social media experience. '(If) you want to zoom in on something that you like more, you can customize your corner of Bluesky,' she said. 'It can really be a 'choose your own adventure.''
CBC
4 days ago
- Business
- CBC
'Fantastic opportunity': 15,000 expected at massive tech conference in Vancouver
Social Sharing Thousands of entrepreneurs and investors are flocking to Vancouver to attend a much-anticipated tech conference over the next week. More than 15,000 attendees from 120 countries are expected to attend the first-ever Web Summit Vancouver, which has drawn headline speakers including Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky, Ivan Zhang, co-founder of AI company Cohere, and American philosopher and author Cornel West. Local officials say the summit is a "fantastic opportunity" for the entire province. "This is a really exciting week to welcome the world, to showcase the innovation, to showcase the technology, and, really, the talent that we have here," said City of North Vancouver Mayor Linda Buchanan, who is also chair of the Invest Vancouver Management Board. Conference panels will include discussions ranging from whether AI is "morally and technically inadequate," to the next era of social media, to investment strategies of the future. Business leaders across the Vancouver region are thrilled at the chance to woo new investors and international talent. Brett Henkel, co-founder and senior vice-president of Burnaby-based Svante Technologies, said the conference can help local companies draw international attention. "We want to get people to know that this is a great place to do business," he said. "It's a great place to manufacture — there's not enough manufacturing here in British Columbia. We want to draw more, especially clean tech manufacturing. It makes a lot of sense to do it here." Henkel said Web Summit will benefit smaller companies as well. "The better we can get people to know these companies here and draw investment, the better for all of these companies here." Vancouver's competitive advantage is its access to experienced tech companies, according to Henkel, as well as its access to the Asia-Pacific region. Gurpreet Kalsi, director at AI machine-learning company Fujitsu Intelligence, said a tech conference like Web Summit coming to Vancouver is "long due." The high number of international attendees proves the conference is a good idea, Kalsi said. "It showcases … how many people are actually looking to invest in B.C., and Vancouver specifically," he said. "We have, now, the right talent pool. We have a lot of start-ups here as well … I'm very excited about it." The conference runs from May 27 to May 30.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber On Building A Better Social Ecosystem
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 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]
WIRED
19-05-2025
- Business
- WIRED
Bluesky Is Plotting a Total Takeover of the Social Internet
May 19, 2025 6:00 AM All the lefties fled to Bluesky following Elon Musk's Twitter takeover. But CEO Jay Graber says the app is for everyone—and could revolutionize how people communicate online. Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky, in downtown Seattle. Photograph: Jovelle Tamayo as i waited to meet with Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky, on the 25th floor of an office building in downtown Seattle, I stared out at the city's waterfront and thought: God fucking damn it . Stretching in every direction was a wall of dense, gray, tragically boring fog. And here I was about to interview the head of a social platform named after good weather. On camera, no less. Then something miraculous happened. Moments before Graber showed up, the haze lifted. Elliott Bay glittered in the sun. I could see past Bainbridge Island's rolling hills all the way to a snow-capped peak, and the skies were, yup, completely and totally blue. Graber's tenure at Bluesky has had this felicitous quality, starting with her given name, Lantian, which—in a triumph for the nominative determinism crowd—means 'blue sky' in Mandarin. (That the name she's gone by for years, Jay, can also mean a winged creature that takes to the skies adds to the serendipity.) When Graber joined Bluesky in 2019, it was an experiment within Twitter. The idea was to spin off a social platform that would give users more control. That happened when Bluesky launched as an invite-only service in 2023, and by the time it opened up to the general public a year later, Twitter had become the right-wing echo chamber known as X. Bluesky swiftly became a refuge for a coalition of leftists, liberals, and never-Trumpers. Photograph: Jovelle Tamayo The 34-year-old chief executive cuts a different figure than most social media bosses. Earlier this year, after Mark Zuckerberg wore a shirt winking at his king-like status at Meta, Graber donned a near-identical top that instead called for a world without kings. The sartorial rebuttal was good press (and Bluesky ended up making major dough selling the shirt), but it also reflects her idea that this project ultimately cannot be controlled by a single leader. Indeed, Graber, a former software engineer, seems most energized when she's talking about the unique infrastructure for her kingless world. Undergirding Bluesky as well as several smaller apps is the Atmosphere, or AT Protocol, which is a rule book that servers use to communicate. The open source protocol allows sovereign digital spaces to integrate with one another as needed. Two apps with complementary ideas about moderation or ads can work in tandem—or not. It's up to them. Graber sees Atmosphere as nothing less than the democratized future of the social internet, and she emphasizes to me that developers are actively building new projects with it. In her dreams, these projects are as big, if not bigger, than Bluesky. Her ambitions might not be kingly, in other words, but they are lofty. For now, call Graber an insurgent go-getter—on whom the sun still shines. When we talked a few months ago, Bluesky had surpassed 25 million users. Where are you today? 34.6 million users. What's your day-to-day like right now? A lot of hiring. We're getting ready to make this a larger social experience for more people, both within the Bluesky app and outside it. How many people have you hired? In November, during our growth spurt, we were around 20. Now we're at 25, and we'll probably pass 30 soon. We're growing at a pace that's sustainable to us. What milestones are you hoping to hit by the end of 2025? Some of the features we've been talking about for a long time, like communities and verification, we're really excited about. Verification is the most fleshed-out. We're doing it in stages. [ Days after we spoke, Bluesky rolled out tools to help users authenticate their identity and discourage impersonators. ] Tell me about the communities feature. 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—the science feed is run by scientists, is moderated by scientists, and has its own rules. But right now you have to go outside the app to do it. Third-party services, like SkyFeed or Graze, let you create feeds. So you can create and monitor many feeds in one interface, but it's a separate app. Are you building this capability into Bluesky itself? We've talked to people who are running these feeds, and they would like better tooling for making these into communities within the Bluesky app. So that's the big idea: making it easier to create and run a custom feed. Any timeline for when that's coming? The end of the year. Let's back up. How did you end up starting a decentralized social platform? In college, I had this major—science, technology, and society—that was very interdisciplinary. I studied virtual currencies and thought that they were going to be disruptive, so I was interested in getting involved in that. I worked on Zcash, a cryptocurrency that combined decentralized technology with privacy technology. I like seeing a new technology emerging, and asking, What can you do with this ? After a few years, I realized you could build better social networks that weren't on a blockchain but use some of those components. I started researching and building decentralized social stuff. Then, when Jack Dorsey announced in 2019 that Twitter was working on a decentralized protocol, I was already considered an expert in the space. Photograph: Jovelle Tamayo I always thought Bluesky started as a skunkworks within Twitter. It was a skunkworks but with outside contributors. I was a contractor. I wanted independence, because old Twitter moved slowly. Jack Dorsey was our biggest champion, but then Elon Musk said that he was going to buy Twitter, and that threw off everything—no new projects were going to get shipped, especially not something as ambitious as Bluesky. That's when we started thinking that we should experiment with building our own app. You mentioned your crypto background. Bluesky's largest investor is a venture capital firm that specializes in crypto. Does Bluesky have more in common with a crypto startup than one might think? Well, the term Web3 got very associated with cryptocurrency, so it's not a good word to use for what we're doing. But if you think about Web3 as evolving the social Web 2.0, that kind of is what we're doing. We're evolving social media that was based in centralized companies into something that is open and distributed. That was a goal underlying the Web3 movement—we just didn't build on that technical foundation of a blockchain. You can achieve a lot of the same things using open web principles and more Web 1.0 kinds of technology. Our identity system lets you use a domain name as your username, so you can have in your username. That's just a web 1.0 technology brought into the social media sphere. I think our investors saw that vision, and they're excited about building out the broader developer ecosystem. We want investors who care about seeing this entire world of social media come to life, not just Bluesky. Bluesky users can now post videos. A lot of people already consider Bluesky an X competitor. Are you gunning for TikTok too? We're built on an open protocol, and other apps are starting to fill in these open spaces. An app called Skylight is more of a straight TikTok alternative. It lets you post short-form videos, and you can edit them in the app. Bluesky has videos, but it's more secondary. The great thing about an open protocol is that you can move from Bluesky over to Skylight and keep your followers. So they go with you across applications. How does that work? Say you download Skylight from the app store—you can log in with your Bluesky username, if you want. Then you have the same followers, and the photos or videos that you post to Skylight can also show up in Bluesky and vice versa. Did the Bluesky team have anything to do with the development of Skylight, or is it totally separate? Totally separate. What are your relationships like with the people developing other apps on the protocol? There was recently the Atmosphere Conference, and we met a lot of folks there building apps we didn't know about. There are private messengers, new moderation tools. The benefit to developers of an open ecosystem is that you don't have to start from zero each time. You have 34.6 million users to tap into. When you're talking about this new ecosystem of applications, is the idea that you're the CEO of all of this, or just Bluesky? I am just the CEO of Bluesky Social. We have built out the protocol, and we maintain the Bluesky app, but the 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 new people shape it. 'Nobody is fully grasping that this is potentially the last social identity you have to create.' If one of these apps were to blow up and surpass Bluesky, would it help or hurt your business? It would help us—because these are shared backends, if you recall. Let's say that the video app, Skylight, goes megaviral. How does that shared backend become relevant? That means you can view all those videos on Bluesky too. It'd probably change the way that people interact on Bluesky, because all this content would be coming in from another application. Also, one of the pathways to monetization we've mentioned is developer services. How do you plan to make money? Subscriptions are coming soon. The next steps are to look into what marketplaces can span these different applications. Other apps in the ecosystem are experimenting with sponsored posts and things like that. I think ads eventually, in some form, work their way in, but we're not going to do ads the way traditional social apps did. We'll let people experiment and see what comes out of it. There's been an influx of big creators onto Bluesky, but there's no direct way for them to monetize their work yet. Are you going to change that? We're giving them great traffic—and that can convert to money. One big thing is we don't downrank links, so if you are a YouTube creator or you have a Patreon and you post those links on Bluesky, you're getting higher link traffic, even with a smaller follower count. This is true of small creators and even news organizations. We've heard from large news organizations that Bluesky has better click-throughs and better subscription rates. [WIRED can vouch for this: The platform has become a top traffic driver and source of new subscribers. ] Democratic Party stars like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have also joined Bluesky. Are you doing anything to court celebrities and influencers? We're doing some community outreach. We're seeing a lot of growth in sectors with maybe not as big celebrities but a lot of traction, like sports media. The sports reporter Mina Kimes came on and created a starter pack, which got a lot of followers very quickly. We have game devs, we have sports, we have science. Would you welcome President Trump? Yeah—Bluesky's for everyone, and we think that over time, the broader public conversation needs to be on an open protocol. That lets people choose their own moderation preferences. We think that it's flexible enough to serve every use case and everyone. We're in this moment when free speech is under threat. How do you think about that? I think building on an open protocol is the most enduring foundation for speech. We're creating a digital commons of user data where you get to control your identity and your data. We're building infrastructure that I hope stays around for a long time. Bluesky, the app, is just one site where speech can happen. This is like the web itself. Early on, we had AOL, and accessing the internet happened through AOL. If the AOL web portal wasn't showing you something, it would be a lot harder to find. Then more browsers came along, and these linked you out to the broader internet. Now anyone can put up a blog and host their own views online. There's larger websites if you want, Substack or Medium, but you can also self-host. This is the kind of ecosystem we're building, where anyone can self-host. And then the question of 'freedom of speech, not reach' is made very tangible. The Mediums of the world get to choose their moderation rules, but if individuals are unhappy with that, they can start a new site or host their own blog. Photograph: Jovelle Tamayo What does 'freedom of speech, not freedom of reach' mean to you? Early on, we basically embedded freedom of speech into the protocol. Anyone can do the equivalent of standing up a new blog. Then sites like Bluesky get to decide how to prioritize reach. And 'reach' here means how Bluesky spreads—or doesn't spread—your posts. So people can say what they want, but they have to live with how Bluesky moderates their words? If you want to change the rules, you can build your own thing or find another space that serves you. Within the parameters of Bluesky, we're setting the rules. With your interest in decentralized spaces, I'm curious what you think about decentralized or 'network' states, which are, in theory, startup countries—a bunch of like-minded people who met online and bought up land together, for example. Are you following the network state movement? We'll have a lot of trial and error to develop good governance in the digital sphere, so maybe much farther down the road that might translate into the real world. In part I see what we're doing as building civic infrastructure in digital form. Social media is how we get our news, it's how we get informed, and if you can make control of that democratic, pluralistic, and open, I think that will translate down the road to more democratic social structures. How do you balance wanting to provide civic infrastructure with being the CEO of a for-profit company? We're running a lot of infrastructure that serves other apps in the network, and I think that is very financially valuable long-term. Early in the history of the web, you had these internet protocols that didn't have monetization baked in, but it meant anyone could spin up a website. Then the people who built the search engines and browsers to access the new web were ultimately very big companies. Are you still working toward any ambitions from when you started in 2019—or are there any that now seem impossible? Yes. Right now, Bluesky feels like Twitter, Flashes like Instagram, Skylight like TikTok. But you can build or combine things in totally new ways, or build social experiences that aren't necessarily large mainstream social apps. Those kinds of experiences are what I'm excited to see unleashed. The long-term vision is not just for a new form of social apps but a new layer for the web—what Web3 aspired to be, without the blockchain. I'm having a flashback to a conversation I had a decade ago. The Internet Archive's founder, Brewster Kahle, talked about reinventing the web in a similar way. I got my first open-source crypto job, at Zcash, through the Internet Archive's Decentralized Web summit. That was one of the places where I got my first insight into all the folks building things in the decentralized web space. I wrote about the Internet Archive's legal struggles last year. Some groups in the book world fiercely support its digital lending; others fiercely oppose it. I see a similar tension brewing among Bluesky power users. Some people want the app to be more active in content moderation, but that seems to clash with the principles of decentralization, where ideally no one body can ban or block people. Do you see this as a problem for Bluesky? There are always going to be conflicts when one person's idea of a good time online conflicts with somebody else's. People have different ideas about safety. Every space needs some moderation. The goal of building an open ecosystem is to support the coexistence of people with different points of view. They don't all have to be in the same room, abiding by the same rules. Maybe they can be in adjacent rooms, or maybe it's like two hotel buildings that are linked. At the end of the day, we set some parameters of what we think acceptable behavior is on Bluesky, and if you disagree with those you can branch off and build another application adjacent to it. What is your relationship with Jack Dorsey like now? Jack isn't involved anymore. He had a portfolio approach to decentralized technologies, and early on he helped several projects get off the ground. He funded another distributed protocol that I think today he probably prefers, Nostr, which shares many architectural similarities to Bluesky, but it works more like a cryptocurrency wallet. You need keys. You have to be a bit more sophisticated as a user. What's your pitch for why people should join Bluesky? It's a great time to shape the culture and the future of Bluesky. The people who have created starter packs, created feeds, and gotten involved in the community have seen a lot of growth—even if they previously weren't big posters elsewhere. For creators, nobody is fully grasping that this is potentially the last social identity you have to create. Signing up now isn't just committing to yet another micro-blogging app, it's committing to a new era of social, to having a sort of digital passport that moves with you. Is there anything else you want people to know about Bluesky? This is a choose-your-own-adventure game. You can get in there and customize the experience as much as you want. If you're not finding what you want within the Bluesky app, there might be another app within the protocol ecosystem that will give you what you want. If you can't find it, you can build it. You don't get this level of control anywhere else. 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