YouSaid · the spoken record

Jay Graber

lines on the record: 74
first: 2024-12-02
most recent: 2024-12-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Do and I've accepted it to some extent, and I've also told people steward of this ecosystem right now and the creator of, let's think of it as like a city-state in an ecosystem we're trying to build my bio on blue skies. Let's build a federated republic starting with this server. And so there'll be lots of other federations out there. I encourage you to start one, you know. And I will do my best on this one. I also am not something we joke about on the app is like a poster's madness as a real thing that people can get on social media. So we try to do some internal awareness on becoming audience captured by our own audience and stay aware of that. And then also, yeah, I'm like try to do my best to also, I'm a poster, engage with the community, but not be like the main character all the time. Like there was a joke at Blue Sky I found very funny, which is like the one thing I love most about this app is I don't know who the CEO is.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All right, last question. It feels like the people who run the more centralized platforms have lately become utterly beholden to their own posters. Like Elon Musk seems very responsive to the posters on Twitter. Adam Asari in the middle of the night is like, I don't know, I'll look into it. Like you see that reaction. I'll be the face of the thing. To some extent, you're the face of Blue Sky. You're here doing this interview. But you have an out, right? It's come up several times in this conversation. I don't know, we'll see what the marketplace does. We'll see what the community does. Do you feel that pressure to be the face and to be responsive, or do you think that that out will actually take hold?”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Haven't seen a lot of it yet, but we're preparing to deal with it through both sort of our policies and training, making sure everyone's aware, and then also making sure that we've gotten this moderation tooling built out, which you'll be able to see in action soon, that's going to let people start to make these interventions”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not quite yet. I mean, we've been dealing with spam and all the other problems that networks run into, but we've been, we've also been building our own automated tooling, and it's a constant cat and mouse game, but we're trying to stay cutting edge in terms of how we address these things using a combination of like human moderation and automated tooling to catch stuff. And then also part of the open interfaces, we've already seen some cool experimentation going on. Like we had a hackathon a few weeks ago at YC. There were some groups that made deepfake detectors using state-of-the-art models that do deepfake detection. And so it's this cat and mouse scheme of, you know, AI is being built to create deepfakes. Also, there's deepfake detectors now. And so those things can come together into things that, you know, if we don't pull them in directly, they can run as independent services. And this composable moderation thing. And if they're running really well and like super critical to the ecosystem, then we'll find ways to integrate them more into the app experience.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the new tools will help a lot, and we're also not relying entirely on them. If everything we've done, we're doing a hybrid approach where we are running our own moderation team with experienced leadership and we are going to do our best. And then we also have all these open interfaces where other people who are more experts or people who think we're not doing it well come in and do it themselves. And then we'll stitch a whole together out of both all the open experimentation and the decisions that we're directly making and what we decide to carve out as like this is stuff we're doing really well and that we think the foundation we need to set for this to be a good experience.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me end by bringing us all the way down on the ground. You have a lot of big ideas about protocols and platforms. I'm obviously obsessed with them. But you run a social network that's growing in an election year. You've had to deal with some very real content moderation controversies on Blue Sky already. There's been some real problems with racism. There's been problems with death threats. And you just had to do some direct moderation, like just take some direct moderation decisions. It's an election year. It's going to be weird. There's going to be a bunch of like AI deepfakes of both candidates coming. Do you think your new tools are going to let you address that stuff in a new way or are you going to have to go back to the old ways and just take some direct moderation decisions as you've had to in the past?”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then that whole ecosystem kind of got closed down when these companies shut down their APIs. But if we open that up again, I think social will be another period of experimentation. There will be lots of companies and people, hobbyists, just people trying things and playing around again. It will be like a playground era of social. But in a next iteration where we're aware of a lot of the problems that happen through platforms and mass broadcast at scale, and we have a lot new tooling, like machine learning has moved on a lot since, you know, last time we had a lot of growth in social. So I think a lot of interesting things are going to come out of this era of building.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like last year I was turning down a lot of media because we had to build this out and we really want to show not tell now we have examples that we can point to and it makes it a lot more real rather than me just sitting here expounding on the printing press. It's very high minded and not concrete. But now we actually have examples of many different feeds and many different services that have been built in this ecosystem. And so one of the things we're starting to do is to fund the developer ecosystem. We've started a grant system. We're going to start giving money to some projects just to help boost this ecosystem. But I think over time these funding models are going to shift and change and we're going to experiment with a lot of them because a whole ecosystem that's like the web means a whole variety of experiments like the web itself kicked off. And I find that really exciting because social has been in a period of stagnation because it's consolidated in a few companies and early on people built all sorts of Twitter clients and experiments on social and even Facebook was more open back in the day.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right now, a lot of what we're doing is trying to communicate the vision, like talking to you earlier on before we build stuff out.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're probably better at seeing it than I am. I'm very curious. This feels like there's some inkling of this is how it should work, but you've got to train a whole bunch of people to think differently and they're right up next to, I don't know, Elon Musk. I'll just do it for you. Just like show up and tweet, that seems like the hard part, right?”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think any of them will be businesses unto themselves? I'm reminded of the Spill Gates quote about Windows as a platform where he's like a platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that made the platform. So all the people who built companies on Windows, you add them all up, they exceed the value of Microsoft. You're kind of talking like that, right? You're going to build a platform. You're going to let people buy and sell on it and build products on top of it. Do you see someone saying, okay, there's an opportunity to build a great content moderation company that runs on top of App Protocol that Blue Sky users can buy?”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, as a company, but then also because this is an open ecosystem, it's not just limited to our funding model, right? Like we are in the early stages of building out this vision. And so we need to keep going, like prove out the vision, like show this, like make money as a company, create a marketplace. But then also somebody running one of these services on its own, already people building clients like other services in the ecosystem are some of them are charging, some of them are taking donations. I think some things will end up nonprofit funded. Like if you look at things like email, like you have big companies that run email services. You also have nonprofits that run through an email servers and you have institutions like your university might give you an email or your company might provide you an email, right? And so this is something where if we show value once again,”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that. That's a very high minded idea. You have to fund it. It sounds like your plan to fund it and be sustainable is to operate those marketplaces, right? To take a cut. So I buy an algorithm from you and you'll take a piece of that transaction.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talked to a reputable fact checking organ. They're running a really good fact checking service. We'll promote this, right? And the app. But then someone else could build a different app. And then how is the ecosystem going to evolve? Well, it's an open system. And eventually at some point we'll probably reach a point where we know what the good sorts of ways of arriving at truth are and like the good institutions like providing objective stuff or stuff that gets things right most of the time and then we'll converge around that.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On social media, and how do we develop new kinds of systems where we can come to shared truth again? We'll have to develop systems that new algorithms like community notes that kind of approximate shared truth from all these people broadcasting into the web. How do we do that? Is it going to be a centralized effort where one company just funds and develops that and gets the right answer? Or are we going to open it up to experimentation? And then maybe lots of people going at the problem start to arrive at the right answer. Our approach is the latter, which is opening up the system, having lots of people experiment on building new ways of curating, like arriving at approximating truth, like pulling lenses apart to look at this shared kind of information and then combining them again will approximate at some point. People start to converge around new ways of doing things. And so we also, as a company in the ecosystem, will be trying to approximate what is a good way to do this, what is the sort of the best labels out there, how do we bring those in? Like maybe if we've”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that basically to go very meta with this for one moment, I think that every new form of technology that comes along causes a lot of disruption, particularly information technology. So when the printing press happened, people said this is going in the world. We're going to have heresies like revolutions. All those things did happen. And there was a lot of chaos for a while because the shared truth of the old order kind of broke down. But then eventually we developed new institutions that built around the printing press and we developed new ways of understanding the written word and arriving at truth. We developed encyclopedias. We developed the academic citation system. We developed all the legal system that's very like text-based and builds off previous texts. And so we developed all these systems that helped us create a society that works. I think the information era has once again totally fragmented shared reality that the printing press had established and the written word and then broadcast media. And so now everyone can broadcast.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To let that whole ecosystem just iterate and experiment, and then we try to have some amount of leadership in terms of what we're encouraging people to build, like how we're creating and surfacing the best stuff that gets built and bringing it to users' attention and helping them install it. It is going to produce a better system. And there's some ideas right now in the academic world of this concept of moderation middleware that they've been kind of designing and thinking around doing this within the centralized platform paradigm of offering, hey, like instead of the only way to make change at these companies to have nonprofits, interest groups, governments like lobby the company for change, maybe you could create a middleware interface where people could directly add some of their input into things. This is composable labeling is kind of like middleware, but as a first class thing built in where anyone can build something like this. And because it's fundamentally open, it's taking that from the fundamental.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was this project that we thought was really cool in Twitter and seeing community notes come out of it that was a success in terms of them pioneering an algorithm that could usefully augment and annotate information out there? And basically the interface we've built is for a thousand algorithms like this to be experimented with and for some of them to be complex algorithms that were like, you know, very specialized algorithms like the Birdwatch algorithm, community notes algorithm, or some of them to be very manual. Like people are like, I'm an expert in this thing. I'm just going to label for this thing. So then that allows all these things to come together and do an experience that, again, it's about harnessing collective intelligence, letting experts, people with local context, move faster on these things than the company whose interests might not be entirely aligned in solving this niche problem or this jurisdiction. Or that's just too slow because it's a big company or it's a small team or whatever. And so our goal is...”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Platforms at scale and government requests. And our goal right now is to grow and get to that kinds of scale where these will be a good set of problems to have, but bringing in the expertise early so that we can be prepared to deal with it. And someone who really understands our whole architecture and can help us navigate those questions is like where we are right now in terms of preparing for that.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ultimately, data has a place where it's being hosted, so wherever server that you're running, the server runs in a jurisdiction where you've hosted it. Whoever's running that server is going to have to be responsive to their legal jurisdiction.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really centralized around that, and so it might functionally not be very open because people are tied to the server. It's kind of hard to move, right? And it's going to be really up to threads whether they ever become fully protocol compliant and let people move off threads easily. And then, you know, is there going to be that composability there? Are users really going to have that much control? Those are open questions and we'll see four threads takes things. But I think that we've built that in from the start. this openness and composability. We're also open source. And so that's the other guarantee is like our code is open source. All these interfaces we've built, that's not the case at threads. It's going to be something that if it becomes fully protocol compliant, I think there will still be risks to users.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really interesting that the ecosystem is moving this direction. Overall, I also at the end of the day want everything to be on an open protocol. And I think that our protocol is the most resilient long term and is going to give the most sort of like flexibility and guarantees of this being a healthy ecosystem where people can move around. But also I'm just excited to see things starting to move this direction. Like Mike Maznik, who wrote protocols not platforms as a paper, said that he shopped this around to all the big tech companies at the time. And this is one of the things that convinced Jack to do Blue Sky. So Twitter listened, but Meta was like, no, this is never going to happen. But since then, they seem to have moved on that position. And maybe like we were one of the things that have started moving things. I think that overall it's a healthier direction to go towards open protocols. One of my concerns about activity pub and the sort of threads model is because it's so server-based, if you have one massive server come on, like the thread server, things.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That you can run, and here's services you can host, but also at more user friendly levels like the user lists and block lists and the ability to run your own labeling service where someone non-technical can do that through software that we've built for you to go in and just say, all right, I want to start setting rules and filtering out this kind of content for me and my community.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, that has been our goal is to give users the tools to build space that are as safe as they want. And I think, you know, one thing that people have said, the protocol is missing right now is private accounts. That's something we'd like to get there. But so far, you know, in our mission statement, we focused on public data and the open Twitter model. And there's other protocols out there for private communication. There's matrix and signal and other sort of protocols that do private communication. So we focused on the hard problem of like global public conversations and algorithmic choice. But even within that, we want people to have the ability to feel like in Blue Sky right now, they're participating in public data, public posting. But you want to not interact with people who are going to harass you. You want to not see stuff that's going to be damaging and stuff. So you want to be able to partition off your little piece of the network. And so we've tried to give people all the tools to do that, not just at the architectural level of like, you know, here's server.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, okay, they can just not federate. And then there was a lot of discussion there was around opt in versus like opt out, right? So it's sort of discussions around what kind of governance norms do we want to set as protocol communities.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it's a big part of the culture of Mastodon. This was, as I mentioned, one of the reasons that we didn't try to get activity pub to change towards the direction of what we wanted to build because not just the technical primitives being different, there was also this culture of resistance to kind of global feeds and global algorithms. That means that people who had tried to do a search engine for all of Mastodon in the past or things like this had gotten shut down like this even before Bridgie Fed in the past. And I'd seen that even back in like 2020, 2021. I think it's just a continuation of that culture. And the key thing is, you know, even if you have a protocol that lets servers talk to each other and federate, part of it is human governance. And if people who run that server don't want to talk to you, then even if the computers can talk, they don't have to talk. And so that's essentially people in Mastodon expressing their preferences of the kind of communities they want, which is, you know, they don't want to talk to Blue Sky users.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Think actually collectives are going to merge and they already have in some ways. Collectives aren't formed at the server infrastructure level. So one of the ideas that we had was on Mastodon, your moderation is very much tied to who runs your server, but often the type of person who wants to do”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So there's some trade offs there. Some are really obvious, right? Like Mastodon server administrators often find that they're running a server and they have software costs and overhead and they have to maintain a server for a bunch of users. At the same time, they're in charge for better or worse. And if something goes wrong, they can shut it down or they can delete stuff. They are in control of the content. They can set different kinds of content moderation policies. There's a decentralization of authority in that way. It feels like at protocols much more individualistic in that way. Like activity pub points you towards groups of collectives that may wish to interact with each other and at protocol and blue sky are much more like you're on your own. If you like it, you can leave and there'll be a sort of larger sort of market of individuals. How do you think about, okay, if someone doesn't like the server they're on, they're going to leave, they might not actually be sending any signal at all.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do we get that sort of convenience and ease of use for the user? And thinking from a UX as a first class thing that we're designing for.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, a pretty good way to think about it, yeah. And this is where earlier on, since we're getting technical now, I said we were borrowing from peer-to-peer systems, peer-to-peer systems really try to do everything at entirely at the user level with no servers, and that actually creates a complicated user experience, but that means that every user is fully in control of all their data all the time. We have the ability for users to do that, but we have servers to make your life easier. So you don't have to have your phone be trying to directly communicate with like, you know, 5 million other phones or your computer trying to do that. But then you can always move off of our server and move off of these services. And so it's the property that we really tried to get out of this piece of decentralization is the right to leave. And so you can use a service and can use even a big service, but you always have the right to leave built in because we've designed around the user. And actually, the other way we've designed around the user is not just at the technical level, but at the UX level. So trying to design for like what do users really want.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Queer.af recently, their.af domain was seized by Afghanistan. And then people were kind of stuck because there was no warning. And then they have to rely on the old server to help for their stuff over to a new place. So we wanted to get around that problem and make sure people always had the ability to move. And then we wanted to have good UX. There was just a lot of complaints with users around the UX of Mastodon, and we wanted to provide something that was more tailored for the mainstream user who was used to Twitter, who could come on and not have to worry about, oh, what server do I pick when I sign up? What does it mean? Is this going to shape my experience forever? On Mastodon, you have to know that right when you sign up because it isn't going to shape your experience. Here you can sign up on our server, which is kind of the default lobby or gateway into the ecosystem, and then you can move to another server and shift to your own. So when we opened up Federation, several of our team members moved their main accounts off onto their own server. And it was pretty seamless. Like nobody notices that”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Something that both technically and culturally we had to design for because Activity Pub sort of has clustered more around servers that they federate and they talk to each other, but there isn't a service that scrapes all of it and gives you this big fire hose. And even if it's technically possible to build, there's been community resistance to people doing that. Even someone in the community who was building a bridge between app protocol and activity fub recently got a lot of pushback from the activity pub community on not wanting that bridge. So that's just sort of both cultural and technical. Another thing was we really wanted to get account portability. So this ability to leave with your identity and your data and have fallbacks where with the way that we've designed your repo, you can even back up all your posts on your phone or back it up on your server that you control and then you don't have to have any sort of friction when you want to move. And so you can move between services and activity pub. But if, for example,”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, activity was around Activity Pub was around when we got started. I did an ecosystem review of all the decentralized protocols that existed in 2019, including Activity Pub. And we looked at it and decided that we needed to build something different because there were some critical pieces that we thought were missing. One of them was around the composability and the interfaces for composability we've designed, like the way that we do custom feeds and all these moderation labelers, that's really not possible with the way that things are very server-centric in ActivityPub right now. Your server is very much your community where all of this happens. And we have split things up into these microservices on the back end, mirroring a bit more of how like a large scale social network works with the global feed. The other thing was the global feed, like having global search and discovery be a sort of a first class thing that we were building for, and also having all of our users at the start know that this is public data and it will be remixed in all sorts of ways by global feeds.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and we've already begun talking to some standardization bodies like starting the very early stages of that work, socializing the idea, taking around the pieces that are relatively more solid, as I mentioned earlier. The app protocol is actually made up of several pieces that, you know, the way identity works, the way data works, and these pieces we aim to get standardized and then stewarded by governance bodies.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Protocol itself is not a blockchain, not something with any built in monetization mechanism. It's like SMTP for email or HTTP for the web. It's just a way for computers to talk.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's ways to explore both right now. Like we have a lot going on in the app and that we're really focusing on. But also I think one insight is like we're trying to make social more like the web. And early on people didn't know how the web was going to monetize, but it definitely did. Services definitely monetized on the web. There's tons of services that made lots of money built on open protocols, right? And nothing that's gotten to massive scale on the internet has ever just totally failed to monetize. And so that's something that we just think we need to show people, first of all, that this vision is something that can work, that is fun, useful, good, better than the alternatives, and also good for society, creating healthier social media ecosystems. And then we really believe that money follows value. Like if we can demonstrate this value and people, you know, really want this, then it's something where we'll be able to make money offering services in this ecosystem.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Aren't doing the best anymore, like something else can come along and users can fragment out, and then maybe recohere around someone else who's doing things really well.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, there's lots of sort of joints on which it can splinter. There's already the sort of feeds and there's going to be the moderation services. These will all create different experiences just within even the blue sky app and are already creating different little corners. Then there will be different servers, there will be different apps running different entire pieces of the network. So that will, I will, I think cause a lot more variety in the ecosystem. Part of the idea of having an underlying protocol is social networks systems tend to go through periods of consolidation and then fragmentation. And a protocol that connects them all lets this happen naturally. So the example is the web itself is a protocol. Websites come and go. Some of them consolidate a lot of users. And then over time, they get worse and worse or they shut down and then users go somewhere else. And that sort of consolidation and fragmentation happens on the web. So this is trying to do that for social. So sites like Blue Sky can come and go and grow and then if we someday”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So building marketplaces within the app, essentially. We've got curation marketplaces, moderation marketplaces. This is a direction that we're going to lean into. We're also providing a service, and we're already making a small amount of money through one step we've made into custom domains. So the idea here is you can use your website that you own, like JGraber.com, as your user handle. But you have to be technical to set that up. You have to go buy your domain. You have to change the TXE record of your DNS settings. And a lot of people don't want to do that or don't know how. And so then we sell you a domain through us. We've partnered with Namecheap to do that. That makes us a little bit of money. And then that's an example of the kinds of services we're going to expand into over time.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For self hosting federation a few weeks ago, and that means that you can run your own server, host your own data, and then if we try to close things down or whatever, you can just say, well, now I'm just going to use a different service because I control my own data and it's on my own server. I control my identity, my data, and where it's hosted. And then that means if a lot of people are like federating and self-hosting, that ecosystem can just like shift around piece by piece to the services that haven't shut down their APIs and that haven't let users feel betrayed.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, yeah, we do want to make money and we are trying to do our best. Part of this is sort of tying yourself to the mast, like Sisyphus style. This is the ways that we've committed to openness. Like we've already open sourced the app and we've open sourced everything you need to run your own version of Blue Sky on the app protocol. And we have built in into the protocol ways for users to move all their identity and relationships and data around. The idea is that each user has all their data as a package. We actually call it a repository if you're familiar with Git and GitHub. It's like your data repository is like your GitHub repository. And then a lot of people use GitHub and that's a centralized site. But then they can take their Git repository and move it to GitLab or some other site. That's the sort of built-in vote with your feet piece is you can take your stuff and move it. And then Federation is an important piece that we just started.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I feel this in my soul. This is something that we have long wanted across a number of products. We've talked about it for a long time. I talk to the CEOs of other companies that are in these kinds of relationships with protocols or standards or open source. And at the end of the day, they often come back to, but we also have to make money. And the best user experience is often the one that we control. And so sometimes the protocol slides by the wayside. Sometimes the commitment to open source gets diminished because we have to make some money here. And if we control the user experience, the user experience gets ahead of the protocol. So be it. We got to eat. We got to pay the team. In particular, I'll give an example of this. And Twitter had a huge ecosystem of third-party clients. It was a playground for developers. So many cool things happened and were built. So many tools were built that had nothing to do with posting or reading tweets in the end of the day. And they had to monetize and they realized they couldn't put the ads and all those clients.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally, yeah. We do. You know, there's things that we've had on the roadmap and longer things that we try to stay focused on, like this vision of algorithmic choice and composable moderation. Those are things we prioritized because from the start we were going to do that. And then other things like hashtags, first we thought, well, I think the custom feeds will allow you to do hashtags within feeds. People did do that for a while, but people still wanted standalone hashtags. And we got enough takes from users saying, just bring us hashtags that eventually we added them. Same with, you know, mute words, like actually composable moderation is going to let you do something that is much more granular and higher powered than just mute words. But people want the simple interfaces too, you know, so that's something we've learned. So we added mute words and we have like mute lists and block lists and these are simpler building blocks and then now you're going to have bigger, more complex building blocks, the full dashboard of power tools under the hood.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That people were posting very aggressively into. That book has since been fixed, but for an era, there was kind of this crazy culture that formed around this bug that almost became a feature. So that was an example of this kind of like playful, chaotic energy taking place through both the intentional interfaces for experimentation and creativity and the unintentional ones, like the bugs that became features.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interfaces for creativity, both intentional and unintentional, so intentional ones are like the ability for anyone to build a custom feed. Like we created this nice interface in the app. Anyone can build a feed. And so now there's really niche feeds. Like, I really like the MOS feed that just shows you nice woodland pictures of moss. And then you can find a post from some user with five followers, but they posted a moss picture. Now it shows up in the moss feed. And so this is a way where like engagement gets spread out beyond one central algorithm into all these little niche communities. I guess another intentional way that it's creative is there's all sorts of different clients and experiences you can build. So people have built these different experiences that show you things a different way, show you the, you know, who's in your social network and all these visualizations that people have played around with. And then the unintentional ones are for a while we had actually a bug in the app that caused this very long thread to break and it became actually one long thread called”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This, I think, might actually just be a community element and partially early on a lot of the team we all were posters, we all were social media users and we engaged a lot, we still post and talk to people and stuff and not just me like quite a few people in the team. The devs talk to dev users like we have people who've worked in journalism and so we kind of have this culture of just like active discussion and using the app. And then there's been lots of”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, early on, we had several waves of users come over that were all really big posters. And most social networks, you have this dynamic where you have like 1% of people posting, and then a smaller percentage of people liking and then a lot of people lurking and just looking at stuff. And early on we had this crazy ratio of like, you know, 90% posters. And so it was extremely active and tons of people firing off, you know, shit posts essentially, like really fast, funny takes on things and like memes and a lot of stuff. And then, you know, since we've grown, I think the majority of people tend to use social in a more consumption mode. And so it has shifted a bit more towards lurkers, but still relative to other apps, I think there's a lot of posters, people who like posting and engaging that way. And then that results in a pretty chaotic and playful culture, I think.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Different things there's like a bit of both that kind of depends per design decision. One example here is that we don't show a like tabs in the blue sky app. That was something where it was an intentional decision early on and actually now we show it to you. So since we don't have Vokemarks, you can kind of use your own likes as a bookmark. But we don't show it to everybody. So if I go look at your profile, I don't see your likes. On the other hand, that is public information. So there's other sites that do show it. But this was just a little bit of friction that we added to say that even though the protocol supports anyone seeing your likes, you know, we think that there's some downsides to just having everyone's likes on their profile. So we didn't show it by default. Another example is we give you”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sits right at the intersection of what does a protocol enable and what is the product exposed to users, right? It's maybe the protocol supports down votes, but blue sky, the social network that people are on, never shows it to anybody or doesn't support that feature of the protocol itself. When you think about, okay, we should put this in the protocol. This is something we'd like, but our users on Blue Sky don't like it. Does that impact the protocol more? Or are you saying, well, we'll get to it in the protocol someday, but maybe Blue Sky won't have it.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Approval of this by downvoting it, and then if enough people downvote it, maybe it just disappears, right? And so that's actually, I think, an important piece, but it's important that also when you downvote it, it's not this big public statement. So that's something that we would still like to bring back at some point, this down regulation, but maybe not in that exact form.”
2024-12-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT