Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on her company’s ascendant year and what she’s planning next

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It would be impossible—or at least negligent—to tell the story of Bluesky without first acknowledging X. After all, it was Twitter cofounder and former CEO Jack Dorsey who first announced the idea for a decentralized social media system back in 2019 (before the platform became X). Dorsey even came up with the name, and then funded a small team of researchers with company cash. It grew into a stand-alone entity that launched to the public in early 2024.

And it was Elon Musk, who took over as CEO of X in 2022 and orchestrated its political and technical realignment—scuttling content moderation rules, transforming its blue-check verification into a pay-to-play model, and amplifying conservative voices—that drove millions of people to seek an alternative. Bluesky grew from about 3 million users at the start of 2024 to more than 28 million by Donald Trump’s inauguration in late January.

Yet Bluesky isn’t just a repository for social media’s disaffected. It’s also the best example of how “federation”—a buzzy Silicon Valley term that describes a structure wherein multiple independent groups collaborate to share information—can build a more equitable and independent social media experience. Getting to this point, for Bluesky CEO Jay Graber and her 21-person team, has meant some very long hours at the laptop. “It’s been all hands on deck,” she said in January.

Bluesky’s developers have created an open-source ecosystem called the ATmosphere—the AT stands for the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (or AT Protocol, for short)—that untethers social media from the command of any one person or organization. It allows users to create and curate their own algorithms that prioritize the voices and content they care about most; take their followers and posts with them if they switch platforms; and escape the influence of a given company’s seemingly arbitrary or politically motivated moderation policies. Users have several effective tools to block unwelcome followers and dozens of options for screening out different types of unwanted content from their feeds. People can also compile and share “starter packs” of accounts to follow, providing an easy, safe, and congenial onboarding ramp for newcomers.

Aesthetically, Bluesky looks a lot like the Twitter of yesteryear. And according to some longtime social media figures, the experience of using it recalls that bygone era too. “Bluesky is one of the last websites that actually gives you a decent amount of control over the posts you see instead of leaving it up to the most depraved algorithms devised by man,” says Paul Dochney, better known as the absurdist Twitter power-user dril. “I’m not going to sing Bluesky’s praises too much because it’s a social media site and therefore bad by definition,” says Max Collins, the front man of ’90s rock band Eve 6, who found a second calling as one of Twitter’s most brilliantly sardonic personalities. “But one thing I will say is it is so nice to be able to riff with people in the replies again.”

The AT Protocol’s publicly available source code also functions as a bedrock on which programmers can build new tools and apps. Should the AT Protocol continue to gain traction with web developers, it could upend the oligarch-controlled walled gardens of traditional social media. “We believe that the protocol is the fundamental guarantee on freedom of speech,” Graber says.

The question is whether both the protocol and the app can scale in an increasingly chaotic and crowded social media landscape. Despite its setbacks, X (now a private company) remains a force, and Meta claimed in November that Threads, which is essentially CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s answer to X, has 275 million monthly active users. And then there is the question of monetization: Bluesky has teased a premium subscription model for months and has quietly considered integrating advertising onto the platform, but so far that’s all hypothetical. Graber promises that Bluesky will never resemble the ad-stuffed feeds of other social platforms. “Our goal is to make sure that, if advertising has a place, it’s a much smaller role in a larger economy,” she says. “If we brought the experience quality down, then users would move away.”

Bluesky’s beginning

Graber was thinking about decentralization long before she began working at Bluesky. She first learned of the concept while earning a bachelor’s degree in science, technology, and society at the University of Pennsylvania in the early 2010s. One book in particular, Thinking in Systems, by the late environmentalist Donella Meadows, piqued her interest. “It laid out how all sorts of systems—biological, social, organizational, technological—share these similar properties,” she says. With each tentacle containing part of its nervous system, “an octopus is a very decentralized creature compared to a human being, and an open-source ecosystem is very decentralized compared to Microsoft.” Graber was fascinated by the notion of a decentralized internet, something that had only existed in minor experiments. (Graber tried using one, a social network called Diaspora. “It was a bit clunky,” she says, “but it gave me a sense that you can just build new kinds of systems.”)

She went on to work as a software engineer for two crypto companies and founded an events-focused social networking company called Happening. When Dorsey’s search for someone to lead his decentralization project kicked into high gear in 2021, Graber successfully pitched herself to run the operation, which was bolstered in early 2022 by an initial $13 million in funding from Twitter. (Bluesky’s current COO, Rose Wang, was Graber’s housemate in San Francisco while Graber was auditioning for the job. “She was doing her practice presentations with us,” Wang recalls, “so I got to know about the project very early on.”)

But the entire notion of Twitter participating in a shared social ecosystem went out the window later that year, when Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. Musk wasn’t interested in the open-source initiative. Graber and the team developing Twitter’s protocol raised $8 million in a seed round and spun out an app—that they launched by invite only in 2023. Since then, the new company has completed a $15 million Series A and has constructed an advisory board that includes Blockchain Capital partner Kinjal Shah (whose company led Bluesky’s Series A) and Mike Masnick, founder of the popular blog Techdirt.

For a time, Dorsey was also on the board, but he left last spring and deleted his Bluesky account in the process. In an interview with venture capitalist Mike Solana last May, Dorsey bemoaned Bluesky’s moderation approach. “[Users] started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it,” he said. “This is literally repeating all the mistakes [Twitter] made as a company,” he went on, presumably referencing accusations that Twitter silenced conservative voices on the platform. (Dorsey didn’t respond to Fast Company’s request for comment.)

Graber, for her part, says that while the Bluesky team does moderate content, it also offers, via its AT Protocol, users the ability to create their own moderation systems if they’re dissatisfied. “You can think of all these moderation pieces as Lego blocks,” she says. A user can assemble them (i.e., modules that screen for profanity or graphic language or the word politics) to create their own bespoke experience.

But when it comes to moderation, it’s impossible to please everyone. Bluesky noted 6.48 million complaints about its moderation service in 2024. And some users argue that the Lego-like moderation approach isn’t enough in some cases. In December 2024, the journalist Jesse Singal—who has written a number of pieces regarded as anti-trans by some on the left—joined Bluesky, prompting some 25,000 people to sign a petition calling for his removal from the platform. Bluesky responded with a thread indicating that it wouldn’t kick anyone out based on off-platform activity.

Graber, meanwhile, remains steadfast: “If people are unhappy with the approach that we’ve taken, they can customize it beyond what we’ve done,” she says.

A field day for developers

Lost in the debate about the merits and moderation policies of Bluesky is an even more profound idea: that even if Bluesky stalls, its AT Protocol could profoundly reshape the future of social media.

For one thing, it allows users to migrate their data, which essentially removes the implied contract we have always signed with social media companies. “The closest analogy to this is mobile phone number portability,” says Jonathan Bellack, senior director of the Applied Social Media Lab at Harvard University. Prior to a 2003 portability law, users received a new phone number if they switched carriers. “I’m sure at the time, Verizon or AT&T would have said, ‘We have tons of loyal customers,’ ” Bellack says. “But the reality was, you didn’t have a choice. What’s promising about Bluesky is that it’s starting to break that bundle open and provide choice.”

In the meantime, programmers are having a field day building new apps and programs atop the AT Protocol. Mark Cuban announced in January that he wanted to fund a TikTok alternative powered by the protocol. German developer Sebastian Vogelsang is using the protocol to create a photo-sharing app called Flashes that could one day take on Instagram.

In essence, Bluesky is offering would-be rivals a toolbox they can use to build their own vision of social media. “You return competition and innovation to the social media space,” Graber says—including, of course, competitors to Bluesky itself. She isn’t worried. In fact, that was the plan all along.

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