There’s a reason journalist and Bluesky board member Mike Masnick calls the platform “the most interesting experiment going in social media.” Originally launched as a project within Twitter in 2019, Bluesky has since become an independent company intent on making social more like the web.

What does that mean, exactly, and why does it matter? Bluesky founder and CEO Jay Graber says social media is stagnating because “we're in this trap where users are locked in and developers are locked out.” It’s time to open things up again, she says, like in the innovative early days of the internet.

Highlights of this conversation:

00:48 Bluesky’s origin story
02:04 Twitter under Elon
04:17 The case for decentralization
05:58 The case for Bluesky
08:33 Mike McCue’s Bluesky aha moment
09:55 What Jay’s excited about re: developer activity
11:21 The “wacky experimentation” happening on Bluesky
12:27 Building social experiences in Web 2.0 and why Bluesky needs to exist now
14:38 The social internet and how it’ll evolve; ActivityPub
15:57 Capturing social primitives in a way that’s composable and extensible for new ways of doing social
16:11 Philosophy of user data (and other kinds of data)
16:55 The identity system of AT Protocol, DIDs (decentralized identifiers)
18:15 Example #1: comments on Bluesky feeding into blog comments
19:08 Example #2: Bluesky username as domain name
20:29 Benefit for creators
21:33 How identity system could shake out over time
22:56 "Like Linktree built on an open protocol"
24:21 Bridging from AT Protocol to ActivityPub
25:23 Bridgy.fed and interoperability
27:35 DID standard and how decentralized networks should come together
30:56 Building identity protocols, DID methods
34:05 Importance of open social graphs (“our relationships shouldn’t be owned by one company")
36:28 Phone number portability analogy
38:16 Store passport analogy
38:40 Bring identity to the forefront, independent of the protocol
43:29 Bluesky principle: “Make social more like the Web”
44:20 Bluesky’s roadmap and what’s next
46:22 Custom feeds: build your own, building communities
48:12 One of Mike’s favorite feeds, Quiet Posters
48:30 "Cozy mode"
49:33 Building a foundation developers can trust, building resilience
50:55 Bluesky’s exciting cultural moments
54:10 Showing the world what’s possible

Mentioned in this episode:

Hard Fork podcast featuring Jay Graber:    • Can Bluesky Save Social Media? | EP 69  

You can find Jay at @jay.bsky.team

✚ You can connect with Mike McCue at @mmccue.bsky.social and at @[email protected]

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