Bluesky, the social media platform that has recently enjoyed a huge influx of leftists fleeing X/Twitter, is designed to be “billionaire proof,” according to CEO Jay Graber.
In a recent interview with CNBC’s Money Movers, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber discussed the platform’s rapid growth and its unique features that set it apart from competitors like Elon Musk’s X and Meta’s Threads. Graber emphasized that Bluesky’s open design is intended to give users the option of leaving the service with all of their followers, which could thwart potential acquisition efforts.
“The billionaire proof is in the way everything is designed, and so if someone bought or if the Bluesky company went down, everything is open source,” Graber explained. “What happened to Twitter couldn’t happen to us in the same ways, because you would always have the option to immediately move without having to start over.”
Bluesky has experienced a surge in popularity since the U.S. presidential election earlier this month, accumulating over 7 million new users in just two weeks as it transforms into a leftist echo chamber. The platform now boasts over 21 million users, although it still trails behind X and Threads in terms of user base. Threads, which was launched by Facebook’s parent company Meta in July 2023, has roughly 275 million monthly users, according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. X, formerly known as Twitter, has an estimated 318 million monthly users as of October, based on data from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.
The growth has been rocky as the leftist platform has been flooded with reports and even child pornography. As Breitbart News previously reported:
After days of explosive growth on the platform, the Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that it received 42,000 moderation reports in the preceding 24 hours, compared to 360,000 in all of 2023. Most troublingly, the company acknowledged that it is receiving reports of “CSAM” or child sexual abuse material, commonly known as child pornography.
On X/Twitter, users are noting that the new platform is quick to censor anyone engaged in wrongthink, including one user allegedly banned on the same day he signed up, echoing the previous Twitter moderation rules before Elon Musk bought the company.
Bluesky was initially created in 2019 as an internal Twitter project during Jack Dorsey’s second stint as CEO. In 2022, it became an independent public benefit corporation, with Dorsey stepping down from the board in May of this year. Graber, who previously founded the social network Happening, which focused on events, has been leading the development of Bluesky since its inception.
“In 2019, Jack had a vision for something better for social media, and so that’s why he chose me to build this, and we’re really thankful for him for setting this up, and we’ve continued to carry this out,” Graber said. “We’re building an open-source social network that anyone can take into their own hands and build on, and it’s something that is radically different from anything that’s been done in social media before. Nobody’s been this open, this transparent and put this much control in the users hands.”
Bluesky’s business model involves offering subscriptions that allow users to access special features. The platform also plans to add more services for third-party coders as part of its “developer ecosystem.” Notably, Graber stated that Bluesky has ruled out the possibility of allowing advertisers to send algorithmically recommended ads to users, emphasizing that the platform will not rely on a model that “just shoves ads at you, locking users in.”
Read more at CNBC here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship.
