“Welcome to Spain!”, greeted Jay Graber, executive director of Bluesky, this Sunday. A social network created in the image and likeness of Twitter, but with an anti-millionaires shield which is experiencing an exponential explosion of users. The Spanish community is part of it: the platform went from seven million members in October to 15 million last Thursday. Since then, this number has increased at the rate of one million per day. But who is Jay Graber? Who else is behind the new fashion platform? Who finances it?
The story of Graber and Bluesky begins in late 2019. Social media is at a turning point and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey believes his platform could be one of the hardest hit. “The value of social media is evolving from simple posting and deleting content to recommendation algorithms that grab people’s attention,” he warned.
For Dorsey, the consequences of this trend for large listed companies such as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram itself were clear. “Existing incentives on social media often focus attention on content and conversations that generate controversy and outrage, rather than conversations that inform and promote health. »
“Unfortunately, these algorithms are usually proprietary and you cannot choose or create alternatives. Yet,” he said. This is the official announcement of a pilot project within Twitter that could avoid this future. As? Taking away your own company’s ability to absolutely dominate the algorithms that control the conversation.
The plan was to separate the data they generate from Twitter itself. The fact that user activity was carried out according to an open protocol and that their social network was a means of exploiting them, but not the only one. Give each member the opportunity to leave and go to another app if they didn’t like what they saw on Twitter. Decentralize the network.
“Why is this good for Twitter?” “This will allow us to access and contribute to a much broader body of public conversations, focus our efforts on building open recommendation algorithms that promote healthy conversations, and require us to be much more innovative than in the past “, he justified.
Dorsey, a strong advocate of decentralized digital technologies, such as cryptocurrencies, believes that if Twitter took this step, it could trigger a virtuous cycle in which other networks join the open, decentralized protocol, connecting with each other .
With this roadmap, the company organized a competition to create the team responsible for developing this new technological standard for social networks. He selected five designers and systems architects to make it happen. The person responsible for its management would be a 28-year-old engineer, Jay Graber.
Bluesky, the rebel intern
Twitter funded the project with $13 million and it launched in December 2019. This was the first investment in Bluesky. It was a “scholarship,” but Twitter did not control the initiative. “I had an advisory seat. But there was no well-defined structure. It was something like: We’re going to put this money aside, and whoever we hire can figure out the best way to build this protocol,” Dorsey explained in a 2024 interview.
The founder of Twitter had already launched this strategy with other initiatives aimed at developing decentralized protocols. One of them is the one that gave birth to Block, a financial company based on cryptocurrencies, of which Dorsey is president. Graber chose to loosen his ties with his mother.
Welcome to Spain!
– Jay 🦋 (@jay.bsky.team) November 17, 2024, 10:35 p.m.
“Jay decided he wanted to create a completely different entity,” Dorsey revealed last May. “It was further accelerated when Elon [Musk] he made the acquisition offer, and it quickly became a matter of survival, where he felt he had to build a company, create a model around it, raise venture capital, form a board of directors, issuing shares and all these things.
The project to save social networks has turned its back on its founder and the platform that gave birth to it. “That was the first time I was like, wow, this isn’t going in a direction that I’m really happy with, or that wasn’t the intention. “It was an open source protocol that Twitter could potentially use,” explains the businessman.
They repeat the same mistakes we made on Twitter
Jack Dorsey
— Founder of Twitter
The months in which Musk attempted to reverse his purchase of Twitter were pivotal for Bluesky. The project of creating a decentralized protocol for networks would become completely independent and begin its journey alone. Ad-free and with minimal algorithmic impact. “What happened was people started to see Bluesky as something to escape to, away from Twitter. “It’s what Twitter isn’t, and so it’s great,” continued Dorsey, who was then still on Bluesky’s board of directors.
The young initiative continued to develop the decentralized protocol that was its initial mission (AT Protocol), but at the same time it also designed a social network to work on its technology. “Little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools and kicking people out. And unfortunately, they decided to do it,” says the Twitter founder.
Dorsey says that was the turning point. Bluesky accepted money from venture capitalists to finance itself and agreed to impose moderation mechanisms. In the spring he left the board of directors and in September he even deleted his account: “They are repeating the same mistakes we made on Twitter. »
Crypto Industry Venture Capital
Bluesky was flying solo and Twitter’s $13 million would soon be insufficient. The platform was limited in its spending in its early days and went so far as to establish an invitation-based registration model to prevent an avalanche of users like the current one from destabilizing it.
The network was only opened to the world last February. Today, it already has nearly 20 million users and only 20 employees. During this period, it opened two financing rounds, of $8 and $13 million respectively. In both cases, crypto investors, attracted by the decentralized model offered by Bluesky, such as SevenX Ventures, Protocol Labs or Blockchain Capital, had great influence.
The company’s exact ownership structure is unknown, as it is not publicly traded. Bluesky made public that the leader of its latest financing round, closed at the end of October, was Blockchain Capital. It is one of the largest and most influential venture capital firms in the crypto industry, with a presence on Coinbase (the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the United States) or OpenSea (the largest large NFT market). In exchange, she placed one of her partners on the board of directors of the social network.
“This fund has an exceptionally deep understanding of our decentralized foundation and has extensive experience building developer ecosystems, making this a natural partnership as we continue to invest in ATmosphere (the developer ecosystem of the AT protocol ),” Bluesky said.
Bluesky and the AT Protocol do not use blockchain or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyper-fund the social experience (via tokens, cryptocurrency trading, NFTs, etc.)
Blue sky
— after its association with one of the leading crypto funds
“This does not change the fact that the Bluesky app and AT Protocol do not use blockchain or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyper-financialize the social experience (via tokens, cryptocurrency trading , NFT, etc.)”, promises the platform.
The blue sky network (a reference to the space where the Twitter bird was supposed to fly) has parted ways with Dorsey and its parent platform. Despite this, its new allies are pushing it towards a monetization model similar to that of avatar colors and frames.
Your next steps will shape your future. “Bluesky will always be free to use – we believe information and conversations should be easily accessible and not blocked. We will not upgrade accounts simply because they subscribe to a paid level,” specifies the young social network.
