Since Elon Musk torpedoed Twitter, Bluesky has seen a stunning surge. CEO Jay Graber is working on “billionaire-proofing” social media against any similar takeover
By Emily Baker-White and Richard Nieva, Forbes Staff
Two months after the social network Bluesky launched in February 2023, it got its first bona fide celebrity user: the humorist known as dril. An absurdist Twitter character once described by the New Yorker as “one of America’s incisive ongoing works of social criticism,” dril had a finger on the pulse of Twitter’s decades-old chaotic energy, and that energy was headed to Bluesky.
“it is real it is him,” Bluesky developer Paul Frazee posted after dril joined. Despite his nearly two million followers at the time, Elon Musk’s X was no longer working for him, dril told Forbes. “Their algorithm has been more aggressively prioritizing moronic political commentators and crypto scammers, while pushing aside the people you actually follow,” he said.
“If Bluesky can market itself as a sort of last bastion against ad bots, AI crap, and nefarious algorithms, I think it’ll be in a very strong position,” he continued. But “it’s likely only a matter of time before one of their higher-up tech gurus decides to break the dam so all that sewage can flow in.”
Bluesky was never meant to be an app — or even a company. It began as an open source research project at Twitter, a skunkworks team helmed by open internet evangelist Jay Graber. Graber’s mandate was to build a protocol, a shared language that computers could use to talk to each other, designed specifically for social media. Through the AT Protocol (or Authentic Transfer, as well as, “where you at online?”), Twitter and other companies would be able to exchange information with one another, creating an open network where posts could be freely shared across social platforms.
But after Elon Musk bought Twitter, it became clear that Bluesky was no longer on its roadmap. Twitter under Musk began to transform, facing an advertiser boycott, exodus of users, and eventually a name change to X. So the team that made the protocol spun up a quick app, just to show how it might be used. They launched it as an invite-only social network in 2023.
Graber began leading Bluesky two years earlier, after Parag Agrawal, who would soon become Twitter CEO, offered her the job. The move proved prophetic for Graber, who had previously worked in cryptocurrency and built social apps. Her mother, who grew up in China, gave her the first name Lantian, Mandarin for blue sky. (The similarity, however, is coincidental, as the project had already been named before Graber’s involvement.)
Since its launch, Bluesky has seen unusual success: It raised a modest $15 million Series A round in October, when it had 13 million users, and since then, its user base has nearly doubled to more than 25 million. The app has panicked Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose own Twitter competitor, Threads, has rushed to copy many of its features. But as dril recognizes, Bluesky is a company with investors who want to make money. And that could someday clash with Graber’s user-first approach to social media: to put the people using Bluesky in control of its central features.
“Open sourcing the app, the choice there was to make sure that everyone could see how we were doing this, that it was possible to build social apps at scale, and that developers could just come in and start building,” Graber told Forbes.
Rather than let Bluesky itself determine what you see, in what order, and why, Graber and her team designed the app to let users create and subscribe to any number of feeds. Want to see posts from just your mutuals? There’s a feed for that. Want to see every post about gardening, or trail running, or a bottomless stream of gift links to news articles that usually have paywalls? There are feeds for those, too, and BlueSky doesn’t own them. Its users do.
Bluesky’s ethos of user choice extends beyond just which feeds you choose to follow. Don’t like the company’s lack of verification? Build your own system, like Hunter Walker, a journalist at Talking Points Memo, did. Don’t want to see AI art? Crowdsource a labeling and filtering system to detect and block it. Don’t like the company’s moderation settings? Create your own — as long as you stay above the company’s permissive floor. (Illegal content, harassment, election meddling, and other hard lines are non-negotiable.)
The idea of user choice even extends beyond Bluesky’s features to the idea of the app itself. If the AT Protocol catches on with other social platforms, then users will be able to frictionlessly move between platforms to the one they like best — which means Bluesky will have to compete with any number of other companies to provide the best user experience.
“Bluesky is a much more positive experience, but bad if you, like me, have built a following partly on dunking on idiots. There aren’t as many idiots on Bluesky.”
Derek Guy, the “menswear guy”
In giving power to the people, Bluesky has so far eschewed the strategy that other social platforms have used to make billions of dollars: collecting troves of intimate data about their users and then letting advertisers target them based on that data. At least today, Bluesky is fully public, and its user data is available to people outside the company, so there’s no secret sauce for advertisers to pay for. It’s not that Graber is opposed to ads, but when it comes to social media, she said they’ve become “overly extractive.”
“We think of it a bit like the resource curse: when a country discovers oil and it becomes a very profitable revenue stream, there’s this phenomenon where other industries get neglected. They don’t build out the rest of the economy.”
If ads are oil, Graber doesn’t yet know what the solar, wind or hydropower sources of income for Bluesky might be. The company is preparing to test several subscription products, and has left the door open to testing some ads, too, in a way that would keep users in control.
Graber is conscious of what she called “bus problems” — or, the scenarios that could happen if she and her executive team, god forbid, get hit by a bus. “We have locked things open enough that we cannot significantly degrade the user experience because we have opened the market up to entrepreneurs.”
What will truly keep the AT Protocol independent, Graber said, is people other than her and her team stewarding it. She said she has started talking to standards bodies, international organizations that define each language of code, but that true decentralization — or “billionaire-proofing” as she has called it — relies on people outside of Bluesky adopting the protocol and making it their own.
There are efforts to expand use of the protocol. A day after the New Year rang in, cryptic posters began appearing throughout San Francisco. The posters show a cloudy blue sky, an asterisk, and teased a website called Free Our Feeds, with a countdown clock to January 13. A source familiar with the posters said they are related to an upcoming announcement about the AT protocol.
Bluesky’s DIY approach requires a bit more effort from users than X or Meta Threads. People who can’t code likely won’t be building their own feeds, verification systems or labels anytime soon — and while it doesn’t require coding, figuring out how to subscribe to other users’ creations and customize your moderation settings requires a bit of effort. But barriers to entry fade away when the product is good enough.
Billionaire investor and frequent poster Mark Cuban thinks it is. He’s embraced Bluesky as a “truly social” experience: “You can post something about your day and get positive responses.” Still, his 805,000 followers on Bluesky is only a fraction of the 8.8 million he’s amassed on X. “There are lots of people I disagree with,” Cuban told Forbes, but “[t]hat is part of any engaging platform.” Still, he said, personal moderation tools like blocking or reporting “kill the incentives of trolls to troll.”
Bluesky does have some moderation features that other platforms don’t have, like the option to detach a quote-post from your original post (a feature that’s largely positive but can sour if people use it to pile on a post they don’t like). But in large part, what makes moderation on Bluesky different from other platforms is how liberally its new users have employed tools that do exist — or at least used to exist — on other platforms, too. Bluesky gained half a million users in a day after X (formerly Twitter) announced that its “block” feature would no longer fully block people.
Derek Guy, known online as “the menswear guy,” also praised the platform for its more civil clientele — though he confessed that the friendly atmosphere might not work as well with his personal brand: “Bluesky is a much more positive experience, but bad if you, like me, have built a following partly on dunking on idiots. There aren’t as many idiots on Bluesky.”
