Welcome to another bonus episode of the Techmeme Ride Home. I'm your host Brian McCullough, as always. I'm joined by your usual co-host Chris Messina. Hello, hello. And, you know, folks, you've heard me do what, three or four segments about BlueSky over the last two weeks on the show. So, hey, why not go right to the source. Our guest today is the CEO of BlueSky Jay Graber Jay. Thanks for coming on the show. Thanks for having me.
So, you guys got rid of the wait lists, opened up the platform to the world last week. What have you seen so far in terms of, you know, uptick people coming on? How's it going? Yeah, we've got, we almost doubled our user count. I think we're at 3.3 million when we opened up last Tuesday. Now we're at 4.8. So, almost 5 million. Pretty good. Things are going well.
And it did the decision to finally open up. Was it based on, you know, obviously this was something that has a project that's been developing for, I think, three years, maybe more than that. Was it a question of you felt like you were feature complete enough that it was time to open up to everyone? Yeah, I think something actually people don't understand about our timelines is we were first sort of just an idea within Twitter and didn't actually become a thing until I took it over in 2021.
And then we weren't really a company until we spun out in 2022. So, it's been about two years. And for the first part of that, we were building a protocol for Twitter to run on. And then we didn't start building an app until it looked clear that Twitter was never going to adopt this protocol. So then we went ahead and built an app sort of like, you know, late 2022.
And so last year has been mostly been about rolling this out, rolling out the app on top of the protocol that we built the app protocol. And it took some time to build out the app protocol. It's really the rails for a sort of social experience where we tried to combine the ease and efficiency of centralized social with the openness and freedom to build a decentralized social. And just taking a while to get things right. But we've scaled up. We're ready for more scale now.
And we've built out a lot that's going to be rolling out in the next few weeks. So next week actually we're starting a federation data federation that feeds are already federated in the sense that you can go in and any third party can run their own feed and post their own custom algorithms.
And then moderation services are coming later this month. So, federating out moderation to any third party service that wants to build, you know, a labeler, an annotator, some way of giving input to the network. So those are all the things that we've kind of been working on over the past year and wanted to sort of bring it all out in a period of time where we can really show people what the full vision is.
So great to finally have this conversation. Jay, like you said, we've sort of been around each other. I think on flu sky here and there.
I've had kind of my own personal history with working on the social web and social networks for a long time. And what I find is so sort of interesting to watch both how you operate in the space and things that you've been working on for the last several years, you know, starting with like events and then working on like Z cash and working on a bunch of different like decentralized and federated technologies, including crypto is that invariably it feels like when we're designing social products.
It's really balancing instead of trade offs. I sort of refer to this set of trade offs as like a complexity balloon. In other words, when you sort of squeeze one part of the complexity out of like say the user experience on one end that complexity will invariably go to some other part of the system, we have to just like clean it up or sort of solve for it at some point later in the future.
So as I've read more of the blue sky technical docs and the white papers, it's clear to me that your bread model is a little bit different than what some of the other platforms are that are out there. So example, my background experience is probably closer to what master on is been doing with activity pub.
Since activity streams was the predecessor to activity pub and we did a lot of work to start out with things like open ID and OAuth back in 2007 through 10 or whatever. And so my question to you is given the time that you've had, I guess, first working with an assumption that Twitter might adopt the AT protocol.
At protocol or AT protocol. It's the short form ATP. At protocol. Yeah, I sort of at proto for short at proto great. Okay, let's do that. So if the idea as a sort of jacket originally suggested that Twitter should have just been a protocol. Now you've built this thing out. Now we've seen what happens when you know the captain of the ship sort of goes rogue IE Elon buys the company.
And my question is sort of like both looking backwards. How would things have been different do you think with Twitter had it actually been built on at proto at the time. And then looking prospectively into the future. Where do you see this kind of going next in terms of what this turns into? Are we talking all the way back like 10 years ago or like 2021.
And then just go back to like 2021 when there was the first sense that the again like the people who are in charge of driving these ships suddenly found themselves where they're threat model where they became the man so to speak. And that became problematic because of the incentive structures that they were bound within became I guess adversarial to the user base right because advertising started to take over.
And then I just tried to put it back on Twitter shut down their platform. So I'm just trying to think through some of the logic and thinking that you've brought to. Blue sky as a demonstration I suppose of that pro pro pro and then where this kind of goes next as a corrective for the ways in which the social web has you know developed and then devolve.
Yeah so a huge part of our motivating design philosophy is just make social more like the web again like the open web back in the days when you had blogs are assessed feeds email x MPP. One of the inventors of x and pp's on a board trying to advise us on this path of how to do it you know better this time.
And I think was something really changed when social platforms became the norm for a lot of people socializing and content creation online because all of our identities and then our social graphs got piled on to these large platforms. And we couldn't leave and so the network effects were so strong because we don't have the account portability you get stuck there and then even when the social site does things you don't like most people are fairly beholden to it.
And when there were more open apis developers could come along build different experiences help you augment your experience. There was moderation tooling like block party built for Twitter there were other experiences like tweet deck you know but a lot of these things got shut down over time and killed a lot of the innovation in the space and that has continued on a downward arc over the past few years.
And so we have gone back to fully open apis firehose of open data people can build on trying to reset user expectations to this is all public some of the other attempts in the space like mass on activity pub.
And so we have developed a culture of being much more sort of like local oriented here's your local community let's not build global firehoses or global aggregators of data we leaned into this sort of public conversation nature of what Twitter used to be where it was real time news streaming from all around the world. And so we tried to build that in a way where you could have the guarantees you get out of decentralization although in order to build a global platform.
You do need some points where you're like pulling all the data together right so we have we built we've kind of turned social apps inside out and turned it into a collection of microservices where this is how they all run on the back end but here anyone can run the microservices that make up the social apps so anyone can run the relay anyone can host certain data or we'll be able to soon once we like start federating with everyone who's self post date right.
And so our goal was really to make it so something where you get the guarantees of decentralization which give you basically locked open APIs keeps the freedom to build for developers it gives users the freedom to choose because now you have these things like you have a tweak type of thing deck blue built on blue sky and users can move between those and they're operating off the same protocols and we're not going to be shutting the about right.
And then creators could keep the relationship with their audience which I think is really key in any of where people have built their following on these platforms and then they become beholden the platforms unable to leave so many creators have gone back to optimizing around building their email list because email is one of those last open protocols that actually you know you still have a direct connection to your subscribers with.
And so we would like to have social be an open protocol again at base and then there's services in the ecosystem there's other things built on top but ultimately there's like a set of things where you can build these services on that stays open resilient and able to change because society is needs for public conversation platform is constantly evolving and when you bought on the innovation on one company you can't evolve as fast as you need to I think.
I think it's super interesting just to think about. With like the locus of control at the level of the individual like you suggested in the early social web you know we we many of us had our own blogs and we would syndicate through RSS you could follow anybody you know a feed reader and would sort of bring those things into a type of special
form in box that will allow you to basically catch up with people no matter which which service provider or which domain they happen to be hosted on gradually there was sort of like the modification and may l l of the social web where became a much more commercial space and I think one of the things that's interesting again to think about these trade offs with what blue sky or at least at Proto is suggesting with the the pds personal data stores that right.
Yeah so essentially you kind of have like this you might think about it like a reverse inbox or essentially it's a collection of all the things that you've you know posted all the letters that you sent out to all the op-ed you know sort of centers of the internet and if your
publisher of these letters goes rogue again you just if you want to move you can do so by utilizing DNS right so sort of going back to this infrastructure that's there that's a global international service that makes it possible for you to leave right so you guys didn't focus so much on on like usernames that are tied to a domain has in the massed on instance case where you know I'm like Christmas at massed on dot xyz on blue sky I'm just Christmas
ended on me which is my domain I control it if I don't like the way that you're running service I can just point it to a new instance using DNS and then I've moved and in theory all of my followers don't have to sign up to anything new they just continue to get my updates that's roughly how it works yes so my question we decided to use it the DID standard which is this proposal emerged over the last few years for a decentralized
identifier that supports lots of different methods and then we supported a placeholder method and it did web method which you do have to have your own domain name for that but then if you really want control over yourself you have this option and then over time more of these methods can be added right which I mean honestly that's actually what we
ended up with with open ID and open ID connect many years ago it's just because it's already there my question is or reflects a recent experience that Casey Newton had when you decided to leave sub stack because there is a conversation in a story that says that well if you have your email addresses of your subscribers you can move from one host to another until the Nazis show up and obviously in cases case the Nazis showed up on
the first stack and he decided to move off so my question is with this portability with the idea that you can move your content especially this is like a great reset for the creator economy and how people I guess can take whatever they've worked on and the following that they've developed when monetization becomes a piece of that and where sub stack is the payment processor for subscriptions how does that work in the AT protocol world I know that like you as far as I understand it like there
is a monetization built into a protocol yet and there's some tipping that's been done but when it comes to actually like subscribers how do you see that developing if someone is to move from one pds to another yeah so there's services in the system like the app that is the app is essentially a service the pds is a service all these are different services we kind of run a bundle of them and we'll be providing that to users you know as a bundle like here will host your data
will you know give you a nice experience to the app these are all things that we've bundled together we've bundled together you know moderation a set of some feeds and then we give you access to the smudge broader marketplace this window and all these different feeds and different
moderation providers right and so that's a direction that we're moving to sort of be a service provider ecosystem but then if something happened again like it happened with Twitter like you know leadership changes or the company drastically goes a different way
the goal with this account portability as you mentioned is to give people away to move to a different service provider and so rather than oh no like the social site went down now my whole social identity is dead and they have to start over again our goal is to get this to a place where it's the last social identity you'll have to create because there's another app out there that will be waiting to take our place and then users can seamlessly migrate over
and this kind of be seamless you know migration path might also let things fragment and come back together more gracefully so people are upset at a company they leave and then if they want to try again they go back and it doesn't disrupt all of their content and their relationships it kind of goes with them so if we had this you know if Twitter had been running on the app protocol at the time that leadership changed people could have you know taken the whole history of their content
all their posts all their followers their username moved off to another service and then if you know Twitter stabilize they could move back you know it would just be like the changing between cell phone service providers like if we were locked in had to change our contact list and our phone number every time that we changed from AT&T to T-Mobile you would really be stuck
and so in other parts of life I think we've started to decide that if this communications infrastructure is important enough people should have the right to really choose between service providers but I think we're still getting there with social and part of this push towards protocol instead of platforms is to push for that kind of user choice and user control
just like it seems like and I think it might just be like the maturity of the app protocol like and maybe evolve over the next couple of years but as more content ends up behind paywalls and the fact that AT protocol presumed that the content is sort of locked open I think is my understanding like that all my content that I'm publishing essentially goes to sort of like a public repository of my stuff that
the paywall mechanism isn't defined yet would be maybe the most like sort of generous way to think about it is not defined not it's not impossible is just not defined because in open service where all these different you know feed consumers all these different services running are all using the same data they need
to have access to at least access the fundamentals and when you want privacy there it's either a coordination game among all these services or you're encrypting things so I think that the most protocol robust way is to encrypt things and then you know give subscribers the key right
but it's just a little bit more technical complexity there and we've started off focusing on the global public conversation because they're already were good protocols out there for you know smaller you know more private conversations
there's matrix there's signal protocol so we know we looked at those and settled that you know and so we were definitely inspired by those and we made sure to design things so that we have these associated with accounts and you know sort of a structure where later we can move in that direction basically people's user data is stored in a way that's very inspired by get it's a user repository and then your personal data server is much like GitHub where you can use GitHub or you can self host
I think like what I'm what I'm noticing in this conversation is there's this concentration tension between kind of monetization and making you living through producing content for the social web versus just being a participant in the social web and it's much easier to solve for the ladder in a way because the monetization stuff requires you to kind of invent artificial scarcity
obviously that was the whole like entity thing for a moment where you impose a like restricted access you know to content or you make it scarce such that people are willing to pay for it and so it is orthogonal to the distribution of that content but it seems like with the way that at protocol is currently specified it's like there's not an obvious answer to someone who let's say like Ben Thompson is publishing you know to to
Stratekery and he wants to have pay-walled articles that if you were to move his pds that his subscribers is paying subscribers would automatically be able to follow him at his new pds with everything intact without doing any extra work so let me pause there
and let's just say that that's that's a little undefined which is fine the question that I was going to ask on the other side is one of the most compelling and interesting aspects of blue sky of course is composable moderation which I feel like
you've been talking about for a very long time and so it must one feel gratifying to come to this place where you now show people what you're talking about and then to my question sort of on the flip side of what I was just asking about when it comes to creators is what you see in terms of opportunities for businesses to become whether it's like laborers or whether it is like block party or whether you know it's like a VPN style or ad block style business model where essentially there's people coming into the network and they're
putting together composable feeds or moderated feeds to provide people with a better experience like do you see a way or how that's going to build out or I guess over the next year or is it still a little too soon to be thinking about those types of opportunities
yeah I think that's a pretty clear path forward for things I mean moderation is something that offers value to the ecosystem it's something that there's you know hasn't been enough new approaches tried I think and generally the centralized companies have been the bottlenecks for change so it's a you know taken a while to figure out how to explain our approach to moderation and I think we're still figuring out how to best explain it but you know for a while people run into the misconception that we didn't moderate because we were just centralized or something and that's not an all choice of what we're doing right
right that's not at all true and we have a moderation team and basically what we've done is we tried to it's a it's a composable because it's like building blocks that stack together and so we've laid a foundation with the blue sky app where we're doing
moderation is set a baseline and the blue sky app is like a service that you sign up to use and we give you a package of defaults and you can customize from there and then the app protocol ecosystem is saying there's this other layer beneath even the blue sky app that other apps can build on and stack their own building blocks and operate
outside of our foundation if they want but in the blue sky app here's sort of like what we've built and then just like we I think custom feeds going first was the greatest example to show people because people also didn't understand that until they saw it which is well we give you a default you have a feed when you sign up
and you have an algorithmic feed we give you discover it's an algorithmic feed but then you can browse 25,000 other algorithmic feeds and then you know substitute out the you know for the feeds that you want like maybe you just want to see cat pictures there's like five cat picture feeds you know and so people can see how much you can start to like tailor things and be creative within the realm of curation which is surfacing information to you out of all the data flowing through the network.
Moderation is the other side of the same coin it's suppressing data hiding it away not promoting it right so curation all these feeds like you know the dredge stuff up for you to see and then moderation tuxed away and expresses it and so the baseline we've said in blue sky app defines like what are the boundaries of like what is the
stuff we've been to show and then on top of that you get to customize with all these lablers that are coming soon which is going to work much like custom feeds and then outside of that whole foundation like in parallel you can run your own services and you can have infrastructure autonomy so if you really just want to index part of the network and have a small community that doesn't happen to go to fire hose sets its own rules does its own thing you can do that and it's you know protocol compliant although but they're not like talks to the rest of the instances is really a matter of like you know government
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and that's where it becomes really interesting right because again you have sort of on the one end the global town square and then on the other hand you have like the individual that's like you know publishing more or less like blog posts or misses you know whatever into their pds then like I think what's interesting about the mass it on approach is that these are more like almost like townships or like smaller sort of you know groups of people coming together to decide what their values might be and then coordinating around that so I guess like question there is like when I think about I don't know one to two years and I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that.
I don't know one to two years and you know in the future and I think about people maybe using blue sky if they're generating their own version of composable moderation you know I know one of the things is very important is like user experience and ease of use what is the process by which someone at an individual level comes up with their own like composed moderation beads you know like it's easy enough to imagine just adding accounts to a list like a save list but composable moderation can actually go much be much more complex.
It's literally it can be an algorithm but that sounds like either writing a bunch of like redgex or something even more powerful with like you know machine learning what is the level of complexity that that that a user starting in the social web in 2027 should be expected to know how to do in order to get a good experience out of this new more diverse social web.
So this is really exciting I think there's so many possibilities here and again it's I think seeing the path towards user adoption is possible when you look at what's happened with custom feeds and so at first you had to be a developer to consume the fire hose to reduce a custom feed and then someone came along and build sky feeds and a few other things which are a custom feed builders that give you a you know graphical user interface like a control panel where you can go in without knowing how to code you can start building custom feeds that do things based off.
Based off lists based off hashtags based off words based off regular expressions based off machine learning and these tools are getting better and better and creating more options for people who want to be creative have an idea for feed but don't know how to code and I was talking to a friend the other day and with the state of you know machine learning you're probably going to be able to in 2027 and do something like you know tell a service I want a feed that shows me this or for moderation that hides this like hide all these topics and you just want to do that.
I just hide all these topics and you just maybe just tell it in words it transcribes it builds an algorithm based off that and then you tweak it until you get what you want that's probably going to be possible in a few years and so having interfaces where you might have to not even have to tie it you just talk to your computer and then you like get feed that you want that would be something I think would be very cool and be possible to build.
So same for moderation I think you know when we first roll this out you're going to be at least able to have a.
We're going to be open source and software that we've built to sort of manage and tag things and label things so you won't have to be a developer to build your software you'll just have to run it and the next step will be probably people will be adding on the open source code that we building their own software to do things in their own way and then probably third party things will emerge like sky feeds for moderation that let users who don't know how to code.
Set their own moderation criteria and then over time you know that will get even more complex and even more refined. Got it okay more questions since you mentioned it one of the things that of course I've gone back and forth with Paul at Blue Sky about is hashtags. Blue sky currently does not support hashtags and yet you just mentioned that they can be used for creating these moderate feeds for yes composed feeds so.
You know you can also deflect and not answer my question but I'm just curious like what is the thinking there and is there any possibility that you know internally blue sky would linkify hashtags or just that that's not going to happen. It actually is on its way.
And we kind of wanted to also give it some time to like see what would happen with custom feeds like that was the main thing when I get out first to show people you know what was new and people started organically once again using hashtags in feeds as a signifier so hashtags actually do exist in the sense that you can build feeds based off hashtags and that's the way.
A lot of people tag things in the feeds through hashtags and emojis but linkifying them is a logical next step and I think you know it's really cool to us the history of how these things emerge back when Twitter was an opening ecosystem you know like.
You could just invent the hashtag and that's awesome and you know in the company would you know adopted and it was sort of like you know follow where the user base goes and where the culture goes so well I mean the company was so you know and then eventually you know Twitter acquired some eyes and some other apps and that's how it got in so it's always it's always the Trojan horse yeah yeah anyways okay so I love that it was like kind of you know it came from you know people just being creative and I think there's already a you know a pull request open because that's the way.
So I think it's a good way to do that because that's open source people have made a full request like link if I hash tags and. I will give that one a lot so yeah yeah you'll you know time lines are always in flux at an order that's like that's really going all these things but I will I do know that it's on its way. Okay great so my last question then is just about the types of social apps that you are anticipating or perhaps that you hope to see the community build on the app protocol.
You know I know that it's possible to build things like Reddit or to build you know blogging software so you know I think one of the challenges of course with app protocol yeah is.
People see it they see blue sky and then they think oh it is like you know Twitter breelon great that's the end of the story but in fact as you've said this is meant to be a technology that enables you know a thousand different flowers or app flowers to bloom so of all thousand app flowers which are the ones that you're most. Optimistically looking forward to let's say in the rest of the year.
Well I know that you know images are easy to support the things within the sort of content for me that it's possible to support video and stuff too but actually the challenge there is more you know just moderation and making sure that you just have experience it's not so much technical limitation of like sporting it at the protocol level it's the social coordination you know making sure that we're like getting a good experience out of it.
So I think yeah I'd be excited to see some things of virgin parallel as as we open up federation we're also enabling third party Lex cons which is our sort of like specification for how you go in and define new protocol like record types.
I think it will be a period of experimentation is people play around with those and it's always a juggle to sort of like guide you know protocol governance and direction where everything comes together in a cookie piece of way and makes sense and so we're talking about you know how do we. Go through that process and make sure that when all these different apps bloom it's not just chaotic and you can.
You're confusing to users but we're excited to see a lot of merge and so yeah different kind of conversation types different record types different kinds of apps long form as well as short form I think would be very exciting to see.
And then the experimentation with radically different types like early on we had somebody build a user interface where you walked through your timeline in a third dimensional VR space and there was like a like an I know anime character that summarized what was going on in your timeline for you and like follow you around. I love you. Yeah. People just like using the social app.
Emitting or is like these little 3D characters like little chat bots like every time you know the Jake a bot like you know tweets or posts or skeets or whatever you want to call it like it's like a 3D character that you're like in a room with. Okay that's that's totally the first.
Yeah I want to see radically experiences like that exactly yeah yeah and just like see see things emerge that like do things outside the box of how social is being done because suddenly innovation is like unbounded like we also have a sky spaces.
experimentation which is like a clubhouse thing because we designed everything to be composable you don't have to use the whole data model you can just use the identity thing and we just put out a proposal for you know an off spec for like how you can like log into these things and the goal would be for your app protocol identity to be something to log in across all sorts of new apps and then.
What we've done is we've built up you know this first user base on this first sort of app but then the next app that comes along will be able to draw users from the same user base and get to keep their relationships and even if you're not operating over the same data maybe you can jump into this guy spaces app and talk to all of your friends that you made on boost guy you know and then and so on and so on and then it all builds on itself until you get a much more vibrant socially consistent.
To to real quick final questions from me curious for your take on the controversy that's happening on threads right now vis-a-vis apparently like you know demoting political threads and things like that there's the obviously the the censorship angle or like the certain certain content is not but also like a lot of people that.
Maybe jumped over from X slash Twitter because this was the place where they were their creators in the political space and they want to do things and now they feel like the rug has been pulled out from under them I'm just curious your take on that controversy.
Yeah I mean I think this is one of the types of many types of problems that emerge when you have one algorithm run by one company it's sort of a black box the company can do whatever they want and users don't really have a choice and the goal of building in algorithmic choice at the start with loose guys.
With loose guy was so that you can always choose what kind of future going to get you can control your scroll you know you can pick to have a pick a very political social experience we're striving to all the. You know politics feeds following all the trending topics there or you can filter out entirely and we just want the tooling to get better and better so people can control their experience and so.
To people eventually using the same app actually think it's already quite like this to people using the same loose guy at could one be having a very cozy quiet experience no politics just in the friends post and maybe like. Pictures of moss and cats and then somebody else could be following you know trending topics super bowl discourse policy and mossy cats whatever is going on like who is a lot of cats exactly.
So my favorite feed it's just it admittedly but I actually really like being able to swipe between both modes like I go over to follow no trending topics on discover and for you and these like. Mindful moss and then chaotic politics and you just yeah right when I want a mindful moment I go over the moss feed and it's usually just like post of moss with like three likes that people have taken on their hikes amazing and I go in and I like all of them you know and then.
How did the CEO find my post I have 12 followers and I took a picture on a hike and I'm like well there's all these niche feeds that surface content and like weird ways. And finally finally you mentioned AI obliquely and talking about like tell the algorithm this is what I want to see that sort of thing or whatever. It's very early for AI in the context of social media and things like that but what are you seeing.
In terms of how AI could transform what social even means like how are you all thinking about this as a potential paradigm shift for social media itself.
I think it's something where we're in a period of huge flux and change not just the fact that there's this transition of you know governance essentially when we're trying to talk about like how do we open up social platforms again make them decentralized but also we have new actors on social networks which are you know AI agents a bots like you know all sorts of new sort of.
And chaotic vectors of change being introduced and I think it's very hard to evolve platforms to keep up with it part of the hope of having an open ecosystem is that we can evolve faster because anyone can come along knowing the state of the art and just plug in and start building something around the interfaces that matter like creation moderation new clients.
And also potentially there's ability for innovation to be accelerated because you can write code and not just algorithms but maybe entire clients you know entire you know new paradigms of doing things faster and faster with the sort of like machine learning augmentation that you're going to get and so you could see you know potentially a new explosion of innovation in the space if we don't close it down where you're suddenly able to create all sorts of different ways of interfacing with your social data.
The data is just like a sort of you know shared public conversation space that we're applying all these different lenses to all these different views not just algorithms but like different apps different you know moderation filters and then my hope is that we can harness the collective intelligence of all the developers and users and people out there who really want to have a space online to connect and communicate and they wanted to work for them and the struggle is always getting decentralized companies to do it in a way that works for them.
And in an open source environment they can just take things into their own hands and start moving changes before the centralized company to sketch up. Jay I've said on the show a couple times now I think y'all are doing the most interesting stuff right now in social so thanks for coming on the show to tell us about that. Thank you.