If you are a child of the 1970s or 1980s, your first experience of the Internet was probably AOL Inc. The hum, crackle and static screech of the connecting modem ushered you into busy chatrooms and vibrant forums. That era did not last long. Through the 1990s and early 2000s, AOL’s walled garden crumbled as millions of Web sites populated what we now call the open Web. Protocols like “HTTP” and “SMTP” allowed people to jump between pages or send e-mails between international servers.
Yet today’s Web experience is less open and more like AOL again. Those who “surf the Web” now spend at least half their time on a few sites owned by companies like Meta Platforms Inc, Alphabet Inc’s Google and Amazon.com Inc. The sprawling, creative wilderness of the early Internet is a distant memory — one that Jay Graber is trying to bring back.
The chief executive officer of Bluesky Social wants to “change the model of social media,” so that after a decade of industry consolidation, consumers can have more control over feeds, algorithms and profiles, Graber tells me.
Illustration: Mountain People
Bluesky was created inside Twitter, but then spun off after Elon Musk took over. Graber, a former software engineer, became CEO in 2021, and so far its rapid expansion has been keeping her busy.
A year after its public launch, Bluesky has amassed 32.5 million registered users, many of them refugees from the now-named X who dislike the site’s more chaotic direction under Musk.
What makes Bluesky unique is the control users have over what they can do on the platform. Instead of scrolling posts and images picked by an algorithm, they can choose from more than 50,000 feeds made by other users. The “science feed,” for example, is curated by a handful of experts including a zoologist and marine biologist.
If users do not like the way curse words are blocked on site, they can install custom filters that allow the f-word to flow through or ones that block more political content. It is the difference between a one-size-fits-all and bespoke experience. While Facebook users get a set meal, Bluesky’s denizens have more of a buffet.
The network’s technical underpinnings make all this possible, particularly its Authenticated Transfer Protocol (ATP), which allows different networks to talk to one another. Bluesky’s original engineers built the framework under former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey because they wanted a more decentralized system for social media, one that a single company would not control. It is why today’s BlueSky visitors can keep their identity and “friends” even when they switch to another platform on the same protocol.
For instance, Blacksky was founded by one of Bluesky’s early adopters as a feed for black users, but it has evolved into its own community with moderation standards and 350,000 monthly active visitors, all on the ATP. Pinksky is another offshoot that simply offers an interface that resembles Instagram.
Researchers in Taiwan are testing “pro-social algorithms” designed to bridge political differences rather than amplify them — an effort to improve “democratic health” — and that could become its own community, too.
“You don’t have to lobby a big social company and say: ‘Hey, can you try our experiment?’” Graber says. “You can just plug it in as one of the feeds in this marketplace.”
The consolidation of control in social media mirrors a broader pattern in technology that artificial intelligence (AI) scientist and entrepreneur Ben Goertzel has been warning about for years.
“The concentration of AI is part of a concentration of wealth and power,” says Goertzel, who has his own community-governed AI network called SingularityNET.
Human connections have been reduced to engagement metrics and algorithmic triggers, making social media more transactional.
Little wonder Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said that he would like AI-generated content (or “AI slop” as some are calling it) to bring more eyeballs to Facebook. If that becomes a turnoff for his users, it will be another exodus for Graber to capitalize on.
So far, she has made a good start: Bluesky is flooded with new visitors because it is easy to use, in part by looking like Twitter.
Her challenge now is to balance all the technical possibilities of decentralized tech with something that is as attractive and seamless as TikTok. Getting caught up in dry, complicated talk of protocols and open standards could stifle the flood of enthusiasm.
Case in point: Free Our Feeds is a noble fundraising campaign to expand Bluesky’s protocol into something much bigger.
“Social media once promised to be a global public square... yet it is now under the control of a few billionaires, used to advance their own political and business objectives,” its organizers say on their GoFundMe page.
However, the public is not rushing to stick it to Zuckerberg and Musk. In two months, Free Our Feeds has raised just 2 percent of its US$4 million target.
If Graber can find a way to help Bluesky’s new crop of feed curators — like the scientists — make money through a seamless payment system, she could create a thriving marketplace and a serious threat to the established order, but she is walking a tightrope in trying to attract more users with something that is both familiar and completely novel.
And Graber wants to avoid creating an incentive structure that rewards those who try to stir outrage for clicks.
“We’ve seen that play out on other networks in ways that we would like to learn from and not repeat,” she says.
The window for this kind of reinvention does not stay open long. In the Internet’s short history, periods of openness and experimentation are followed by consolidation. If Bluesky can maintain its growth, it might just recapture what many of us loved about the net in the first place: a space where human preferences dictate our experiences, not engagement metrics and algorithms.
Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. She is a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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