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.
wo months after the social network Bluesky launched in February 2023, it got its first bona fide celebrity user: the humorist known asas “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 .
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.
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 hasmany 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.
“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.” 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 testGraber 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.
Twitter Elon Musk Jay Graber Jack Dorsey Mark Cuban Dril Derek Guy
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