Kate Knibbs writes:

As I waited to meet with Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky, on the 25th floor of an office building in downtown Seattle, I stared out at the city’s waterfront and thought: God fucking damn it. Stretching in every direction was a wall of dense, gray, tragically boring fog. And here I was about to interview the head of a social platform named after good weather. On camera, no less.

Then something miraculous happened. Moments before Graber showed up, the haze lifted. Elliott Bay glittered in the sun. I could see past Bainbridge Island’s rolling hills all the way to a snow-capped peak, and the skies were, yup, completely and totally blue.

Graber’s tenure at Bluesky has had this felicitous quality, starting with her given name, Lantian, which—in a triumph for the nominative determinism crowd—means “blue sky” in Mandarin. (That the name she’s gone by for years, Jay, can also mean a winged creature that takes to the skies adds to the serendipity.) When Graber joined Bluesky in 2019, it was an experiment within Twitter. The idea was to spin off a social platform that would give users more control. That happened when Bluesky launched as an invite-only service in 2023, and by the time it opened up to the general public a year later, Twitter had become the right-wing echo chamber known as X. Bluesky swiftly became a refuge for a coalition of leftists, liberals, and never-Trumpers.

The 34-year-old chief executive cuts a different figure than most social media bosses. Earlier this year, after Mark Zuckerberg wore a shirt winking at his king-like status at Meta, Graber donned a near-identical top that instead called for a world without kings. The sartorial rebuttal was good press (and Bluesky ended up making major dough selling the shirt), but it also reflects her idea that this project ultimately cannot be controlled by a single leader.

Indeed, Graber, a former software engineer, seems most energized when she’s talking about the unique infrastructure for her kingless world. Undergirding Bluesky as well as several smaller apps is the Atmosphere, or AT Protocol, which is a rule book that servers use to communicate. The open source protocol allows sovereign digital spaces to integrate with one another as needed. Two apps with complementary ideas about moderation or ads can work in tandem—or not. It’s up to them.

Graber sees Atmosphere as nothing less than the democratized future of the social internet, and she emphasizes to me that developers are actively building new projects with it. In her dreams, these projects are as big, if not bigger, than Bluesky. Her ambitions might not be kingly, in other words, but they are lofty. For now, call Graber an insurgent go-getter—on whom the sun still shines. [Continue reading…]