After a year of carefully limiting sign-ups to those with invites, the Twitter-style social app Bluesky this week threw open the doors for anyone to join.
It’s a make-or-break moment. Remember when the live-audio app Clubhouse went from the most hyped-up social startup when it was hard to snag an invite, to a big old bust when anyone could join? Bluesky has managed to maintain a steady buzz so far, outlasting other up-and-coming microblogging platforms like Pebble and Parler. This week it scored 1.2 million new sign-ups in just two days after opening to all. But although Bluesky has won over some extremely-online communities, in part through a decentralized design that allows others to build on it, sustainability requires appealing to the masses. It’s something similar platforms, like Mastodon, haven’t been able to master.
WIRED spoke with Bluesky CEO Jay Graber the day after Bluesky opened up to all comers. She seemed alternately exhausted and exhilarated, but focused on trying to prove that a platform with a “federated” structure can attract users who don’t care about the tech but just want to have fun. The conversation has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
Kate Knibbs: How did Bluesky prepare for this moment?
Jay Graber: We weren’t using invites to try to be exclusive. We were using them to manage growth while we built out what is essentially a foundation, the rails for this new kind of distributed network.
We had to build the app protocol beneath Bluesky, the AT Protocol, that lets different developers, companies, or people come in and modify their experiences. Some of it is going to be rolling out soon. One example of this is your feeds: When you join, we give you the default following and algorithmic feeds. But then there’s over 25,000 custom feeds to choose from, most built by independent developers. One is a moss feed, which I find very calming and fun—it just shows pictures of moss and green things.
What do you think distinguishes Bluesky from other platforms, culturally?
It’s very playful and chaotic. Especially over the past year, we’ve had a very high poster-to-lurker ratio. On most social apps, people are just looking at content. Here, there’s a lot of people posting and talking.
Not all those posts will be playful, though. What’s your vision for moderation?
We have community guidelines to prevent harassment and hate speech, and we use moderation to try to create a baseline of a healthy, welcoming social space on the default Bluesky app. Then because it’s built on this open protocol, anyone can set up and run their own infrastructure and start labeling or annotating content and accounts in the network. That’s something that users can directly install to piece together their own community norms.
Moderation has proven to be a weak spot of just about every social network, even those that are very profitable. Do you think you’ll ever reach a point where you’re unable to moderate efficiently?
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