Jay Graber, the C.E.O. of the upstart social-media platform Bluesky, arrived in San Francisco the Sunday after Donald Trump’s reëlection and holed up in a hotel room. She’d spent the previous days road-tripping down the West Coast from her home, in Seattle, stopping at beaches and redwood groves along the way, and in San Francisco she’d hoped to remain half in vacation mode. But now Bluesky was seeing a surge in new users, and it was looking as if she’d need all hands on deck. “There was momentum,” Graber recalled recently, adding, “It was just picking up day by day.”
Since launching, in early 2023, Bluesky had positioned itself as a refuge from X, the site formerly known as Twitter. For nearly two decades, Twitter had been considered the internet’s town square, chaotic and often rancorous but informative and diversely discursive. Then, after the tech billionaire turned Trump backer Elon Musk acquired the platform, in October of 2022, it devolved into a circus of right-wing conspiracy theories. Liberals began fleeing, and Bluesky in turn accumulated more than ten million users by the fall of 2024, making it one of the fastest-growing social networks. But the post-election influx proved to be of a different order, turning Bluesky into what one tech blogger compared to a Macy’s at the start of Black Friday sales.
Graber put in sixteen-hour days overseeing Bluesky’s twenty-person staff, taking calls with prospective investors, and recruiting new hires, leaving her hotel room only to pick up DoorDash deliveries in the lobby. In Seattle, Bluesky’s chief technology officer set up an automatic “failover” so that if one of the company’s servers crashed another would take its place. A team of engineers took shifts to insure that someone was on duty at all hours, battling to keep the overwhelmed servers online—“like firefighting,” as one put it. On November 14th—two days after Trump announced the creation of the Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency—Bluesky staffers stayed late, in a virtual “situation room,” to watch the day’s sign-up ticker hit a million. In a matter of two weeks, Bluesky’s population doubled. Today, it has a user base of more than thirty million.
Disaffected X users gravitate to Bluesky as a throwback to a gentler, saner social-media experience. Being on the site feels like a mixture of Twitter in 2012, when it was a haven for internet nerdery, and in 2017, when it was a seedbed of anti-Trump #Resistance. The Bluesky interface reassuringly resembles Twitter’s, down to the winged blue logo (a butterfly instead of a bird) and the character limit on posts (three hundred rather than early Twitter’s hundred and forty). The platform is theoretically open to all, but some MAGA trolls have reported that their accounts have been blocked. Discourse is solidly left-leaning, and disagreements tend to be internecine. The most followed account belongs to Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As if to consummate Bluesky as a successor to the liberal Twitter of yore, Barack Obama recently joined and, in his first post, celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of the Affordable Care Act.
The platform is not yet populated enough to qualify as the internet’s new town square. Even after the Musk-induced exodus, X reports that it has more than five hundred million active users per month; Threads, Meta’s self-fashioned Twitter alternative, has around three hundred million. Yet Bluesky wields outsized influence in the social-media landscape because of the innovative infrastructure on which it’s built. All the giant social networks are what’s known as centralized platforms: most aspects of user experience, from content moderation to algorithmic recommendations, are dictated by the corporation that runs the platform. Bluesky, by contrast, originated as a radical side project within Twitter under its co-founder and former C.E.O., Jack Dorsey, to create a decentralized social-media model. Where X or Facebook runs primarily on proprietary technology, Bluesky is powered by an open-source protocol, a sort of instruction manual and set of data standards that allows anyone to build compatible software on top of it. As a result, users can customize the algorithms and content-moderation rules that govern what appears in their feeds—and, if they don’t like Bluesky, they can take their followers and their archive of posts and build or join another site running on the same protocol. The power that typically lies with corporations is thus redistributed to the users themselves.
With its post-election boom, Bluesky has become by far the largest decentralized social network and Graber (who, citing privacy concerns, gives her age as “around thirty-three”) the most high-profile female head of a social network in an industry known for eccentrically megalomaniacal men. With Trump and Musk in power, Silicon Valley leaders have taken a rightward turn. At Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has cut back on fact checking, abandoned D.E.I. efforts, and said that the corporate world needs more “masculine energy.” Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Post, has ordered that the paper’s opinion pages publish only pieces that support “personal liberties and free markets.” Graber, who defines her politics as “anti-authoritarian,” sees Bluesky as a corrective to prevailing social media that subjects users to the whims of billionaires. “Elon, if he wanted to, could just delete the whole X time line—just do these totally arbitrary things,” she said, adding, “I think this self-styled tech-monarch thing is worth questioning. Do we want to live in that world?”
The Seattle area, home to Microsoft’s and Amazon’s headquarters, is perhaps the most significant American tech hub outside the Bay Area. You can’t throw a Starbucks venti there without hitting a software engineer. But Graber told me that she chose the city in part for its separation from Silicon Valley, and for its “moody and majestic” landscape: “Some people said I moved here because I’m a moss maximalist, and they’re not wrong.”
Graber and several Seattle-based employees have desks in a co-working space with views of Puget Sound. One day in January, I met Graber there. Tall and willowy, with a halo of tight dark curls, she wore a hooded black coat from the Chinese brand JNBY which gave her high-cheekboned face a slightly witchy aspect. The workspace was bright and sparse, with motorized standing desks and scattered beanbag chairs. Graber’s station was in a pod of four cluttered with external monitors, Annie’s crackers, and spent coffee cups. Compared with most tech leaders, she has a low-key digital footprint. On her Bluesky account, one representative post features a photo of her arms cradling a hen, captioned “My favorite chicken.”
“Jay” is an adopted moniker. Bluesky was named before Graber became involved, but by coincidence her given name is Lantian—Mandarin for “blue sky.” Graber likes to say that her mother, an émigré from China, chose it to lend her daughter “boundless freedom.” Her mom, who worked as an acupuncturist, and her dad, a math teacher and a former lieutenant colonel, met at a Christian university in Oklahoma. They raised Graber, an only child, in a Baptist community in Tulsa. Growing up, Graber looked forward to Friday nights after church, when she was granted unfettered access to the family’s desktop computer. A formative internet experience was a game called Neopets, in which users raise digital creatures and connect with other players in a shared virtual village. As an adolescent, Graber kept a blog on Xanga, an early social platform, and taught herself rudimentary code so that she could customize her page with music and a zebra theme.
At the time, Graber identified less as a computer kid than as a bookworm, reading stories of scientific and mathematical discovery. “One thing that interested me was how a lot of inventions came through ordinary people trying things,” she said. “It wasn’t just the lone genius.” She read the children’s fantasy series “Redwall” and every “Robin Hood” book in the library; she grew to love such feminist sci-fi authors as Margaret Atwood and Ursula K. Le Guin, who, as Graber put it, excelled at reimagining “how society could look.” To this day, she remains an avowed fantasy devotee.
In one corner of the Bluesky office sat a pile of padded training swords. Graber belongs to a club that re-creates medieval sword-fighting tactics, and the office had recently staged a tournament. She picked up a mock shortsword and extended it expertly in one hand. I grabbed another, plus a small plastic shield, and she led me in an impromptu battle. “A lot of men just rely on brute force to get through things,” she said. “When you learn that, you can still win, with better leverage and technique.” She raised her sword and mimed slashing it down toward my exposed neck.
After high school, Graber enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania, figuring that its combination of liberal-arts, engineering, and business programs would allow her to “maximize optionality.” She chose an interdisciplinary major called Science, Technology, and Society, and as part of her senior thesis designed an online time bank through which students could swap labor—taking photos for another person, say, in exchange for cooking lessons. Graber told me, “In some ways, it was like a social network.” When she graduated, she moved to an all-female coöperative in West Philadelphia and volunteered for local tech-policy projects, which led to a job as an organizer at Free Press, a media-advocacy nonprofit. But the policy world operated “at a high level of abstraction,” she said, and she found it unsatisfying: “Being able to make change directly has always been really appealing to me.” On work trips to San Francisco, meeting with tech activists and hanging out in “hackerspaces,” she was drawn to the tech industry’s nimble immediacy.
In 2015, she enrolled in a coding boot camp in San Francisco, then landed a job at a startup that employed blockchain cryptography to track inventory for corporate clients. But she was restless there, too. According to Graber, her mother had hoped that she would become a doctor, and would tell her, contra the name Lantian, “You have too much freedom. You have to learn how to be more grounded.” In San Francisco, Graber started going by Jay. A blue jay, she reasoned, could navigate both sky and land.
A new crypto opportunity soon arose: a friend’s brother was running a bitcoin-mining operation in a defunct ammunition factory in rural Washington and needed help from someone with technical prowess and an appetite for grunt work. Graber moved to a house near the factory and, between shifts, spent hours studying code on her own. She described this to me as her “cocoon period”: “There were no distractions—no place to go, no parties, no friends.” Even in isolation, Graber displayed a future tech founder’s knack for self-invention. She wore earrings made out of salvaged memory sticks and dyed locks of her hair electric blue and purple. She began lifting weights and, for a brief time, tried an all-meat diet. “I’m pretty experimental,” she said. “I’ll try anything once.”
In mid-2016, Graber went to San Francisco to attend the first annual Decentralized Web Summit, hosted by the open-web organization Internet Archive. There she met Zooko Wilcox-O’Hearn, who was developing a cryptocurrency called Zcash. Wilcox-O’Hearn told me that Graber stood out for the contrast between her “youth and her seriousness,” and for her emotional intelligence. He hired her as a junior engineer, and she eventually rose to oversee developer operations. One early Zcash transaction became something of a legend within the blockchain community: in the memo field, the sender had encrypted a romantic message. Though people didn’t know it at the time, the note was for Graber, from a programmer paramour.
San Francisco was good for networking and dating, but Graber was spending all her money on rent. She founded her own startup, Happening, a kind of social network for event organizing, but it didn’t take off. “I was trying to figure out how to get people to use a social app,” she said. “But starting from zero was really hard.” Then, in December, 2019, she saw a tweet thread from Jack Dorsey about a decentralized social-media project he was launching—Bluesky. Graber told me that she felt a degree of so-called nominative determinism, pulled toward the project because it shared her name. “If fate doesn’t exist, then we must create it,” she said. “You can follow things that seem synchronous.”
On the internet, protocols are a bit like a city’s electrical grid—crucial to its functioning but invisible to most civilians. When you send an e-mail, you are making use of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP). When you visit any website, you are using Hypertext Transfer Protocol (hence the letters at the beginning of every address, HTTP). Because of SMTP, your e-mail account can send messages to any other e-mail account; you don’t have to be a Gmail user to e-mail a Gmail user. Daniel Holmgren, one of Bluesky’s head engineers, likened the company’s protocol—called the Authenticated Transfer, or AT, Protocol—to an “open data lake”: whatever is in the water is public property, and any boat on the lake can dredge it up. Conventional social media, by contrast, is siloed: a Facebook account cannot follow or message a TikTok account. In recent years, Google, Meta, Amazon, and Apple have all been targets of antitrust lawsuits. Protocols are anti-monopolistic by design, allowing stakeholders to build coöperative systems that run side by side. As the founder of Internet Archive, Brewster Kahle, put it in an influential talk in 2015, decentralized technology has the power to “lock the Web open.”
What piqued Dorsey’s interest, though, was a long 2019 essay by Mike Masnick, the founder of the blog Techdirt, titled “Protocols, Not Platforms.” The piece summed up a “crisis” that social-media companies faced with content moderation: caught between complaints that they allowed the spread of hatred and disinformation and complaints that they stifled free speech, they managed to please “almost no one.” The solution, Masnick argued, was to develop social-media protocols, which would allow individuals to design filtering tools based on “their own tolerances for different types of speech.” At the time, Dorsey was facing accusations that Twitter “shadow banned” content from conservatives; he’d been questioned by Congress about the company’s content-moderation practices. If Twitter were on a protocol and the work of content moderation were decentralized, then the company’s leadership would no longer be the target of blame. (Dorsey did not respond to requests for comment.) Several decentralized social networks already existed, among them Mastodon, another Twitter-like platform, but none had broken into the mainstream. Masnick, who today is a Bluesky board member, told me that Dorsey contacted him out of the blue and said, “I’m convinced by your paper. I think we’re going to do it.”
Dorsey announced that Twitter would fund the development of a “decentralized standard for social media” which Twitter would eventually adopt. To kick-start the project, his team created a group chat on Matrix, another open protocol for digital communication, and invited select people who expressed interest in joining. Then Twitter’s C.T.O., Parag Agrawal, kept tabs on the group to see who would emerge as its leader. Graber joined and was struck by the rudderlessness of the conversation. New people would pop in, make a few unsupported suggestions, and then drop out. No broader vision seemed to be coalescing. She began collating papers that other group members mentioned and wrote an overview of existing open-source social-media protocols. She told me, “The way that you become a leader is you just add value—you just do things.”
In early 2021, Dorsey and Agrawal started conducting interviews with prospective Bluesky heads. Jeremie Miller, who created the pioneering open-source instant-messaging system Jabber (and later became a Bluesky board member), sat in on the interviews as a consultant. He recalled that Graber easily became his pick. The Twitter heads had preconceptions of what Bluesky should be, he told me: “She didn’t give in to those and just propose the things that they wanted to hear.” Still, the search dragged on for months. In the meantime, Graber accepted a position at Twitter itself, working on blockchain technology. Then, in the summer of 2021, during onboarding, she got a call from Agrawal, offering her the role of Bluesky C.E.O. Put off by the protracted hiring process, Graber said that she’d accept only if Bluesky could exist separately from Twitter. Negotiating independence took another few months, but the decision proved pivotal. That November, after years of pressure from an activist investment firm, Dorsey resigned as C.E.O. and was replaced by Agrawal. Then, in January, Musk began buying up Twitter stock. By that April, he’d become the largest shareholder. Encouraged by a disaffected Dorsey, he offered to buy Twitter outright, for forty-four billion dollars.
Twitter had agreed to compensate Bluesky for constructing a protocol, with twenty-five million dollars over five years. Following a brief period during which Graber paid her first contractor out of her own pocket, Twitter executives made sure that an initial twelve million dollars went through. But Graber knew that, with Twitter’s leadership in limbo, she now had to think beyond Bluesky’s original goal of hosting Twitter. She put out feelers to other companies, including Reddit, about the idea of using Bluesky’s protocol. Then, in August, 2022, noting the dread on Twitter at the possibility of Musk’s takeover, she made another crucial decision: Bluesky would build not only a protocol but a social network to run on it. Doing so would offer a proof of concept, Graber said: “But it was also important in case we’re on our own and need to lean in on Plan B.”
That October, Bluesky débuted a landing page with a sign-up box. Within days, driven by word of mouth on extant social media, it had a wait list of more than a million e-mails. The next week, Musk officially became Twitter’s owner. When Masnick heard the news, he texted Graber some friendly advice: “Work faster.” The Bluesky team reached out to Twitter to ask whether Musk would continue to fund the protocol. Dorsey, who sat on Bluesky’s board, had urged Musk to make Twitter open source, so Graber held out hope that Musk would support the project. But they soon received an e-mail from a “random dude with no Twitter e-mail address,” stating that their contract would be cancelled.
In late 2022, the writer Cory Doctorow coined the term “enshittification” to describe how social-media companies make changes that benefit them but gradually, inevitably degrade user experience. In recent years, Facebook and X have buried news by deprioritizing links to articles. Instagram and Pinterest have flooded feeds with surreally inane A.I.-generated content, making it harder to find posts of interest. Social-media users who voice dismay at such changes are accustomed to feeling as if they are petitioning uncaring gods. Bluesky staff members, by contrast, like to describe users of decentralized technology as “agentic,” a jargony way of saying that they get to choose what they see.
One January day, I met in San Francisco with Rose Wang, Bluesky’s C.O.O., and Emily Liu, its head of special projects, who spoke about the average social-media user in a way that evoked a factory-farmed chicken resisting going free range. With the advent of platforms such as Bluesky, users “don’t have to petition the mods or complain about the algorithm,” Liu said, using a shorthand for moderators. She added, “Hating the mods is an artifact of when mods had all the power.”
Wang, a longtime friend of Graber’s (and the co-founder of a line of snacks made with cricket flour), said, “Success is when users ask us to build tools so that they can go and create whatever experience they want.”
Decentralized social networks can take several forms. The most complex are peer-to-peer systems, in which each individual connects her computer directly to others using her own private server. Perhaps the most prominent example is Urbit, a blockchain-linked platform founded by the neo-reactionary programmer Curtis Yarvin, which has only around sixteen thousand accounts. A more accessible approach, employed by platforms such as Mastodon, which has some ten million registered users, is the federated model, in which some people build servers to host groups of accounts, forming a “federation” of user-hosts. (Last year, looking to break into the so-called fediverse, Meta took its first step into decentralized social media and began integrating some of Threads’ functions with the protocol that Mastodon runs.) On Bluesky, any user can host her own account on a private server or join the server of another user-host. But the vast majority of users choose a default option that lets Bluesky’s servers function as host. As a result, creating an account on Bluesky can be as easy as signing up for Facebook or X.
In the spring of 2023, Bluesky rolled out an invite-only beta version of its app. The first batches of invitations went out to just a thousand people from the wait list each week, but each new user was given invite codes to recruit others, and the population quickly diversified. Wrestlers formed an enthusiastic niche and soon attracted other sports subcultures. Brazilian Taylor Swift fans established a community. Early adopters came disproportionately from the groups most negatively affected by Musk’s right-wing makeover of X—sex workers, trans people, people of color. X users in the media and progressive politics traded invite codes like passengers on a ship hijacked by lunatics, offering spots on the only lifeboat.
When I joined Bluesky, in April of 2023, the scene was underpopulated and raw. Content moderation was minimal. An optional What’s Hot algorithmic feed collected content that was popular across the platform. The posts that qualified had as few as a dozen likes and were, as one user observed, roughly “1/3 nudes, 1/3 technical discussion of federated networks, and 1/3 pet photos.” Posts were dubbed “skeets,” for “sky tweets,” a term that has a double meaning as vulgar slang. Without the possibility of going viral (or attracting much attention, period), users’ only incentive was to entertain their fellow internet addicts. The poet and author Patricia Lockwood, a maestro of tweeting, had departed Twitter after Trump used the platform to incite the January 6th riot. She joined Bluesky in May of 2023 and began skeeting in her signature absurdist style. In one brief prose poem, she narrated tumbling down a hill: “haha—Yes! it will be the job of sisyphus, my sexual partner, to roll me up again.” Lockwood told me that Bluesky felt a bit like “returning to a second childhood,” striving to reclaim a social internet that was fun and freeing.
The early enthusiasm allowed Graber to raise eight million dollars in seed investment that July, providing the team with the runway to keep growing. Then Bluesky’s sign-ups slowed, in part because of competition from Threads, which débuted that month. In February, 2024, Bluesky’s social platform became open to the public, yet it continued to feel like a digital backwater. I checked in sporadically that spring and summer and found little action; periodically, I posted messages into the void such as “btw I’m still on this site.” In August, when X was briefly banned in Brazil for refusing to follow local moderation laws, a wave of Brazilians (among the world’s most internet-savvy people) migrated to Bluesky. But the platform may well have remained as niche as Mastodon, which stalled out after experiencing a bump in popularity when Musk acquired Twitter. One feature that helped make Bluesky a viable X replacement was its “starter packs,” offering user-curated lists of accounts to follow in certain areas of interest, so that new members didn’t have to rebuild their online communities from scratch. Threads soon added the same feature.
When a user logs on to X, two tabs appear at the top of her feed: For You, which shows algorithmically recommended posts, and Following, which shows posts from accounts that you follow. The analogous features on Bluesky differ in significant ways. Where X’s Following feed is crowded with ads and recommendations, Bluesky’s contains only the things that people you follow have posted, in reverse chronological order, as on early Twitter, giving Bluesky users a clearer sense of the conversation happening in real time. A Discover feed, meanwhile, custom-selects posts for each user according to an algorithm designed by the company; one of its advantages over X’s For You is that you don’t have to see Musk himself spouting an endless stream of MAGA propaganda and proudly puerile memes. But the site’s biggest departure from X is its My Feeds tab, which allows users to select additional algorithmic feeds designed by fellow-users. At the Bluesky office, Graber opened her laptop, which bore a large sticker of a vine-wreathed sword, and pulled up a test account, then navigated to the menu of feeds. She clicked on one called Science, moderated by a self-vetted crowd of science professionals, then on one called Fungi Friends, which filled the feed with photos of mushrooms. A Popular with Friends feed shows posts getting engagement from people you follow; Quiet Posters, conversely, brings up messages from accounts you follow that don’t post very often.
Bluesky’s head of trust and safety, Aaron Rodericks, previously worked at Twitter, until Musk dismantled its content-moderation team and eventually forced him out. Rodericks told me that Bluesky performs “a foundational layer” of moderation, with more than a hundred contractors working to remove such things as child-sexual-abuse material and threats of violence. But more fine-grained filtering decisions are made at the individual level. In Settings, users can choose from among hundreds of homespun labelling tools that flag or block certain posts in their feeds. The labels range from the straightforwardly functional (a red check mark for authenticated power users, akin to Twitter’s old blue checks) to the idiosyncratically satirical (a label that identifies landlords, private-school graduates, and associates of Jeffrey Epstein). One of the platform’s most prominent feeds, Blacksky, which draws more than three hundred thousand users a month, offers a tool to identify and block racism and misogynoir. Bluesky as a company can afford to enable free speech because the platform’s smaller, optional communities have the power to police speech however they choose. Blacksky’s founder, Rudy Fraser, told me, “If anyone uses a slur anywhere—in a username, bio, in a post—we can get automatically alerted and take action.” He added, of moderation decisions, “If you’re making everyone happy, you’re maybe not serving a community.”
If there’s a trade-off to nurturing insular online communities, it’s that Bluesky as a whole still lacks the kind of cacophonous urgency that defined Twitter in its heyday. The dominant discourse tends to take place in a tone of cosseted aggrievement. On a typical day, a litany of posts might ask why “nobody is talking about” a given issue—the death toll in Gaza, the threatened defunding of NPR—although people are in fact talking about those very things on the same website. Even when it’s politically diverse, social media too easily creates echo chambers. In time, if Bluesky wants to remain relevant, it will have to evolve beyond its relatively monocultural milieu.
Graber likes to compare Bluesky to a hotel: “We’re trying to create a good time for people who step into the lobby,” she said—though the lobby also contains construction materials, left there as a community resource. Users are “going off and exploring custom rooms that people built, and maybe there’s another hotel out back.” If the system proves successful, there will eventually be many hotels operating on the protocol. In the eyes of some of Bluesky’s original supporters, though, the success of its social network has undermined its decentralized vision; its hotel grew so lively so fast that people didn’t venture off to build their own.
Aaron D. Goldman, a former Twitter engineer who worked for Bluesky in its first year, told me that hosting millions of accounts on Bluesky’s servers is costly and creates pressure for the platform to monetize its user base. “If we’re going to have huge hosting costs, then we need a toll booth somewhere,” he said. Graber has resisted replicating Twitter’s advertising-driven model, and Bluesky’s open-source structure obviates the possibility of licensing the platform’s content to train A.I. programs, as companies such as X and Reddit have done. Bluesky currently has only one revenue stream, from hosting accounts on custom domains, but Graber envisions sustaining the business by eventually charging subscription fees, and by monetizing its marketplace of custom tools—users would pay, say, five dollars a month for Blacksky, and Bluesky would take a cut. Still, Goldman said that Bluesky, even with “the bones of a good decentralized system,” has ended up with “the same incentives that led Jack to make Twitter very commercial.” Goldman helped design Bluesky’s protocol, but he and Graber later came to an impasse; he was let go in late 2022. (Graber ascribed their parting less to ideological differences than to Goldman’s lack of productivity; he was “not shipping like an engineer,” she said, and was “treating this more like a research project.”)
Last May, Dorsey revealed that he’d left his seat on Bluesky’s board. In an interview, he complained that Bluesky was “repeating all the mistakes” that Twitter had made, becoming “a company with V.C.s and a board.” He recommended Nostr, an obscure “censorship-resistant” social protocol to which he had donated five million dollars. Graber told me that Dorsey’s departure actually “freed up” the company somewhat. Some prospective users had grumbled that Bluesky was still the pet project of a billionaire; without Dorsey’s involvement the allegation was moot.
Even on the decentralized internet, founders are not above competing for the primacy of their tools. Mastodon’s founder, Eugen Rochko, told me that last year he and Graber discussed a collaboration that would have allowed their two protocols to interoperate, but each told me that the other seemed more interested in having the rival platform migrate onto their own protocol. Rochko did not see the point in Mastodon using AT Protocol, given that Bluesky already dominates it. “There isn’t really a lot of benefit to running your own app on it,” he said. “There would just be no place.” If the decentralized-social-media vision is realized, a single protocol might, like SMTP for e-mail, one day host an entire mainstream social internet: the next generation of Facebooks, Instagrams, and TikToks.
In January, Mallory Knodel, the executive director of the nonprofit Social Web Foundation, co-founded an initiative, Free Our Feeds, to foster the construction of more social networks on Bluesky’s protocol. The goal, as Knodel put it to me, was to “take them up on their offer to make it a truly decentralized platform.” Perhaps there will soon be a proliferation of other popular social apps operating alongside Bluesky. In the meantime, there are signs of growth. Flashes, an Instagram-like site that launched in February, has so far been downloaded more than a hundred thousand times. My favorite project besides Bluesky is a tiny site called PinkSea, a version of Japanese oekaki, bulletin boards for sharing digital drawings. I can log on to PinkSea using my Bluesky account information and post what I draw on both platforms simultaneously. In the Bluesky office, I pulled up PinkSea on Graber’s laptop, and she said that she had never seen it before. It is not a digital town square; with perhaps a few hundred active users, it’s barely even a digital dive bar. But its existence suggests the possibility of other creative projects on the protocol to come. Graber scrolled through the feed, which showcased both sophisticated anime figures and crude doodles, and her eyes lit up. “What excites me is new worlds emerging that I can’t imagine,” she said.
As the sun began to set, we walked from the Bluesky office to a pub. Graber, who doesn’t drink, settled into a dark nook and ordered a non-alcoholic Guinness. As Bluesky has become more mainstream, Graber has asserted herself more pointedly as a nemesis of social media’s Old Guard. For an appearance at South by Southwest in March, she wore a custom T-shirt that parodied one of Zuckerberg’s own design. Where his is emblazoned with the phrase “aut Zuck aut nihil,” a riff on the Latin “either a Caesar or nothing,” hers read “mundus sine caesaribus”—“a world without Caesars.” (The company started selling the shirts for forty dollars apiece and made more money in a day than it had in two years of selling domains.) In Bluesky’s founding documents, taking a lesson from Twitter’s history, Graber introduced a slogan: “The company is a future adversary.” In other words, they must design their platform today in such a way that, even if new leadership eventually jettisons their guiding principles, the thing they’ve created will remain impossible to abuse.
Graber seemed almost to welcome the idea that Bluesky’s legion of thirty million-plus users could someday disband; if people migrated elsewhere on the protocol tomorrow, it would only prove the viability of her vision. “Every centralized system faces the problem of succession, because leadership changes, and you eventually get someone not smart or not good,” she said. “Then users can vote with their feet, because they have their relationships and their data and their identity. Somebody else can come along and say, ‘Hey, I’m doing it better. Come over here.’ ” ♦
