Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky Social, a decentralized competitor to Twitter, believes that federation is the future of social media. Bluesky, initially a project inside Twitter under then-CEO Jack Dorsey, was spun 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 finds itself in the middle of one of the most chaotic moments in the history of social media. Amidst this chaos, Graber argues that decentralization — the idea that users should be able to take their username and following to different servers as they wish — is the future.
Bluesky’s approach to this is something called the AT Protocol, which powers Bluesky’s own platform but which is also a technology that anyone can use right now to host their own servers and, eventually, interoperate with a bunch of other networks.
Despite some early controversies around content moderation, Bluesky is experimenting with devolving control, so Bluesky users can pick their own moderation systems and recommendation algorithms. The Bluesky app, which now has more than 5 million users, is growing, and many of the company’s early decisions around product design and moderation have shaped the type of organic culture that’s taken hold there.
read more > www.theverge.com