On May 1, Gold House unveiled its annual A100 List, recognizing the 100 most impactful Asian Pacific leaders across industries. See the full list here.
This March, Bluesky’s CEO Jay Graber showed up to her SWSX keynote speech wearing a shirt that seemed to pay tribute to Mark Zuckerberg. It was an oversized black tee with Latin block lettering, just like the shirt that Zuckerberg had designed and worn the year before. Zuckerberg’s t-shirt read “Aut Zuck aut nihil” or, “Zuck or nothing”—a reference to a famous quote about Julius Caesar and his uncompromising lust for power. Graber’s shirt, however, read “Mundus sine Caesaribus”—”a world without Caesars.”
Graber’s shirt was a pointed critique of Zuckerberg. She strives to run and build Bluesky, an ascendant social media app which opened to the public in early 2024, antithetically to the centralized way in which Zuckerberg has built Meta, she tells TIME. “These tech companies have built online kingdoms where the CEOs style themselves as self-made monarchs,” she says. “We have made them that by giving them our time, our attention. I want people to remember that they can take that back.”
This message has increasing resonance in a hyper-centralized era of social media, in which tech titans like Zuckerberg and Elon Musk make unilateral decisions about censorship, privacy, and data harvesting for AI. The day after the election, as users searched for a haven from right-wing trolls, paid posts and disinformation bots, X lost 115,000 users, while BlueSky’s daily usage climbed 500%. (X’s U.S. daily active user count remained 10 times that of Bluesky, however.) Bluesky now has 35 million users, the most prominent of which include Stephen King, George Takei, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. It is by far the largest decentralized social network in the world.
Bluesky still has a ways to go toward profitability and gaining widespread adoption outside of its large base of liberal supporters. But Graber’s goal, she says, is not to supplant Zuckerberg or Musk atop the social media heap.
“We reject centralized authority dictating the rules for everyone else,” she says. “We don't want to create a world where I'm a new emperor who rules more kindly. We want a world where there's no need for emperors at all.”
Visually, Bluesky’s interface looks a lot like Twitter: it shows you an infinite scroll of text posts that are limited to 300 characters or less. New users can join the conversation quickly by following “starter packs,” which are user-created lists of accounts based on shared interests. There are lots of people talking about politics, pop culture, sports, and memes.
The big difference between Twitter and Bluesky is that the latter is powered by an open-source protocol, which allows users to customize their algorithms and content feeds. Similar to Reddit, tight-knit communities have formed on Bluesky and developed their own modes of communication and censorship rules. And Bluesky’s architecture means that users can take their followers and posts with them to another platform, provided it’s built atop the same protocol.
Bluesky wasn’t Graber’s idea: Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey announced Bluesky as a decentralized version of Twitter in 2019, funding a small team of researchers. In 2021, Graber, who had long been interested in decentralized technology—including working on cryptocurrency projects—pitched herself to run the organization. At the time, San Francisco was in the throes of lockdown, and Graber was living in a large group house full of entrepreneurs. Rose Wang, Graber’s then floormate who is now Bluesky’s COO, says that the unique circumstances of COVID helped inform Bluesky’s development.
“There were a lot of community challenges, of how do you get people to feel safe together in this time?” she says. “I think that Jay’s and my experience of building community in the real world helps a lot toward how we think about building community online.”
Female-led startups are rare in Silicon Valley; Pitchbook found that they receive only 6% of all venture capital deals. Graber says that her and Wang’s identities have shaped their approach to their company. “Our experience as women online has meant that we prioritized moderation first and foremost as one of the things we think a healthy social platform needs,” she says.
In 2022, Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion. While he originally stumped for making its algorithm open-sourced—which could be drawn from Bluesky’s research and tech—he instead quickly cut off Bluesky’s funding. So Graber and her team looked elsewhere, eventually raising funding rounds of $8 and then $15 million. They also decided to make Bluesky a public benefit corporation, which requires them to pursue social and public good alongside generating profits.
In 2023, as Bluesky's team readied their invite-only system for launch, demand surged, with numerous prospective users urging them to lift the platform's restrictions. But its decentralized tools weren’t quite ready, so Graber opted to keep Bluesky small until the tools were built. “That is probably one of the hardest decisions a company can make: to throttle growth and to instead stay principled and build the underlying plumbing,” Wang says.
Graber now presides over 24 employees and over 100 content moderator contractors who work to remove dangerous posts like child-sexual-abuse material and violent threats. Bluesky’s approach to content moderation raised the ire of Dorsey, who left the board last spring and later contended that Bluesky was centralizing and that its moderation tools were becoming too heavy-handed. Graber argues that it’s mostly up to the users to create their own moderation systems in order to decide what they see and what they don’t. “You have this open right to leave—where if you disagree with the services, moderation actions, or design choices, you can build your own thing,” she says.
Popular feeds on Bluesky include Science and Blacksky, for Black community building, which has 370,000 monthly active users, according to Rudy Fraser, a technologist who launched the feed. “Some of the feeds are based around people who are finding shared affinity in gender or their identities,” Graber says. “My goal of building an open network is also so that people and communities who feel alienated from existing social media platforms and structures of power can build their own spaces.”
Bluesky still skews extremely left politically, with conservatives complaining that they have faced censorship or harassment on the platform. Bluesky’s user growth has also slowed significantly since its post-election bump. And its 35 million users pale in comparison to the hundreds of millions of users on X and Meta’s Threads, to say nothing of the billions of users on Instagram and TikTok.
Graber says she’s not concerned about the slowdown, noting that the platform has experienced several waves of fits and starts. She adds that she’s comfortable moving more slowly to avoid the pitfalls of earlier social media platforms that prioritized growth above all else—only to degrade the user experience once they achieved dominance. “Social networks have gotten too used to thinking users are trapped because of the network effects, so they can degrade the main experience of the feed,” she says. “This monetization model is probably not going to last indefinitely, because it hits some natural limits where people get tired of it.”
It is now up to Graber and Wang to find a new monetization model beyond incessant ads or wielding user data to train AI models. Graber says she’s considering subscription models or monetizing Bluesky’s marketplaces of custom tools, but no concrete plans have been set in motion.
While Bluesky crawls towards monetization, Graber and Wang are all too happy for independent entrepreneurs to build other platforms on top of Bluesky’s AT protocol, which are also open-sourced and interoperable with each other. (Think of how Gmail, Yahoo, and other inboxes were built atop standard email protocols.) These new projects include Flashes—an Instagram alternative which has been downloaded more than a hundred thousand times—and Skylight, a TikTok clone backed by Mark Cuban.
If someone wants to build a Bluesky clone atop the infrastructure, Graber and Wang aren’t going to stop them. “If Bluesky the server shuts down overnight, Greensky can pop up the next morning,” Wang says. “People ask us all the time, ‘How can we trust you?’ And our answer is, ‘Don't trust us. Trust the infrastructure.’”