If you’re a child of the 1970s or 1980s, your first experience of the internet was probably dial-up. The hum, crackle and static screech of the connecting modem ushered you into busy chatrooms and vibrant forums. That era didn’t last long. Through the 1990s and early 2000s, millions of websites 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 has become less open. Those who “surf the web” now spend at least half their time on a few sites owned by companies like Meta Platforms, Google and Amazon.com. The sprawling, creative wilderness of the early internet is a distant memory — one that Jay Graber is trying to bring back.
The CEO 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, she tells me. 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 don’t 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’s 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.
AT protocol
The network’s technical underpinnings make all this possible, particularly its AT (authenticated transfer) protocol, 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 decentralised system for social media, one that a single company wouldn’t control. It’s 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 AT protocol. Pinksky is another offshoot that simply offers an interface that resembles Instagram.
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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 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’d 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 capitalise on. So far, she has made a good start: Bluesky is flooded with new visitors because it’s easy to use, in part by looking like Twitter.
Her challenge now is to balance all the technical possibilities of decentralised tech with something that’s as attractive and seamless as TikTok. Getting caught up in dry, complicated talk of protocols and open standards could stifle the flood of enthusiasm.
Read: The trouble with Meta Platforms
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 organisers say on their GoFundMe page. But the public isn’t rushing to stick it to Zuckerberg and Musk. In two months, Free Our Feeds has managed to raise just 2% 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’s walking a tightrope in trying to attract more users with something that’s 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 doesn’t 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 internet in the first place: a space where human preferences dictate our experiences, not engagement metrics and algorithms. — (c) 2025 Bloomberg LP
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