Jay Graber on a Mission:
Making BlueSky Billionaire-Proof!
Jay Graber, the quiet mastermind
Jay Graber, the almost invisible mastermind behind Bluesky, is a software engineer redefining social media. Jay started her career as a digital policy activist. Born in 1991 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, she was raised by a Chinese acupuncturist mother and a Swiss mathematician father. Her name, “Lántiān” (Mandarin for “blue sky”), was a wish for limitless freedom—perfectly matching a visionair now building a decentralized digital future.
It's like building the wings on an airplane, while it is already flying
User's choice and developers freedom
BlueSky is an open source democratic form of network, a market place of feeds. The goal is to make social media more like the web, buildig a micro blogging protocol instead of a platform. It’s all about user’s choice and developers freedom.
The BlueSky team, for now, in all consists of 21 people. There are major technical challenges, but openness is key, while scaling up. They chose to build a federation behind the scenes back in 2023, instead of a centralised application. That slowed down the process of onboarding users. Now users can self host data and interact with the network.
The platform is independent, but started off as a project internal to Twitter.
From 2018 Jay was interested in building decentralized social protocols. “You need infrastructures which are democratic and give people a choice, let’s people intervene. Let people have a form of communication which they can modify and make their own.”
Moderation
Moderation is governance. We have a multi-layered approach to moderation. There is the BlueSky moderation but on top of that you can have other moderation services. You can have an AI image laberer or a politics laberer. We call that stackable moderation. The composable approach, you can pick and chose elements of moderation in your own app. We use Ozone moderation service, the protective layer of the atmosphere.
Our goal is to choose your own adventure on BlueSky. So we build features to have a close circle of communication. How to interact and how they want their space to be in customizing the settings. We have anti-harassment policies.
Decentralization
BlueSky is building the AT protocol. In BlueSky, communities are not restricted to individual servers. Federation operates at the user level, allowing individuals to create and join communities freely, without being bound to a specific server or administrator. On BlueSky you have a portable identity. You can have the same identity, communicate across serviceproviders and you. Users retain full control over their content and social graph, allowing them to switch between services at any time without interference from any administrator.
Now looking at Elon Musk’s X and the control over speech and algoritms. Everything what is happening on X proofs the case for why you need something as Bluesky.
The upside of decentralization is innovation. Any user can built clients and new experiences.
We are in this trap where users are locked in and developers are locked out and BlueSky is opening it up again.
BlueSky's potential businessmodel
BlueSky aims to align the business model with users in the long run.
- user subscriptions, value for money;
- developer ecosystem and services;
- market place. BlueSky takes a cut of transactions.
Bluesky’s future business model is still evolving
Will BlueSky remain Billionaire Proof?
During Jay Graber’s keynote at SXSW in March 2025, Graber wore a T-shirt with the Latin phrase “mundus sine caesaribus” (“a world without Caesars”), symbolizing Bluesky’s commitment to a decentralized platform free from control by any single entity.
Jay seems to to counter acquisition attempts by billionaires. While Bluesky is built to resist billionaire influence, challenges remain:
- Hosting and service providers still require funding, meaning companies could emerge that dominate parts of the ecosystem.
- If a billionaire wanted influence, they could still fund alternative services or algorithms within the network.
- Decentralization doesn’t automatically prevent monopolization; it depends on adoption and governance structures.
Why wait and see? Let’s give our full trust to the amazing platform Jay Graber has built—for our freedom!
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Author’s accounton BlueSky: iAnnet
Author: iAnnet
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