Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Bluesky has really taken off since the election, and since the Decoder team took some time off for Thanksgiving break, we felt it was a great time to bring back the interview we did earlier this year with Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky, the upstart competitor to Meta’s Threads and the platform formerly known as Twitter.

At the time, Bluesky was a pretty small platform. It had just reached 5 million users when Jay and I spoke. But since the election, Bluesky’s growth has absolutely skyrocketed to more than 20 million users, and it's starting to put real competitive pressure on Threads at the feature level. As Bluesky really ramps up, it seemed like a great time to engage with some of the core questions behind its design and see if Jay and her team can keep it up.

Links:

• Twitter’s heir apparent isn’t X or Threads — it’s Bluesky | The Verge
• Bluesky now has more than 20 million users | The Verge
• Bluesky moves deeper into moderation hell | The Verge
• Twitter is funding research into a decentralized version of its platform | The Verge
• Bluesky built a decentralized protocol for Twitter | The Verge
• The fediverse, explained | The Verge
• Bluesky showed everyone’s ass | The Verge
• Can ActivityPub save the internet? | The Verge
• Bluesky snags former Twitter/X Trust & Safety exec cut by Musk | TechCrunch
• Protocols, Not Platforms: A Technological Approach to Free Speech — Mike Masnick

Transcript: https://www.theverge.com/e/23872913

Credits:

Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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