Bluesky's Grand Vision: Jay Graber on Decentralizing the Social Internet with the AT Protocol
As I waited to meet with Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky, on the 25th floor of an office building in downtown Seattle, I stared out at the city’s waterfront and thought: God fucking damn it. Stretching in every direction was a wall of dense, gray, tragically boring fog. And here I was about to interview the head of a social platform named after good weather. On camera, no less.
Then something miraculous happened. Moments before Graber showed up, the haze lifted. Elliott Bay glittered in the sun. I could see past Bainbridge Island’s rolling hills all the way to a snow-capped peak, and the skies were, yup, completely and totally blue.
Graber’s tenure at Bluesky has had this felicitous quality, starting with her given name, Lantian, which—in a triumph for the nominative determinism crowd—means “blue sky” in Mandarin. (That the name she’s gone by for years, Jay, can also mean a winged creature that takes to the skies adds to the serendipity.) When Graber joined Bluesky in 2019, it was an experiment within Twitter. The idea was to spin off a social platform that would give users more control. That happened when Bluesky launched as an invite-only service in 2023, and by the time it opened up to the general public a year later, Twitter had become the right-wing echo chamber known as X. Bluesky swiftly became a refuge for a coalition of leftists, liberals, and never-Trumpers.
The 34-year-old chief executive cuts a different figure than most social media bosses. Earlier this year, after Mark Zuckerberg wore a shirt winking at his king-like status at Meta, Graber donned a near-identical top that instead called for a world without kings. The sartorial rebuttal was good press (and Bluesky ended up making major dough selling the shirt), but it also reflects her idea that this project ultimately cannot be controlled by a single leader.
Indeed, Graber, a former software engineer, seems most energized when she’s talking about the unique infrastructure for her kingless world. Undergirding Bluesky as well as several smaller apps is the Atmosphere, or AT Protocol, which is a rule book that servers use to communicate. The open source protocol allows sovereign digital spaces to integrate with one another as needed. Two apps with complementary ideas about moderation or ads can work in tandem—or not. It’s up to them.
Graber sees Atmosphere as nothing less than the democratized future of the social internet, and she emphasizes to me that developers are actively building new projects with it. In her dreams, these projects are as big, if not bigger, than Bluesky. Her ambitions might not be kingly, in other words, but they are lofty. For now, call Graber an insurgent go-getter—on whom the sun still shines.
The Rapid Ascent of Bluesky
Bluesky's journey from a conceptual project within Twitter to a burgeoning social media force has been remarkably swift. Launched initially as an invite-only platform, its public debut coincided with a period of significant upheaval at Twitter (now X), creating a vacuum that Bluesky was uniquely positioned to fill. The platform quickly attracted users seeking an alternative, particularly those disaffected by the changes under Elon Musk's ownership. This initial wave of users, often described as left-leaning or liberal, helped establish Bluesky's early community culture.
When asked about the platform's growth, Jay Graber provided impressive figures:
When we talked a few months ago, Bluesky had surpassed 25 million users. Where are you today?
34.6 million users.
This rapid expansion underscores the demand for new social media paradigms and the effectiveness of Bluesky's approach in attracting a significant user base in a relatively short time. The growth isn't just in user numbers but also in the organization itself.
What’s your day-to-day like right now?
A lot of hiring. We’re getting ready to make this a larger social experience for more people, both within the Bluesky app and outside it.
How many people have you hired?
In November, during our growth spurt, we were around 20. Now we’re at 25, and we’ll probably pass 30 soon. We’re growing at a pace that’s sustainable to us.
This measured hiring pace suggests a focus on building a robust foundation for future growth rather than pursuing explosive, potentially unsustainable expansion. The team is scaling up to support the increasing user base and the development of new features.
Building the Future: Upcoming Features and Ecosystem
Bluesky isn't resting on its laurels. Graber outlined several key features on the horizon aimed at enhancing the user experience and expanding the platform's capabilities.
What milestones are you hoping to hit by the end of 2025?
Some of the features we’ve been talking about for a long time, like communities and verification, we’re really excited about. Verification is the most fleshed-out. We’re doing it in stages. [Days after we spoke, Bluesky rolled out tools to help users authenticate their identity and discourage impersonators.]
Verification is a critical component for establishing trust and authenticity on any social platform, particularly one aiming for broad adoption. Bluesky's phased rollout indicates a careful approach to implementing this feature.
Perhaps even more significant is the planned communities feature, which Graber elaborated on:
Tell me about the communities feature.
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—the science feed is run by scientists, is moderated by scientists, and has its own rules. But right now you have to go outside the app to do it. Third-party services, like SkyFeed or Graze, let you create feeds.
So you can create and monitor many feeds in one interface, but it’s a separate app. Are you building this capability into Bluesky itself?
We’ve talked to people who are running these feeds, and they would like better tooling for making these into communities within the Bluesky app. So that’s the big idea: making it easier to create and run a custom feed.
Any timeline for when that’s coming?
The end of the year.
The integration of custom feeds and community tools directly into the Bluesky app is a major step towards fulfilling the platform's potential as a flexible social space. This feature, drawing inspiration from platforms like Reddit while maintaining the microblogging format, could significantly enhance user engagement and allow for more niche and moderated discussions.
Beyond text and images, Bluesky is also embracing multimedia:
Bluesky users can now post videos. A lot of people already consider Bluesky an X competitor. Are you gunning for TikTok too?
We’re built on an open protocol, and other apps are starting to fill in these open spaces. An app called Skylight is more of a straight TikTok alternative. It lets you post short-form videos, and you can edit them in the app. Bluesky has videos, but it’s more secondary. The great thing about an open protocol is that you can move from Bluesky over to Skylight and keep your followers. So they go with you across applications.
This points to a fundamental aspect of the AT Protocol ecosystem: interoperability and user portability. The idea that a user's identity and social graph (followers, following) can seamlessly transition between different applications built on the same protocol is a radical departure from the siloed nature of current social media giants.
How does that work?
Say you download Skylight from the app store—you can log in with your Bluesky username, if you want. Then you have the same followers, and the photos or videos that you post to Skylight can also show up in Bluesky and vice versa.
Did the Bluesky team have anything to do with the development of Skylight, or is it totally separate?
Totally separate.
This separation is key to the decentralized vision. Bluesky Social is one application built on the AT Protocol, but it is not the *only* application. Developers are free to build their own clients, services, and even entirely different types of social apps on the same underlying data layer. This fosters innovation and gives users choice.
What are your relationships like with the people developing other apps on the protocol?
There was recently the Atmosphere Conference, and we met a lot of folks there building apps we didn’t know about. There are private messengers, new moderation tools. The benefit to developers of an open ecosystem is that you don’t have to start from zero each time. You have 34.6 million users to tap into.
This developer ecosystem is crucial for the long-term health and growth of the AT Protocol. By providing a large, accessible user base and a common set of rules for data exchange, Bluesky hopes to incentivize developers to build diverse and innovative applications that can interoperate, creating a richer and more resilient social internet.
The AT Protocol: A New Foundation for Social Media
At the heart of Bluesky's ambition is the AT Protocol. Graber's background in decentralized technologies, particularly her work on the privacy-focused cryptocurrency Zcash, heavily influenced the design principles behind the protocol.
Let’s back up. How did you end up starting a decentralized social platform?
In college, I had this major—science, technology, and society—that was very interdisciplinary. I studied virtual currencies and thought that they were going to be disruptive, so I was interested in getting involved in that. I worked on Zcash, a cryptocurrency that combined decentralized technology with privacy technology. I like seeing a new technology emerging, and asking, What can you do with this? After a few years, I realized you could build better social networks that weren’t on a blockchain but use some of those components. I started researching and building decentralized social stuff. Then, when Jack Dorsey announced in 2019 that Twitter was working on a decentralized protocol, I was already considered an expert in the space.
The initial concept for Bluesky originated within Twitter, spearheaded by then-CEO Jack Dorsey. However, the project was designed from the outset to be independent.
I always thought Bluesky started as a skunkworks within Twitter.
It was a skunkworks but with outside contributors. I was a contractor. I wanted independence, because old Twitter moved slowly. Jack Dorsey was our biggest champion, but then Elon Musk said that he was going to buy Twitter, and that threw off everything—no new projects were going to get shipped, especially not something as ambitious as Bluesky. That’s when we started thinking that we should experiment with building our own app.
This pivot to building their own application, Bluesky Social, was a direct consequence of the uncertainty surrounding Twitter's acquisition. It accelerated the project's independence and allowed the team to focus on implementing the AT Protocol without the constraints of a large, established company.
Graber's connection to the crypto world and the venture capital funding Bluesky received from crypto-specialized firms might lead some to associate Bluesky with the Web3 movement. However, Graber is careful to distinguish Bluesky's approach.
You mentioned your crypto background. Bluesky’s largest investor is a venture capital firm that specializes in crypto. Does Bluesky have more in common with a crypto startup than one might think?
Well, the term Web3 got very associated with cryptocurrency, so it’s not a good word to use for what we’re doing. But if you think about Web3 as evolving the social Web 2.0, that kind of is what we’re doing. We’re evolving social media that was based in centralized companies into something that is open and distributed. That was a goal underlying the Web3 movement—we just didn’t build on that technical foundation of a blockchain. You can achieve a lot of the same things using open web principles and more Web 1.0 kinds of technology. Our identity system lets you use a domain name as your username, so you can have wired.com in your username. That’s just a web 1.0 technology brought into the social media sphere. I think our investors saw that vision, and they’re excited about building out the broader developer ecosystem. We want investors who care about seeing this entire world of social media come to life, not just Bluesky.
This distinction is crucial. While sharing the Web3 ideal of decentralization and user ownership, the AT Protocol avoids the complexities and performance issues often associated with blockchain technology for high-volume social interactions. Instead, it leverages existing web technologies like domain names for identity, creating a system that is both decentralized and potentially more scalable and user-friendly than many blockchain-based alternatives.
The core idea is federation: allowing multiple independent servers (or "PDSs" - Personal Data Servers) to host user data and communicate with each other using the AT Protocol. This is similar in concept to email (where different providers like Gmail, Outlook, etc., can exchange messages) or Mastodon (which uses the ActivityPub protocol). However, the AT Protocol has some unique features, such as the ability to migrate accounts between servers without losing data or followers, and the separation of data hosting from the application layer, which allows for diverse client applications and custom feed algorithms.
When you’re talking about this new ecosystem of applications, is the idea that you’re the CEO of all of this, or just Bluesky?
I am just the CEO of Bluesky Social. We have built out the protocol, and we maintain the Bluesky app, but the 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 new people shape it.
This reinforces the decentralized nature of the project. Bluesky PBC (Public Benefit Company) developed the protocol and maintains the primary client app, but they do not control the entire ecosystem. The AT Protocol is intended to be an open standard, allowing anyone to build on it, fostering a truly distributed network where no single entity holds ultimate power.
If one of these apps were to blow up and surpass Bluesky, would it help or hurt your business?
It would help us—because these are shared backends, if you recall.
Let’s say that the video app, Skylight, goes megaviral. How does that shared backend become relevant?
That means you can view all those videos on Bluesky too. It’d probably change the way that people interact on Bluesky, because all this content would be coming in from another application. Also, one of the pathways to monetization we’ve mentioned is developer services.
This highlights the symbiotic relationship within the AT Protocol ecosystem. Growth on one part of the network benefits the others by increasing the overall pool of users and content. Bluesky PBC, as the steward of the protocol and a major service provider, can potentially monetize by offering services to other applications or users within the network.
Monetization and Creator Support
A key question for any growing platform is how it plans to become financially sustainable. Bluesky's approach to monetization is still evolving, but Graber outlined several potential avenues.
How do you plan to make money?
Subscriptions are coming soon. The next steps are to look into what marketplaces can span these different applications. Other apps in the ecosystem are experimenting with sponsored posts and things like that. I think ads eventually, in some form, work their way in, but we’re not going to do ads the way traditional social apps did. We’ll let people experiment and see what comes out of it.
Subscriptions offer a direct revenue stream from users who value premium features or wish to support the platform. The idea of "marketplaces" spanning applications is intriguing, suggesting potential for commerce or service exchange within the ecosystem. The cautious approach to advertising, learning from the pitfalls of traditional ad-driven social media, aligns with the platform's user-centric philosophy.
For creators, monetization is often a primary concern. While direct in-app monetization tools are not yet fully developed, Bluesky offers indirect benefits.
There’s been an influx of big creators onto Bluesky, but there’s no direct way for them to monetize their work yet. Are you going to change that?
We’re giving them great traffic—and that can convert to money. One big thing is we don’t downrank links, so if you are a YouTube creator or you have a Patreon and you post those links on Bluesky, you’re getting higher link traffic, even with a smaller follower count. This is true of small creators and even news organizations. We’ve heard from large news organizations that Bluesky has better click-throughs and better subscription rates. [WIRED can vouch for this: The platform has become a top traffic driver and source of new subscribers.]
This is a significant point of differentiation from platforms like X or Facebook, which often algorithmically suppress external links to keep users within their own ecosystem. By prioritizing link visibility, Bluesky becomes a valuable tool for creators and publishers to drive traffic to their own sites and monetization channels. This aligns with the open web philosophy, treating Bluesky not as a destination to trap users, but as a hub that connects users to the broader internet.
Beyond creators, Bluesky is also attracting prominent figures from various fields.
Democratic Party stars like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton have also joined Bluesky. Are you doing anything to court celebrities and influencers?
We’re doing some community outreach. We’re seeing a lot of growth in sectors with maybe not as big celebrities but a lot of traction, like sports media. The sports reporter Mina Kimes came on and created a starter pack, which got a lot of followers very quickly. We have game devs, we have sports, we have science.
The organic growth among diverse communities, from politics to sports and science, suggests that the platform's structure and culture are appealing to a wide range of users and content producers. This broad appeal is essential for building a truly universal social network.
Would you welcome President Trump?
Yeah—Bluesky’s for everyone, and we think that over time, the broader public conversation needs to be on an open protocol. That lets people choose their own moderation preferences. We think that it’s flexible enough to serve every use case and everyone.
This statement underscores Bluesky's commitment to being an open platform, even for controversial figures. The key, in their view, is not to dictate who can speak, but to build a system where users and communities can choose what content they see and how it is moderated, thanks to the flexibility of the AT Protocol.
Moderation in a Decentralized World: Freedom of Speech, Not Reach
Content moderation is one of the most challenging aspects of running a social platform, particularly in an era of increasing polarization and concerns about misinformation and harmful content. Bluesky's decentralized architecture offers a different approach to this complex problem.
We’re in this moment when free speech is under threat. How do you think about that?
I think building on an open protocol is the most enduring foundation for speech. We’re creating a digital commons of user data where you get to control your identity and your data. We’re building infrastructure that I hope stays around for a long time. Bluesky, the app, is just one site where speech can happen.
Graber frames the AT Protocol as fundamental civic infrastructure for the digital age. By decentralizing data ownership and identity, the protocol aims to make online speech less vulnerable to the arbitrary decisions of a single company or government. The Bluesky app itself is presented as just one interface to this underlying network, implying that if users disagree with Bluesky's policies, they can access the same data and users through a different application with different rules.
This model is analogous to the early web:
This is like the web itself. Early on, we had AOL, and accessing the internet happened through AOL. If the AOL web portal wasn’t showing you something, it would be a lot harder to find. Then more browsers came along, and these linked you out to the broader internet. Now anyone can put up a blog and host their own views online. There’s larger websites if you want, Substack or Medium, but you can also self-host. This is the kind of ecosystem we’re building, where anyone can self-host. And then the question of “freedom of speech, not reach” is made very tangible. The Mediums of the world get to choose their moderation rules, but if individuals are unhappy with that, they can start a new site or host their own blog.
The "freedom of speech, not reach" principle is central to Bluesky's moderation philosophy. On a centralized platform, the platform owner controls both whether you can speak (speech) and how widely your words are seen (reach). In the AT Protocol model, the protocol ensures the freedom to speak and publish data (analogous to hosting a blog), while individual applications or services built on the protocol (like the Bluesky app, or custom feeds) control the "reach" by curating, filtering, or moderating content according to their own rules.
What does “freedom of speech, not freedom of reach” mean to you?
Early on, we basically embedded freedom of speech into the protocol. Anyone can do the equivalent of standing up a new blog. Then sites like Bluesky get to decide how to prioritize reach.
And “reach” here means how Bluesky spreads—or doesn’t spread—your posts. So people can say what they want, but they have to live with how Bluesky moderates their words?
If you want to change the rules, you can build your own thing or find another space that serves you. Within the parameters of Bluesky, we’re setting the rules.
This multi-layered approach to moderation allows for diversity and user choice. Users who find Bluesky's moderation policies too strict or too lenient can potentially switch to a different client application or server within the AT Protocol network that better aligns with their preferences, without losing their identity or social graph. This contrasts with platforms like Mastodon, where switching servers can sometimes be cumbersome and may involve losing some data.
However, this model also presents challenges. Ensuring safety and combating harmful content across a federated network requires coordination and shared tools. Bluesky is developing features like composable moderation, which allows different moderation services to analyze content and provide labels that users can choose to filter or view. This puts more power in the hands of the user to customize their experience, but also requires users to actively configure their moderation settings.
Beyond Social Media: A New Layer for the Web
Graber's vision for the AT Protocol extends far beyond simply creating an alternative to existing social media platforms. She sees it as a foundational technology for a new era of the internet.
With your interest in decentralized spaces, I’m curious what you think about decentralized or “network” states, which are, in theory, startup countries—a bunch of like-minded people who met online and bought up land together, for example. Are you following the network state movement?
We’ll have a lot of trial and error to develop good governance in the digital sphere, so maybe much farther down the road that might translate into the real world. In part I see what we’re doing as building civic infrastructure in digital form. Social media is how we get our news, it’s how we get informed, and if you can make control of that democratic, pluralistic, and open, I think that will translate down the road to more democratic social structures.
This perspective elevates the AT Protocol from a mere communication tool to a form of digital civic infrastructure. By decentralizing the flow of information and giving users more control, Graber believes it can contribute to more democratic processes and structures, both online and potentially offline.
Balancing this civic ambition with the realities of running a for-profit company is a delicate act.
How do you balance wanting to provide civic infrastructure with being the CEO of a for-profit company?
We’re running a lot of infrastructure that serves other apps in the network, and I think that is very financially valuable long-term. Early in the history of the web, you had these internet protocols that didn’t have monetization baked in, but it meant anyone could spin up a website. Then the people who built the search engines and browsers to access the new web were ultimately very big companies.
Graber draws a parallel to the early internet, where foundational protocols like HTTP and TCP/IP were open and non-commercial, but companies built massive businesses on top of them by providing services like search engines and browsers. Bluesky PBC aims to be one such service provider within the AT Protocol ecosystem, offering hosting, moderation tools, and potentially other services that generate revenue while supporting the broader network.
The long-term goal remains ambitious:
Are you still working toward any ambitions from when you started in 2019—or are there any that now seem impossible?
Yes. Right now, Bluesky feels like Twitter, Flashes like Instagram, Skylight like TikTok. But you can build or combine things in totally new ways, or build social experiences that aren’t necessarily large mainstream social apps. Those kinds of experiences are what I’m excited to see unleashed. The long-term vision is not just for a new form of social apps but a new layer for the web—what Web3 aspired to be, without the blockchain.
This vision positions the AT Protocol not just as a platform for microblogging or video sharing, but as a fundamental layer for online identity, data, and social interaction, enabling entirely new types of applications and online experiences that are not possible on centralized platforms.
Graber's connection to the decentralized web movement runs deep, tracing back to early gatherings focused on these ideas.
I’m having a flashback to a conversation I had a decade ago. The Internet Archive’s founder, Brewster Kahle, talked about reinventing the web in a similar way.
I got my first open-source crypto job, at Zcash, through the Internet Archive’s Decentralized Web summit. That was one of the places where I got my first insight into all the folks building things in the decentralized web space.
This historical context highlights that the ideas behind the AT Protocol are not entirely new but are part of a long-standing effort within the tech community to build a more open, decentralized, and user-controlled internet. Bluesky is perhaps the most prominent attempt to bring these principles to mainstream social networking.
The challenges are real, however, particularly regarding content moderation and governance in a decentralized system, as seen in the debates within the Bluesky community itself.
I wrote about the Internet Archive’s legal struggles last year. Some groups in the book world fiercely support its digital lending; others fiercely oppose it. I see a similar tension brewing among Bluesky power users. Some people want the app to be more active in content moderation, but that seems to clash with the principles of decentralization, where ideally no one body can ban or block people. Do you see this as a problem for Bluesky?
There are always going to be conflicts when one person’s idea of a good time online conflicts with somebody else’s. People have different ideas about safety. Every space needs some moderation. The goal of building an open ecosystem is to support the coexistence of people with different points of view. They don’t all have to be in the same room, abiding by the same rules. Maybe they can be in adjacent rooms, or maybe it’s like two hotel buildings that are linked.
At the end of the day, we set some parameters of what we think acceptable behavior is on Bluesky, and if you disagree with those you can branch off and build another application adjacent to it.
This acknowledges the inherent tension but reiterates the solution offered by decentralization: choice. Users are not locked into a single set of rules. They can choose the application or server that best fits their preferences, or even create their own. This shifts the power dynamic from a single platform owner to the users and communities themselves.
Regarding the platform's origins, Graber clarified the current relationship with Jack Dorsey:
What is your relationship with Jack Dorsey like now?
Jack isn’t involved anymore. He had a portfolio approach to decentralized technologies, and early on he helped several projects get off the ground. He funded another distributed protocol that I think today he probably prefers, Nostr, which shares many architectural similarities to Bluesky, but it works more like a cryptocurrency wallet. You need keys. You have to be a bit more sophisticated as a user.
This confirms that Bluesky is now fully independent, pursuing its own path with the AT Protocol, distinct from Dorsey's other decentralized interests like Nostr, which targets a different user base with its more technically demanding approach.
Why Join Bluesky Now?
With a growing user base and ambitious plans, what is Jay Graber's pitch for why people should join Bluesky today?
What’s your pitch for why people should join Bluesky?
It’s a great time to shape the culture and the future of Bluesky. The people who have created starter packs, created feeds, and gotten involved in the community have seen a lot of growth—even if they previously weren’t big posters elsewhere. For creators, nobody is fully grasping that this is potentially the last social identity you have to create. Signing up now isn’t just committing to yet another micro-blogging app, it’s committing to a new era of social, to having a sort of digital passport that moves with you.
This pitch emphasizes opportunity and longevity. Early adopters have the chance to influence the platform's culture and gain visibility. More importantly, joining Bluesky means adopting an identity on the AT Protocol, an identity that is portable and not tied to a single company. This "digital passport" concept is a powerful vision for user empowerment, promising freedom from vendor lock-in and the ability to take one's social graph and data across a diverse ecosystem of applications.
Finally, Graber highlighted the core value proposition of the AT Protocol ecosystem:
Is there anything else you want people to know about Bluesky?
This is a choose-your-own-adventure game. You can get in there and customize the experience as much as you want. If you’re not finding what you want within the Bluesky app, there might be another app within the protocol ecosystem that will give you what you want. If you can’t find it, you can build it. You don’t get this level of control anywhere else.
This encapsulates the promise of the AT Protocol: a flexible, customizable, and open social web where users have unprecedented control over their experience, their data, and their online identity. It's a vision of a social internet that is not owned by a few powerful corporations but is a shared digital commons, shaped by its users and developers.
The Road Ahead
Bluesky and the AT Protocol are still in their relatively early stages, but the foundation is laid for a potentially transformative shift in how we interact online. The challenges are significant: scaling the protocol, ensuring robust moderation tools are available across the ecosystem, educating users about the benefits of decentralization, and competing with the network effects of established giants. However, the rapid growth, the burgeoning developer community, and the clear vision articulated by Jay Graber suggest that Bluesky is more than just another Twitter clone; it is a serious attempt to build a more open, resilient, and user-centric social internet from the ground up.
Whether the AT Protocol ultimately becomes the foundational layer Graber envisions remains to be seen. But as the digital landscape continues to evolve, driven by concerns over privacy, control, and the power of centralized platforms, the decentralized path championed by Bluesky offers a compelling alternative—a path towards a social internet where the skies are, perhaps, a little bluer for everyone.