Bluesky’s CEO on building a new kind of social media

This week, I have an exclusive interview with Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky, the decentralized social media service incubated by Twitter that is now gearing up for a wider release. Also: I talk to David Marcus about his new Bitcoin startup, share some notes on what I’m hearing about the FTC’s antitrust lawsuit against Meta, and more.

As Elon Musk continues wielding Twitter like a blunt weapon against competitors like Substack, the downsides of centralized social media platforms are becoming more apparent every day. For those like me who have built a valuable audience on Twitter over the years, it’s unnerving to consider that those relationships could be broken or taken away completely in the blink of an eye.

That underlying unease animates much of the consternation toward Musk these days. Zooming out, it’s also why I’m closely watching the rise of decentralized social media platforms like Mastodon. Ultimately, they promise that a Musk-like figure won’t be able to censor or ban someone from the underlying protocol. I like to use the analogy of email service providers: you can theoretically be kicked off Gmail and still take your contacts and emails with you to another address.

Before Musk reluctantly bought Twitter, former CEO Jack Dorsey funded and spun off Bluesky, a public benefit company tasked with building an open-source, decentralized social media protocol that he wanted Twitter itself to eventually operate on. Bluesky remains invite-only to access but is now starting to let in more users, including me, as of this week. After setting up my account, I wanted to talk with CEO Jay Graber. She agreed to answer some of my questions last night over Signal for what I believe is her first interview since she joined to lead Bluesky in August 2021.

Right now, Bluesky’s interface is a shameless clone of Twitter. A key difference is that it defaults to a chronological feed of who you follow and lets you choose to toggle between a “What’s Hot” algorithmic feed. The service currently lacks the basic tools it needs to live up to its decentralized mission, including the ability to export account data. Big parts of what the underlying AT Protocol (atproto) promises to deliver, such as a marketplace of feed algorithms to choose from, also don’t exist yet. The company’s approach to content moderation was just outlined today. It’s early days.

Still, I’m fascinated by what Bluesky will become and what it means for where social media is headed more broadly. In the near term, it represents direct competition to Mastodon and Nostr, another decentralized protocol that is also funded by Dorsey.

Below is my interview over text with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber, lightly edited for clarity:

I saw you posted (what are Bluesky posts called btw?) that the waitlist for the service jumped to over 1.2 million after Elon Musk bought Twitter. How many accounts have you let on so far, and when do you think the full waitlist is allowed on?

I hesitate to give timelines because we’re a small team and are working hard right now to keep up with demand and build out the moderation tooling that we think is essential to broader adoption. We’ve let in about 20,000 people so far.

Officially, we simply call posts on Bluesky “posts” because they are a common component in the underlying protocol (the AT Protocol) and will show up in many different kinds of client apps. It’s a topic of debate for our current users, though.

Mastodon/ActivityPub seem to be where most of the energy in decentralized social media is going. What’s the main thing the AT Protocol offers that’s better, and how do you compete with that head start? I’m also curious if you ever see interoperability between atproto and ActivityPub happening.

We’ve designed a protocol that has three big things we think are missing from the Mastodon ecosystem: account portability, global discoverability, [and] composable, customizable curation and moderation.

We don’t see ourselves as being in competition with Mastodon — we welcome approaches to decentralize social platforms and are simply taking a different, opinionated approach. Our focus right now is on building out our approach and proving it works at scale.

I know Jack Dorsey is on your board and helped dream this all up. These days, he seems much more into Nostr and spending his time there. Has there been a change with his involvement in Bluesky?

Nope, he’s still on our board. He also welcomes multiple approaches to achieving a decentralized social ecosystem, and I believe he ultimately just wants this paradigm of protocols instead of platforms to succeed.

Are you all planning a business model to support all this (both for you, the company, and developers), or is it too early for that? A marketplace of algorithms is compelling to me, but I’m wondering what the incentives will be for those algorithms to be made.

We have some ideas for business models but are currently focused on the near-term challenges of moderation and growth. There’s a lot to tackle here! In an open marketplace, there will very likely be value-added services that people find worth paying for.

Are you ready for Elon to ban your links?

As the owner of a centralized site, he is free to do that if he wants. But this is exactly why what we’re building is important — the AT Protocol gives users freedom, and developers locked-open APIs.

Because even if Bluesky the app decides to block something, I can take my profile and social graph to another client and not rebuild from scratch?

100 percent. That’s the benefit of account portability between services that we’ve designed around. Users can still opt in to the convenience of an easy-to-use service, but the user’s ability to leave when they want constrains the service’s ability to abuse their power.

When I think about the career of David Marcus over the past few years, the proverb “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” comes to mind.

After leaving Facebook at the end of 2021, the former head of the company’s failed Libra cryptocurrency decided to strike out on his own with a startup called Lightspark. He convinced most of the initial team behind Libra to join him and raised over $170 million in funding at close to a $1 billion valuation.

This week, Lightspark announced its initial suite of products for making it easier to facilitate payments through the Lightning Network, a nascent protocol that enables fast, real time transactions through Bitcoin. With Lightspark, Marcus sees an opportunity to take another crack at the problem he was trying to solve with Libra originally.

“Unsurprisingly, we’re still very motivated by the same things and have a lot of passion for helping bring a true protocol for payments and money on the internet,” he told me during a recent interview. (I’ll have a full conversation with him in a future episode of the Decoder podcast, so stay tuned for that.) “The internet has been around for way too long to not have a protocol for moving value on it.”

Even still, Marcus is trying this at a difficult time. Crypto as a category has been hit hard by the implosion of FTX, a plethora of pump and dump schemes, companies building things with little to no utility, and rising interest rates. This has all led many (including Marcus) to think a protracted, multi-year crypto winter is ahead. It’s not just people in the industry who feel that way; a recent survey conducted by Pew found that 43 percent of US adults who have bought cryptocurrencies are now “not very or not at all confident” in the technology.

While consumer confidence in crypto may be as low as ever, Marcus believes that developer interest in using crypto for payments is still on the rise. And SEC chair Gary Gensler’s acknowledgment that Bitcoin is a commodity — a definition he hasn’t bestowed to other cryptocurrencies — gave Marcus ease to embark on what he hopes is his life’s work: “It’s really, truly a decentralized type of network that also benefits from regulatory clarity at a time where regulatory clarity is really not where it needs to be for basically every other asset out there and every other blockchain.”

By removing the tediousness out of Lightning, Marcus predicts the protocol will be used for a wide variety of use cases, including microtransactions and payments that are converted from and to fiat money so quickly that Bitcoin’s role in the process is imperceptible. “When you’re actually using any of these apps, you’re not thinking of an app being hosted on AWS or AWS using a Cisco router. And if we can get to that level of abstraction, that would be great.”

The discovery process for the FTC’s big social media monopoly lawsuit against Meta is heating up. More than 70 former Meta employees, including many who held senior positions across the company over the years, have been called in by the agency for depositions, I’m told. Meanwhile, Meta’s lawyers have been conducting lengthy depositions with executives from companies they are positioning as competitors. This comes after Meta issued broad subpoenas to over 100 firms asking to see everything but the kitchen sink, including internal “documents sufficient to show who you view as your actual and potential competitor,” according to a copy of one such subpoena I was forwarded.

The FTC stated goal is to force a spinoff of Instagram and WhatsApp, which will likely hinge on its ability to accurately define and defend the squishy market of “personal social networking.” The strategy for now, based on what I can gather from talking to people involved in the case, is to try and dismantle Meta’s argument that it competes with a legion of services for user attention in just about every category. My understanding is that the FTC is also asking former employees about more ancillary Meta products like Marketplace, its classifieds competitor to Craigslist. Interestingly, the EU charged Meta with antitrust violations by tying Marketplace to Facebook late last year. As one former employee put it to me, sometimes Europe copies the US, and sometimes it’s the other way around.

I’ve been collecting some links that further topics I’ve covered in past editions:

This 10-year roadmap graphic from a 2016 Facebook conference came up in my Twitter feed the other day. What ever happened to the lasers?

That’s it for this week. I’ll be back next Thursday. In the meantime, if you have any feedback on this edition, I’d love to feature your commentary next week.

The first three of you to ping me get invite codes to Bluesky.