Two months after the Bluesky social network launched in February 2023, it gained its first bona fide celebrity user: the comedian 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 He was heading to Bluesky.
“It’s real, it’s 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 stupid political commentators and cryptocurrency scammers, while leaving out people you actually follow,” he said.
“If Bluesky can promote itself as a sort of last bastion against ad bots, AI crap, and nefarious algorithms, I think it will be in a very strong position,” he continued. But “it’s likely only a matter of time before one of their highest-ranking tech gurus decides to break the dam so all that wastewater can flow.”
Bluesky was never intended to be an app, or even a company. It started as an open source research project at Twitter, a skunkworks team led by open internet evangelist Jay Graber. Graber’s mandate was to build a protocol, a shared language that computers could use to communicate with each other, designed specifically for social media. Through the AT Protocol (or Authentic Transfer, as in “where are you online?”), Twitter and other companies could exchange information with each other, creating an open network where posts could be shared freely across social platforms.
But after Elon Musk bought Twitter, it became clear that Bluesky was no longer on his roadmap. Twitter, under Musk, began to transform, facing an advertiser boycott, a user exodus, and eventually a name change to X. So the team that created the protocol created a quick app, just to show how it could be used. They launched it as an invitation-only social network in 2023.
Graber began running Bluesky two years earlier, after Parag Agrawal, who would soon become CEO of Twitter, offered him the job. The move proved prophetic for Graber, who had previously worked in cryptocurrencies and created social apps. His mother, who grew up in China, gave him the first name Langian, which in Mandarin means blue sky. (The similarity, however, is a coincidence, as the project had already been named before Graber’s involvement.)
Since launching, Bluesky has been unusually successful: It raised a modest $15 million Series A round in October, when it had 13 million users, and its user base has since nearly doubled to more than 25 million. . The app has caused panic among Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, whose own Twitter competitor Threads has been quick to copy many of its features. But as Dril acknowledges, Bluesky is a company with investors who want to make money. And that could one day clash with Graber’s user-first approach to social media: putting people who use Bluesky in control of its core functions.
“When opening the app, the choice was to make sure that everyone could see how we were doing it, that it was possible to create social apps at scale and that developers could come in and start building,” Graber told Forbes.
Instead of letting Bluesky determine what you see, in what order, and why, Graber and his team designed the app to allow users to create and subscribe to any number of feeds. Do you want to see posts only from your mutual insurance companies? There’s a feed for that. Do you want to see every post about gardening or trail running, or an endless stream of freebie links to news articles that usually have paywalls? There are feeds for them too, and BlueSky does not own them. Your users do.
Bluesky’s ethos of user choice extends beyond the feeds you choose to follow. Don’t like the lack of company verification? Build your own system, like Talking Points Memo journalist Hunter Walker did. Don’t want to see AI art? Crowdsourcing a tagging 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.)
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Bluesky has so far avoided the strategy that other social platforms have used
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 move frictionlessly between platforms they like best, meaning Bluesky will have to compete with any number of other companies to provide the best user experience. .
By empowering the people, Bluesky has so far avoided the strategy that other social platforms have used to make billions of dollars: collecting vast amounts of intimate data about its users and then allowing advertisers to target them based on those data. At least today, Bluesky is completely public and its user data is available to people outside the company, so there’s no secret sauce to getting advertisers to pay. It’s not that Graber is opposed to ads, but when it comes to social media, he said they have become “too extractive.”
“We think of it a little bit like the resource curse: when a country discovers oil and it becomes a very profitable source of income, this phenomenon occurs where other industries are neglected. “They don’t build the rest of the economy.”
If the ads are for oil, Graber doesn’t yet know what Bluesky’s solar, wind or hydro revenue streams might be. The company is preparing to test several subscription products, and has left the door open to test some ads as well, in a way that would keep users in control.
Graber is aware of what she calls “bus trouble,” or the scenarios that could happen if she and her executive team, God forbid, get hit by a bus: “We’ve closed things open enough that “We cannot significantly degrade the user experience because we have opened the market to entrepreneurs.”
What will really keep the AT Protocol independent, Graber said, is having people other than her and her team manage it. She said she has started talking to standards bodies, international organizations that define each code language, but that true decentralization, or “billionaire-proofing,” as she has called it, depends on people outside of Bluesky adopting the protocol and make it yours.
There are efforts to expand the use of the protocol. One day after the New Year arrived, cryptic signs began appearing all over San Francisco. The signs show a cloudy blue sky, an asterisk, and mocked 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 little more effort from users than X or Meta Threads. People who don’t know how to code aren’t likely to be creating 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 takes a bit of work. effort. But barriers to entry fade when the product is good enough.
Billionaire investor and frequent publisher Mark Cuban thinks so. It has 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 are just a fraction of the 8.8 million he’s amassed on X. “There are a lot of people I disagree with,” Cuban told Forbes, but “that’s part of any engaging platform.” . Still, he said, personal moderation tools, such as blocking or reporting, “kill trolls’ incentives to troll.”
Bluesky has some moderation features that other platforms don’t, such as the option to separate a quote post from its original post (a feature that’s largely positive, but can sour if people use it to pile on a post they don’t care about). like). But in large part, what makes moderation on Bluesky different from other platforms is the liberality with which its new users have employed tools that exist, or at least used to exist, on other platforms. Bluesky gained half a million users in one day after X (formerly Twitter) announced that its “blocking” feature would no longer completely block people.
Derek Guy, known online as “the menswear guy,” also praised the platform for its more civilized clientele, although he confessed that the friendly environment might not work as well with his personal brand: “Bluesky is a much more positive, but bad if you, like me, have built a following partly thanks to idiots. There aren’t that many idiots in Bluesky.”
This article was originally published on Forbes US.
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