Jay Graber, the C.E.O. of the upstart social-media platform Bluesky, arrived in San Francisco the Sunday after Donald Trump’s reëlection and holed up in a lodge room. She’d spent the earlier days road-tripping down the West Coast from her residence, in Seattle, stopping at seashores and redwood groves alongside the way in which, and in San Francisco she’d hoped to stay half in trip mode. However now Bluesky was seeing a surge in new customers, and it was wanting as if she’d want all fingers on deck. “There was momentum,” Graber recalled not too long ago, including, “It was simply choosing up day-to-day.”
Since launching, in early 2023, Bluesky had positioned itself as a refuge from X, the positioning previously referred to as Twitter. For almost 20 years, Twitter had been thought-about the web’s city sq., chaotic and infrequently rancorous however informative and diversely discursive. Then, after the tech billionaire turned Trump backer Elon Musk acquired the platform, in October of 2022, it devolved right into a circus of right-wing conspiracy theories. Liberals started fleeing, and Bluesky in flip collected greater than ten million customers by the autumn of 2024, making it one of many fastest-growing social networks. However the post-election inflow proved to be of a special order, turning Bluesky into what one tech blogger in comparison with a Macy’s firstly of Black Friday gross sales.
Graber put in sixteen-hour days overseeing Bluesky’s twenty-person employees, taking calls with potential buyers, and recruiting new hires, leaving her lodge room solely to choose up DoorDash deliveries within the foyer. In Seattle, Bluesky’s chief know-how officer arrange an computerized “failover” in order that if one of many firm’s servers crashed one other would take its place. A crew of engineers took shifts to insure that somebody was on obligation in any respect hours, battling to maintain the overwhelmed servers on-line—“like firefighting,” as one put it. On November 14th—two days after Trump introduced the creation of the Musk-led Division of Authorities Effectivity—Bluesky staffers stayed late, in a digital “state of affairs room,” to observe the day’s sign-up ticker hit 1,000,000. In a matter of two weeks, Bluesky’s inhabitants doubled. At present, it has a person base of greater than thirty million.
Disaffected X customers gravitate to Bluesky as a throwback to a gentler, saner social-media expertise. Being on the positioning appears like a mix of Twitter in 2012, when it was a haven for web nerdery, and in 2017, when it was a seedbed of anti-Trump #Resistance. The Bluesky interface reassuringly resembles Twitter’s, right down to the winged blue brand (a butterfly as an alternative of a chicken) and the character restrict on posts (300 fairly than early Twitter’s hundred and forty). The platform is theoretically open to all, however some MAGA trolls have reported that their accounts have been blocked. Discourse is solidly left-leaning, and disagreements are typically internecine. Probably the most adopted account belongs to Consultant Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As if to consummate Bluesky as a successor to the liberal Twitter of yore, Barack Obama not too long ago joined and, in his first put up, celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of the Inexpensive Care Act.
The platform shouldn’t be but populated sufficient to qualify because the web’s new city sq.. Even after the Musk-induced exodus, X experiences that it has greater than 5 hundred million lively customers per 30 days; Threads, Meta’s self-fashioned Twitter various, has round 300 million. But Bluesky wields outsized affect within the social-media panorama due to the progressive infrastructure on which it’s constructed. All the large social networks are what’s referred to as centralized platforms: most points of person expertise, from content material moderation to algorithmic suggestions, are dictated by the company that runs the platform. Bluesky, against this, originated as a radical aspect undertaking inside Twitter underneath its co-founder and former C.E.O., Jack Dorsey, to create a decentralized social-media mannequin. The place X or Fb runs totally on proprietary know-how, Bluesky is powered by an open-source protocol, a form of instruction guide and set of information requirements that permits anybody to construct appropriate software program on high of it. In consequence, customers can customise the algorithms and content-moderation guidelines that govern what seems of their feeds—and, in the event that they don’t like Bluesky, they will take their followers and their archive of posts and construct or be part of one other web site working on the identical protocol. The facility that usually lies with companies is thus redistributed to the customers themselves.
With its post-election growth, Bluesky has change into by far the biggest decentralized social community and Graber (who, citing privateness issues, offers her age as “round thirty-three”) essentially the most high-profile feminine head of a social community in an business identified for eccentrically megalomaniacal males. With Trump and Musk in energy, Silicon Valley leaders have taken a rightward flip. At Meta, Mark Zuckerberg has in the reduction of on truth checking, deserted D.E.I. efforts, and stated that the company world wants extra “masculine vitality.” Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who owns the Washington Put up, has ordered that the paper’s opinion pages publish solely items that help “private liberties and free markets.” Graber, who defines her politics as “anti-authoritarian,” sees Bluesky as a corrective to prevailing social media that topics customers to the whims of billionaires. “Elon, if he wished to, may simply delete the entire X time line—simply do these completely arbitrary issues,” she stated, including, “I believe this self-styled tech-monarch factor is value questioning. Will we need to dwell in that world?”
The Seattle space, residence to Microsoft’s and Amazon’s headquarters, is maybe essentially the most vital American tech hub outdoors the Bay Space. You’ll be able to’t throw a Starbucks venti there with out hitting a software program engineer. However Graber informed me that she selected the town partly for its separation from Silicon Valley, and for its “moody and majestic” panorama: “Some folks stated I moved right here as a result of I’m a moss maximalist, and so they’re not flawed.”
Graber and a number of other Seattle-based staff have desks in a co-working area with views of Puget Sound. Someday in January, I met Graber there. Tall and willowy, with a halo of tight darkish curls, she wore a hooded black coat from the Chinese language model JNBY which gave her high-cheekboned face a barely witchy facet. The workspace was vivid and sparse, with motorized standing desks and scattered beanbag chairs. Graber’s station was in a pod of 4 cluttered with exterior displays, Annie’s crackers, and spent espresso cups. In contrast with most tech leaders, she has a low-key digital footprint. On her Bluesky account, one consultant put up includes a picture of her arms cradling a hen, captioned “My favourite hen.”
“Jay” is an adopted moniker. Bluesky was named earlier than Graber grew to become concerned, however by coincidence her given title is Lantian—Mandarin for “blue sky.” Graber likes to say that her mom, an émigré from China, selected it to lend her daughter “boundless freedom.” Her mother, who labored as an acupuncturist, and her dad, a math trainer and a former lieutenant colonel, met at a Christian college in Oklahoma. They raised Graber, an solely little one, in a Baptist neighborhood in Tulsa. Rising up, Graber appeared ahead to Friday nights after church, when she was granted unfettered entry to the household’s desktop pc. A formative web expertise was a sport known as Neopets, during which customers increase digital creatures and join with different gamers in a shared digital village. As an adolescent, Graber saved a weblog on Xanga, an early social platform, and taught herself rudimentary code in order that she may customise her web page with music and a zebra theme.
On the time, Graber recognized much less as a pc child than as a bookworm, studying tales of scientific and mathematical discovery. “One factor that me was how lots of innovations got here by means of odd folks attempting issues,” she stated. “It wasn’t simply the lone genius.” She learn the youngsters’s fantasy collection “Redwall” and each “Robin Hood” ebook within the library; she grew to like such feminist sci-fi authors as Margaret Atwood and Ursula Ok. Le Guin, who, as Graber put it, excelled at reimagining “how society may look.” To today, she stays an avowed fantasy devotee.
“There have to be a neater approach to invent the merry-go-round.”
Cartoon by Justin Sheen
In a single nook of the Bluesky workplace sat a pile of padded coaching swords. Graber belongs to a membership that re-creates medieval sword-fighting ways, and the workplace had not too long ago staged a match. She picked up a mock shortsword and prolonged it expertly in a single hand. I grabbed one other, plus a small plastic protect, and she or he led me in an impromptu battle. “Plenty of males simply depend on brute drive to get by means of issues,” she stated. “If you be taught that, you may nonetheless win, with higher leverage and method.” She raised her sword and mimed slashing it down towards my uncovered neck.
After highschool, Graber enrolled on the College of Pennsylvania, figuring that its mixture of liberal-arts, engineering, and enterprise packages would enable her to “maximize optionality.” She selected an interdisciplinary main known as Science, Expertise, and Society, and as a part of her senior thesis designed an internet time financial institution by means of which college students may swap labor—taking images for an additional individual, say, in trade for cooking classes. Graber informed me, “In some methods, it was like a social community.” When she graduated, she moved to an all-female coöperative in West Philadelphia and volunteered for native tech-policy tasks, which led to a job as an organizer at Free Press, a media-advocacy nonprofit. However the coverage world operated “at a excessive degree of abstraction,” she stated, and she or he discovered it unsatisfying: “Having the ability to make change straight has all the time been actually interesting to me.” On work journeys to San Francisco, assembly with tech activists and hanging out in “hackerspaces,” she was drawn to the tech business’s nimble immediacy.
