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

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Vox Media Podcast Network

Technology, Business

4.3 • 3.2K Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 2024

⏱️ 71 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Support for Decoder comes from Stripe.
0:02.0	Stripe is a payments and billing platform supporting millions of businesses around the world.
0:07.0	Whether you run a startup or a well-established business,
0:10.0	Stripe can help you reach more customers, hit your revenue growth targets, and build a more profitable business.
0:17.0	The platform offers a suite of specialized features and tools to fast-track growth, like Stripe billing,
0:22.1	which makes it easy to handle subscription-based charges, invoicing, and recurring revenue management needs.
0:28.2	You can learn how Stripe helps companies of all sizes make progress at Stripe.com.
0:33.1	That's Stripe.com to learn more.
0:35.2	Stripe Make Progress.
0:39.2	Hello and welcome to Decoder.
0:40.5	I'm Nilai Patel, editor-in-chief of The Virgin.
0:42.2	Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems.
0:45.2	The Decoder team just took some time off for Thanksgiving break,
0:47.6	and I hope you also had a restful holiday and spent some time with your loved ones.
0:51.6	I am very thankful for all of our Dakota listeners. It is a blast
0:55.2	making the show for you, and yes, reading all the emails. We'll be back after today with all new shows
1:00.8	through the end of the year, and we've got some really good ones coming up. In the meantime, though,
1:04.6	we thought we'd bring back the interview we did several months ago with Jay Graber, the CEO of
1:08.5	Blue Sky, the upstart social network that's pulling a lot of users
1:11.7	away from X. At the time we recorded this interview, Blue Sky was, frankly, a pretty small platform.
1:17.3	It had just reached 5 million users when Jay and I spoke, and it had only very recently dropped
1:21.9	the requirement for new users to have invitation codes, a tactic that the company used to keep
	...

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