Bluesky CEO Jay Graber On Building A Better Social Ecosystem

Bluesky's for everyone.

When we think that over time the broader public conversation

needs to be on an open protocol,

which is what we're built on.

I'm Wired senior writer Kate Nibs.

Today I sat down with Bluesky, CEO Jay Graber.

We discuss how influencers are joining the platform,

Bluesky's relationship with news media

and whether she would welcome President Trump to Bluesky.

This is The Big Interview.

[upbeat music]

Jay, thank you so much for joining me today.

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

So last time we talked in December,

I believe Bluesky had just surpassed 24, 25 million users.

Where are you today?

34.6 million users.

What milestones are you hoping to hit by the end of 2025?

There's a lot of new features that we're launching

and we're excited to expand a lot.

I think getting in some of the things we've been talking

about for a long time.

Like communities.

Or what does that look like?

Yeah, communities is a way

that people are already using feeds.

A lot of people don't realize

that Bluesky is a bit like Reddit

and Twitter at the same time

because you can build feeds

that are essentially communities like the science feed is

run by scientists, moderated by scientists

and has its own rules.

And so this is something that you can do,

but you have to go outside the app to do it right now.

And so we've talked to people who are running these feeds

and they would like better tooling

for making these into communities in the app.

And so that's the big idea, which is essentially just making

it easier to create

and run a custom feed,

which is an interface you can install into the app

that's like your own timeline

and run that like a community of your own.

When you say you have to go outside

of the app, what does that mean?

There's third party services

that have built feed builders services like Sky Feeds

or Grays.

They let you create feeds without knowing how to code

and you can say, I want this list of people

to contribute to my feed.

You can post into it with this hashtag or this emoji

and then you run it essentially like it's a service

that you're providing other people,

other people can install it, subscribe to it, pin it

to the homepage of their app.

Any timeline for when this is coming?

Well, you asked about the end of the year, so I think

that's the, the most

concrete timeline we can give at the moment.

And I know that you recently rolled out video

as a feature, which we're very excited about.

I think a lot of people already conceptualize Bluesky

as sort of a X competitor,

but now are you gunning for TikTok too?

We are, as you know, built on an open protocol

and so other apps are starting to fill in these open spaces.

There is an app called Skylight

that has just gotten 150,000 users

and this is more of a straight TikTok alternative.

It lets you post short form videos, you know,

edit them in app, create them.

There's these other apps springing up now on the same

protocol like Skylight, like flashes for photos

that do different things.

And the great thing about this being an open protocol means

that you can move from Bluesky over to Skylight Social

and keep your followers.

So they go with you across these applications.

So when you say they go with me, if I'm going

to port my followers over

or even just join these new apps, how would I do that?

Like do I actually go into the app store

and download something new or how does it work?

Yeah, you download Skylight from the app store

and then you log in

with your Bluesky username if you wanna link them together.

If you don't want to link them, you can create

a new account, but if you link them,

you have the same number of followers and the photos

or videos that you post

to Skylight will also show up in Bluesky or vice versa.

And like over time the apps can decide is everything going

to, you know, be shared across

or is there gonna be some stuff that's separate?

But right now it's sort of just a shared data layer

where you can have people seeing your videos on Bluesky,

even if they're posted on Skylight.

And so does the Bluesky team have anything to do

with the development of Skylight or is it totally separate?

It's totally separate.

Do you know know who developed it at all?

Like what are your relationships like with the people

who are developing different apps on the protocol?

There was recently a conference called

the Atmosphere Conference.

We call the atmosphere the broader ecosystem of applications

around the AT protocol,

which is the layer Bluesky is built on.

And we met a lot of folks there

who are building even apps we didn't know were being built.

So there's private messengers being built,

new forms of moderation tools.

There's a lot of ones out there

that are innovating on new forms

of social built on this shared layer

because they can immediately tap into the Bluesky user base

and just add features on

rather than having to start from zero.

So that's the benefit to developers

of building in an open ecosystem.

You don't have to start from zero each time you start over

and now you have 34.6 million users to tap into.

So I know there's Bluesky the app

and then it's built on this app protocol

and that's how all of these people are developing

these new cool video and photo apps and everything.

So the teams are separate.

As the CEO of Bluesky,

like if one of the video apps were to go mega viral

and surpass Bluesky wildly, et cetera, would that help you

or would it just sort of be a wash for you?

It would help us because these are shared backends

if you recall.

So that means that all those videos would be being able

to be viewed on Bluesky too.

It'd probably change the way

that people could interact over on Bluesky

because all this content would be coming in

from another application,

just like all the content created on Bluesky

can be borrowed over there.

We can borrow from the other apps as well.

And then it means that, you know,

if they're building on our services over time,

one of the pathways to monetization we've mentioned is

developer services.

So building out infrastructure for new apps to get started.

Sort of like a fire base for social, if you will,

where you get new apps off the ground

and then you know, provide infrastructure to them.

So I've noticed that there has been sort of an influx

of big creators onto Bluesky,

but right now there's no direct way for creators

to monetize their work on Bluesky in the way

that there is on say YouTube.

Are you working on ways to change that?

Yeah, one things that we've seen is

that we're not giving creators money

but we're giving them really great traffic

and that can convert to money

because if you are a YouTube creator or you have a Patreon

and you're posting your Patreon link,

one big thing is we don't down rank links

and so you're getting higher link traffic on Bluesky,

even with a smaller follower count.

This is true of small creators

and even news organizations have been reporting this

difference in engagement and click-through numbers.

We've heard from large news organizations

that Bluesky is giving better click-throughs

and subscription rates

and so this converts to money once you

get people onto your site.

So I think this is one of the big benefits we're leaning

into right now is just giving people that direct traffic,

that direct relationship with their audience

and giving them the ability to monetize

however they want.

Down the road we might introduce other mechanisms,

but right now it's just about being the best platform

to serve creators needs in terms of giving them attention,

giving them engagement and giving them the ability

to move with their followers right?

So as I mentioned before, if you're a video creator

and you do some content on Bluesky to build up a following

and then you download Skylight

and you start posting different kinds of content over there,

you can have that follow graph just go with you

and start building on it.

So it's cumulative rather than also

as a creator starting from scratch each app you move to.

I love that as someone who's jumped from app

to app in the past, that sounds very helpful.

And when you were talking about traffic

for traditional news organizations,

I know that traditionally the news media

and social media have had sort

of an antagonistic relationship.

Like it's been obviously a huge driver of traffic

for news outlets,

but then they're sort of beholden

to people like Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk

and what they wanna do to the news.

Do you have a broader vision for how you want Bluesky

to interact

with like the information ecosystem or the news media?

Yeah, we want to create a more direct relationship again

and be the place where we make those relationships happen.

And so rather than being the single feed

that all user attention passes through

where small algorithm changes can affect

how much traffic a news organization is getting,

we want to give direct traffic to news orgs

and even let them do things like build their own feeds

or link their domain directly as their username,

clicking that just clicks you directly through to your site.

You can also right now create verified news feeds.

Some people have been building these in the community

and so users can just scroll

through all the news articles being posted.

This means that you're getting direct traffic

because you're not depending on the algorithm,

which might be at any given moment showing more

or less news to a given user.

If the users are interested they can just subscribe

to a newsfeed and see all the articles being published

on Bluesky in one place.

So recently there's been a pretty noticeable influx

of bigger name celebrities on the app,

including some of the biggest names in democratic politics

like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton

just joined for instance.

Are you doing anything to court the celebrities

or really famous influencers?

We're doing some community outreach.

We've had a very community driven growth strategy

and so we're seeing a lot of growth in sectors

with maybe not as big celebrities,

but a lot of traction in areas like you know, sports media.

For example, Mina Kimes, a sports reporter came on

and she created a starter pack which got

a lot of follows very quickly

because when you create starter packs,

which are essentially lists of accounts

that bundle together everyone in a given field,

when new people come on through that link,

they're following all of them at once.

So that's been a way that communities have been onboarding

outside of, you know, politics

or like even large celebrities, we have game devs,

we have sports, we have science.

Lots of these different interests are kind of starting

with people building custom starter packs

and then bringing on folks directly into their community.

Some of these bigger name people who are joining,

you know, they do tend

to be liberal politicians when they're politicians.

I'm wondering, would you welcome President Trump

if he was debating joining Bluesky?

Yeah, Bluesky's for everyone, you know,

and we think that over time the broader public conversation

needs to be on an open protocol,

which is what we're built on because

that lets people choose their own moderation preferences.

It lets people choose their own feed preferences

and things can evolve without it being a binary choice,

which is like everyone has to adhere

to this set of moderation rules

or that one you can have customization both within

the app and outside of it.

Right now, you know, it's people who feel

that there's more direct benefits

to being on here if you are a creator

or somebody who wants to have a direct relationship

with your audience.

But over time the benefit

of this protocol based approach I think will extend

to all sorts of social media users.

So right now we're in this moment

where free speech is under threat

and free speech on the internet is under threat.

I'm wondering how you envision Bluesky's relationship

to speech, including political speech

and what your obligations are to your users

and I guess to the internet at large.

I think building on an open protocol like we've done is

the most enduring foundation for speech

because what we're doing is creating a digital commons

of user data where you really get

to control your own identity and your data.

And then we're building, you know, infrastructure

that I hope stays around for a really long time

because Bluesky, the app is just one site

where speech can happen and all these other apps are showing

that you can have an ecosystem of a lot

of different applications.

This is like the web itself.

Early on we had AOL

and accessing the internet happen through AOL

and if the AOL web portal wasn't showing you something,

it would be a lot harder to find

and then more unopinionated browsers came along

and these just linked you out to the broader internet

and now anyone can put up a blog

and host their own views online.

And then there's larger websites if you want to, you know,

be on Substack or Medium, but you can either self-host

or choose one of these, this is the kind

of ecosystem we're building, anyone can self-host.

And then the question of, you know, freedom of speech

not reach is made very tangible

because then the sites like the sort of mediums of the world

that host a lot of blogs get

to choose their moderation rules,

but if individuals are unhappy with that,

they can start a new site or host their own blog.

For people who might not be familiar

with the phrase freedom of speech, not freedom of reach.

Could you explain it?

Yeah, this was a principle

that old Twitter talked about early on

and when we were spinning out of Twitter, I never worked

for Twitter, but we opened up this new design space

around Bluesky, which was how do we embed

that into a protocol layer?

So the freedom of speech is embedded in the protocol.

Anyone can do the equivalent of standing up a new blog

and then the sites like Bluesky,

which are the applications, get to decide, you know,

how are we going to prioritize reach, you know,

we do have a default algorithm

but you can choose any other algorithm you want.

And so we don't necessarily show everything in the algorithm

or the default service,

but if you want to find something elsewhere,

you can go elsewhere in the ecosystem to find it.

That means that you have the pathways

that the apps are deciding what is going

to be most accessible

and then if you want

to change the rules you can build another thing

and that's guarantee of freedom of speech

is being always able to build your own thing

or find your own space that serves you the most.

So as you're scaling up,

I know that you hired additional moderators to tackle

some of the necessary moderation challenges like CSAM.

How challenging is it as as you're scaling up to sort

of balance offering this level of customization

with just the sort of basic things you need to do

as a social network for everyone?

Like you know, keep pornography off for example?

Yeah, I mean we're running

a foundational moderation service,

so we get to choose the rules within the Bluesky app

and like I said, you can fork off do your own thing,

but within the parameters of Bluesky we're setting

what the rules are and so we employ

moderation team to do this.

We face some of the same challenges

as centralized social apps

because to run a centralized moderation team you're doing

a lot of the same kinds of work.

And so I would say it's, it's very similar at the base layer

and then we have this extra options

that we've layered on top for users

to choose their own spaces.

And in some cases that means that users are able

to resolve things more locally.

So for example, within the feeds

that run a bit like communities, you can moderate things,

resolve things locally,

but still it's a broader Bluesky application

has its own set of rules.

How many countries are you operating in right now

or do you have users everywhere?

We have a lot of users in different countries.

Some of the biggest are the US of course, Japan, Brazil,

and various countries in the EU.

Are there unique challenges in certain locations

and if so, what are they?

Each place has their own regulatory guidelines

and you know, we try to be in compliance

and that's part of being a global company is just learning

to operate in different places.

I think over the long run there will be applications

just like Skylight is targeted towards video,

maybe there's applications targeted

towards different markets.

Early on we saw several Japanese users build Japan focused

applications before we had gotten

internationalization into the app.

So you know, different languages depending on

where you're based, people built their own apps to do that.

So that's an example of how you can customize things

to your own local market.

Speaking of local markets, we're in Seattle,

which is where you are based,

but is Bluesky currently remote forward workspace?

How are you guys set up?

We're a fully remote team

and part of the reason for this is we wanted to hire people

who care deeply about the mission

and are really aligned in what we're doing.

Have some of the experience in social,

have experience in open protocols

and that combination is rare and hard to find.

So if we tried to hire all in one city,

we wouldn't be getting the best people out there.

But as it is, we've hired from several different countries

all over the United States

because there's people all over

that are interested in the vision of what we're building.

And what brought you to Seattle originally?

I moved here during the pandemic.

I was previously in San Francisco

and it's a really nice city.

I mean the nature, the water, the mountains, it's a place

where nature is really accessible and I really like that.

And I understand that you have a background in crypto.

I know that the largest investor in Bluesky is

a venture capital firm that sort of specializes

in crypto investing.

Does Bluesky have more in common

with a crypto startup than one might like

originally suspect?

Well the term Web3 got very associated

with cryptocurrency, so it's not a good word to use for

what we're doing anymore because there isn't a blockchain

or a cryptocurrency involved.

But if you wanna think about Web3

as evolving the social Web2 version forward,

that kind of is what we're doing.

We're evolving forward social media

that was based in centralized companies into something

that is open and distributed

and that was some of the goals underlying the Web3 movement

that had a lot of blockchains involved.

We just didn't build on that technical foundation

of a blockchain because we didn't need it.

You can achieve a lot of the same things using

open web principles and more Web 1.0 kinds of technology,

which is, for example,

our identity system let's you use a domain name

as your username so you can be like

wired.com as your username.

That's just a web 1.0 technology brought

into a social media sphere.

And so I think our investors really saw that vision

and they're also excited about building out

the broader dev ecosystem,

which is something we really wanted alignment on.

We want investors who care about seeing this entire world

of social media come to life,

not just one application Bluesky succeeding.

Yeah. What would building out the dev ecosystem look like?

It's starting to happen.

So the Atmosphere Conference,

which I mentioned was started and run by the community.

We heard about it partway through and sponsored it,

but they found other sponsors as well.

And it's something that's taking off sort of as a movement

of people to reclaim social and Bluesky

and the Open Protocol is a great place

to do a lot of this building.

People are getting in and starting

to build different applications,

starting to propose new ways the protocol could be evolved.

Private data for example, is not something

that we have in Bluesky at the moment

as part of the protocol, but people are proposing new ways

to do private data for their applications

that they're building.

And so moving forward the app protocol,

I don't think all the development will just be

within the Bluesky company.

It'll be other people building their own applications

and then modifying the protocol

and suggesting changes

that meet the needs of what they're trying to do.

And when you say the Bluesky company,

like would you be the CEO of all of this

or just the platform?

I am just the CEO of Bluesky Social.

So we have built out the app protocol

and we maintain the Bluesky application.

So we'll always maintain the Bluesky app,

but the app protocol is going to take on a life of its own.

Pieces of it are going to be standardized,

pieces of it are going to be stewarded by the community

and it's going to evolve in different directions

as the new people who are getting involved shape it.

Right now you do have some investor money.

Is your stance on advertising still the same?

Where are you with subscriptions?

Basically this is me asking you

how are you planning to make money?

Yeah, subscriptions are actually coming soon as well.

So that got delayed

for a few months last year doing our growth spurt,

but we're re-approaching how we're gonna do them

and I think the next steps down the road are also

to look into what kind of marketplaces can we build

that span some of these different applications.

There's other apps in the ecosystem that are experimenting

with say, you know, placing sponsored posts

in feeds and things like that.

I've mentioned before, I think ads eventually in some form

work their way into an attention economy,

but we're not gonna do ads the way

traditional social apps did

because we don't have a single feed

and the traditional ad model is usually getting everyone

to spend as much time engaged on a single feed as possible

and then putting ads in there.

Since we have lots of different feeds.

Even if we did that, you could switch away

and use a different feed because this one has too many ads.

And so it kind of constrains the open model of

what we've done, constraints what we can do.

We'll just let people experiment

and see what comes out of it.

Some people watching this video might not be

super familiar with Bluesky.

What do you want people to know about this platform?

I'd want them to know this is

a choose your own adventure game so you can get in there

and customize the experience as much as you want.

And if you're not finding what you want

within the Bluesky app,

there might be another app out there

that is still part of the Bluesky at protocol ecosystem

that will give you what you want.

Like if it's you know, videos or images

or maybe a different kind of feed experience,

like let's say the Discover Feed isn't giving you

what you want, you can install a different one

and find the stuff you want

and if you can't find it, you can build it.

And so the options are really endless.

I think it takes some time to get in there

and really set things up the way that you like it,

but then once you do, it's a great place to be

because you don't get this level of control anywhere else.

I mean you've kind of sold me on becoming an app developer

for this protocol.

I might be making a career pivot soon, so thank you.

Yeah, I think there's lots of technical folks who watch,

you know, Wired interviews as well

and I would just love for them to know

that this is an open field to build on.

This is like early social era

where you can build anything on fully open APIs.

Well thank you again for joining us.

Thank you. [cameras snapping]

[upbeat music]