By Andy Serwer
Red-hot social media platform Bluesky is an overnight success story years in the making. Considered to be an alternative to X/Twitter, Bluesky is now exploding on the scene -- even though it was birthed five years ago as a research initiative by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey. After the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk in 2022, Bluesky became an independent company in competition with Twitter, which Musk has renamed X. Software engineer Lantian "Jay" Graber became Bluesky's CEO in August 2021.
Now, post election and with X increasingly reflecting the politics of Musk, a turnoff to some, Bluesky -- with over 21 million users and growing by some million a day -- is having its moment.
Bluesky, part of the decentralized social media movement, allows users to easily build their own content feed by following users and liking content, and which unlike other social media, isn't also steered by a central algorithm. Bluesky also has sophisticated tools for users looking for an enhanced experience.
Bluesky is still a privately owned startup. The company has raised $36 million in venture funding in three rounds since early 2023.
I spoke with Graber, 33, from Washington, D.C., where she was attending the Summit on the Future of the Internet.
Q: Why are people coming to Bluesky?
A: More people are willing to engage with social media when they have more control over how they use it. People who don't find the Twitter style of talking and maybe arguing with strangers appealing, can find a quiet, cozy corner of Bluesky that works for them. Originally, there were a few influential people who triggered people coming over and that created a snowball effect. Now we're just spreading through word-of-mouth, news articles and through particular communities. The Taylor Swift community was a group that came over all at once, as well as various sports team communities. When a particular group of people online have a shared interest, they all decide to leave it at once.
Q: When did the Swifties come over?
A: Early last week. Suddenly, everything was about Taylor Swift.
Q: Are you concerned that X becomes the red politics platform and Bluesky becomes the blue platform, continuing divisiveness in America?
A: I think it'll sort itself out, particularly if things shift towards an open protocol ecosystem because it allows a more graceful pulling apart and coming back together. This was part of my original thesis of why an open protocol and decentralization was necessary, because there's been a trend of people peeling off from social to more private spaces like Discord and WhatsApp, chat groups and private communities. But if you make it easy for people to form smaller communities [inside] big ones, then you let people migrate more easily between the small and big groups. On Bluesky you might be following a few people but you're seeing everything trending. So you can leave your small group and go bigger, meaning you can customize your Bluesky experience giving you flexibility in how you use social media. The danger of echo chambers is people get irrevocably stuck in one place. The lower friction there is to moving, the less stagnation there is.
Q: Are people using your sophisticated tools?
A: Yeah, definitely. They've been helpful for forming communities and customizing people's preferences. An example is some artists don't want to see AI art in their feed. That's not something that we will be taking down from a terms of service perspective. But there's an AI art labeler out there, and that means that you can report art you think is AI art, so you can label or hide all AI images from a feed.
Q: What's Bluesky's business model?
A: We're moving into subscriptions for a premium tier. We've also been building out a developer ecosystem and are planning to offer services to that ecosystem once there's more activity.
Q: Are you going to have something like the blue checks of X for authorized users?
A: You'll see once we roll it out, but part of our philosophy is that we shouldn't use financial incentives to change people's posting habits too drastically, because that introduces a game dynamic to social media. I it's better to stick to people posting for more organic reasons.
Q: Are you going to have advertising?
A: It's not something that we will never do, but it's something that we will never do in the current form. Current platforms have advertising as part of an algorithmic feed that forces you to spend as much time on there as possible in order to sell you more ad time. This is something that we can't do because we don't control a single algorithmic feed. That means we'll never be able to do ads the way traditional social media does. On the other hand, this is like the open web, and on the open web there are ads on websites, but you can always install ad blockers. There will always be an ad-free option.
Q: Are the VCs backing you different from typical venture investors?
A: They have focused on building a broader ecosystem rather than just maximizing a single company on the network, because the network effect is beyond a single company. Traditional VCs are used to Twitter and Snapchat, which are about getting everyone on their app and aggressively locking in and monetizing through ads. Because we haven't locked people in we can't complete that loop, and we don't want to complete that loop. What we do want to do is make the pie bigger for everyone in the network and then monetize by being a value provider.
Q: What about an IPO?
That's further down the road. Right now we're looking at growing, scaling and taking advantage of this moment where everyone's looking for alternatives.
Q: I read that your Chinese name [Graber's mother is Chinese] is Lantian, which means "Bluesky" in Mandarin. Is that where the name of the company comes from?
A: Actually Twitter named it Bluesky as a placeholder. The phrase relates to 'a blue sky idea,' as in open possibilities. I was working at building my own decentralized social network and I saw Twitter put out a Twitter account and said, 'Everyone who's interested in this Bluesky project, DM the Bluesky Twitter account.' I was like, This is exactly what I should be doing with my life. I should pursue this.' So I DMed them.
Q: Where did your nickname 'Jay' come from?
A: I picked it myself, actually based on Bluesky, because I thought, 'Well, a bird flies very well in the sky.'
Q: Was it connected to the Twitter bird?
A: I understood initially the Twitter bird was symbolically flying into an open protocol or a blue sky. I'm not sure that's the association that Twitter had, but I made that connection.
Q: Jack Dorsey recently left the Bluesky board. What is he focused on now?
I'm not sure what he's focused on, but I do know that he's always taken a portfolio approach to watching social media evolve. He has cross-posted across multiple social apps for a while, and supported Nostr, a peer-to-peer based social network, which essentially maximizes the freedom and anticensorship that a network has, over convenience, usability and strong safety features. I think that there's a niche for that, but those sorts of design trade-offs mean that it's much harder to get people on such a network. For instance, you have to know how to download what is essentially a crypto wallet in order to create an account. But yeah, Jack has left the board and we're really grateful for him helping us get off the ground.
Q: Do you still talk to him?
A: Not really. I'm just heads down.
Q: Nostr as well as Mastodon are competing with you?
Mastodon is another federated social network which we share some architectural similarities with, but Mastodon has more of a service-to-service, point-to-point protocol. It splits up a broader social network into small vertical chunks. Anyone can start their own piece of it, moderate it, treat it like that's their social site, and then talk to other sites. That creates a smaller community effect, because each chunk of Mastodon can set their own rules or block each other. Each ends up having its own culture and generally its own domain name. It's a bit clunky to move around because if you move then you have to change your identity, because it's moving from one website to another. We have basically turned that into several layers including a global talk-to-everyone layer which picks up all the posts in the network, so the people running their own servers don't have to do as much moderation, because that's a separate marketplace for moderation and curation.
Q: How are you planning to grow Bluesky?
A: We have 20 people right now so we're hiring. Check out our jobs page! We're also just growing the community. It's been great to see people taking that into their own hands, using starter packs, for instance, to grow a macroeconomists [group] on Bluesky, which previously wasn't super represented. They were able to quickly assemble, create some feeds and spin up a custom version of Bluesky. Seeing a project like that take off shows people the possibilities of what you can do when you come on here.
Write to Andy Serwer at andy.serwer@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
November 22, 2024 01:00 ET (06:00 GMT)
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