I admit it: I most definitely rolled my eyes in 2019, when Twitter announced vague plans to build a “open and decentralized standard for social media.”
At the time I didn’t really understand what then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was trying to do — or why the head of a social media company with plenty of problems was messing around with plans to create more social media companies.
I get it now: Bluesky was a science project that aimed to let people build their own social networks. And that’s still what it is at its core, says Bluesky CEO Jay Graber.
But in the meantime, Bluesky has also become an accidental Twitter rival, with some 36 million users. And most of them likely don’t care about Bluesky’s origins, or the fact that it’s really supposed to be a technical framework for decentralized social media. Or what decentralized social media means, for that matter.
All of which means that talking to Graber about Bluesky means you’re doing two things at once: asking about how Bluesky, the app, works — and what Bluesky, the idea, is. I tried to do that in a conversation with her at Web Summit Vancouver in May, and you can hear the entire conversation on my Channels podcast.
In the edited excerpt below, Graber discusses the recent influx of Bluesky users, the premise behind the company and its ambitions — and her T-shirt that trolled Mark Zuckerberg.
Peter Kafka: You’ve been growing really fast. I assume a lot of that is people who came over after Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover, and then another wave of people who came over when Mark Zuckerberg pivoted toward Donald Trump.
Jay Graber: I think it happens for various reasons in different places. But in general, people want to branch out, try new things. And in the US recently we’ve seen a lot of uptake since November.
Are people coming because they want a service that gives them something they don’t have somewhere else? Or is it because they don’t like the service they’re using — either because of the people that are on there or the people who are running it?
It’s all sorts of reasons. It’s moderation policies. It’s a sense of toxicity and fatigue. It’s people wanting to just try something new. It’s people finding their community here.
I think in general it’s both people looking for something and people looking to get away from something.
I think most people are still confused about what Bluesky actually is, because it’s not a simple answer. Want to try explaining?
Bluesky started as a protocol that Twitter would run on, and so it was an alternative foundation for Twitter. It has turned into an alternative app that people treat as a microblogging alternative.
We built an app that is very familiar, and that’s both good and bad.
It’s good because it’s familiar, so people don’t have to feel like it’s this big learning curve to use it. It’s also bad, because people think that’s all it is. And what it actually is, is a lobby to the open social web, which is what we set out to build — this open protocol ecosystem that you could build apps like Twitter on.
In Twitter’s earliest days, there were debates about whether it should be a protocol instead of a company or a service. What does protocol mean?
The protocol is like a toolbox for building social apps. The way to think about it is it’s a bit like email. Email services [can] talk to each other [because there’s a protocol]. And so the protocol is a way to build a microblogging service that talks to other services.
It’s a language that computers talk in order to transfer data and information. And companies can build on the protocol.
A big idea behind Bluesky is that it’s decentralized. That appealed to Jack Dorsey, who started Bluesky when he was still running Twitter, and it appeals to you. What is it about decentralization that excites you? Is it inherently a good thing?
There’s benefits to both centralization and decentralization.
There are ways to build things. There are system properties. You see it across the organic world, and you see it in organizations and you see it pretty much everywhere once you start looking for it.
And what decentralization is good for is parallel experimentation and resilience: You can do a lot of things at one time, like all the arms of an octopus.
When you’re centralized, you can concentrate resources, and move one direction very fast. But if you get that wrong, then you have no fallbacks.
With decentralization, you can try all these things and then you pick the experiments that win. It lets you evolve in a more open manner. And I think that produces better outcomes in a time when you have a lot of rapid change. Because if you bet on a centralized direction, you’re putting all your eggs in one basket.
I get why that appeals to a developer, someone who wants to try building their own thing. Why is that good for a normal person, who probably doesn’t know that this thing is decentralized, and probably has not heard the word protocol? Why would they care about whether something is centralized or not?
It really takes developers to show you what you can build. But we’ve tried really hard to make it possible for people who don’t know how to code to be able to experience some of the benefits of decentralization.
That means having control over your timeline and the way that you moderate the app. You can build your own moderation service and you don’t even have to know how to code: You can use one of the open source tools we’ve put out there and you just go in there and run your own little moderation service for you and your friends. You can do the same for your own feed.
Sometimes we say it’s a choose-your-own-adventure app. Because you can come into the default experience and the main storyline is familiar. But then if you go deeper under the hood, you can find all these different little universes.
Of those 36 million people who are using Bluesky today, how many are using the straight out of the box, Twitter replacement version? And how many are modifying the experience or building on top of that?
A good number of them play around with it. It’s something that is getting increasingly integrated into people’s everyday experience through various feeds.
There’s about 50,000 feeds. A few thousand are relatively popular, and a few dozen or a few hundred are quite popular.
There’s the science feed or, Blacksky. There’s one called the ‘gram, which is just pictures. There’s one called Quiet Posters, which is just your friends who don’t post that often. Those are essentially different algorithms that give you a different experience of the network.
There are no ads on Blue Sky right now. A lot of people say “ads are the reason the internet sucks.” You haven’t ruled out ads though, right?
I think ads work their way into every attention economy. But we are very wary of going down the ad-driven path, because we know that’s the history of Twitter and a lot of other sites — particularly when you lock users in around your timeline, you do a lot of things to start actually making the timeline more engaging, but in some ways worse in order to keep users on there.
I think there’s probably a new relationship that needs to be found with advertising.
You wore a T-shirt with Latin on it at an event a couple months ago. What did that say and why did you wear it?
It said “a world without Caesars” and I wore it because I saw this article where Mark Zuckerberg had worn this shirt that said “All Zuck or Nothing”, which is a “Caesar or nothing” reference.
Is there a Bluesky store where I can buy that shirt?
We had a store up briefly, but we shut it down. Because we’re not in the T-shirt business long-term.
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