Federation is the future of social media, says Bluesky CEO Jay Graber

Decoder with Nilay Patel

Today, I’m talking to Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky Social, which is a decentralized competitor to Meta’s Threads, Mastodon, and X. Bluesky actually started inside of what was then known as Twitter — it was a project from then-CEO Jack Dorsey, who spent his days wandering the earth and saying things like Twitter should be a protocol and not a company. Bluesky was supposed to be that protocol, but Jack spun it out of Twitter in 2021, just before Elon Musk bought the company and renamed it X.

Bluesky is now an independent company with a few dozen employees, and it finds itself in the middle of one of the most chaotic moments in the history of social media. There are a lot of companies and ideas competing for space on the post-Twitter internet, and Jay makes a convincing argument that decentralization — the idea that you should be able to take your username and following to different servers as you wish — is the future.

Links:

• Twitter is funding research into a decentralized version of its platform — The Verge
• Bluesky built a decentralized protocol for Twitter — and is working on an app that uses it — The Verge
• The fediverse, explained — The Verge
• Bluesky showed everyone’s ass — The Verge
• Can ActivityPub save the internet? — The Verge
• The ‘queer.af’ Mastodon instance disappeared because of the Taliban — The Verge
• Usage Of Elon Musk’s X Dropped 30% In The Last Year, Study Suggests — Forbes
• Bluesky snags former Twitter/X Trust & Safety exec cut by Musk — TechCrunch
• Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media — 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.

Today’s episode was produced by Kate Cox and Nick Statt and was edited by Callie Wright. Our supervising producer is Liam James.

The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.

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