Graber's outfit cleverly referenced a well-publicized sweatshirt worn months earlier by Meta's billionaire boss Mark Zuckerberg, the world's second richest man.
His shirt had proclaimed "Aut Zuck aut nihil," riffing on the Latin phrase meaning "Either Caesar or nothing" -- except putting his own name in as a nod to his reputation for ruthlessly conquering new markets.
Graber's counter-slogan "was our cheeky way of saying there shouldn't be just one person making all the decisions," explained Bluesky's chief operating officer Rose Wang in an interview with AFP.
"We've seen what happens when one person takes over a platform overnight."
Making such a statement at SXSW carries significance.
The weeklong jamboree of tech conferences, music, and film is where Twitter first emerged in 2007, beginning its journey to become the heartbeat of global conversation before eventually catching the attention of Elon Musk, the world's richest person.
Musk's 2022 acquisition of Twitter, since renamed X, transformed the platform into a channel for his increasingly hard-right viewpoints and the de facto official outlet for Donald Trump's second presidential term. As this Musk-led transformation took shape, developers -- including Zuckerberg himself -- quickly created alternatives.
- 'Helplessness' -
Tech blogger Mike Masnick, whose paper inspired Bluesky's creation, describes the platform as a response to "learned helplessness" -- the condition where people knowingly but reluctantly accept that "someone else controls life's major interactions."
The site first began as a side project at Twitter but became independent ahead of Musk's buyout.
Two women, Graber and Wang, now lead a team of about 20 people spread across the globe, and Bluesky currently has more than 30 million users and has been fast-expanding.
A core aspect of Bluesky is that it is based on technology that makes your online identity portable to other apps using the same technology and the company encourages developers to strike out on their own.
"The whole point is that if a billionaire came in and took Bluesky hostage, everyone could just leave and go build Greensky," said Wang.
This represents a crucial difference when compared to major platforms controlled by capricious billionaires (X and Meta) or allegedly influenced by foreign governments (as claimed about TikTok, which could get banned in the US).
Bluesky empowers both developers and users to craft personalized experiences through specialized feeds highlighting specific content -- whether gardening, sports, linguistics, or other interests.
On Tiktok or Instagram, "creators are just tired of serving an algorithm that doesn't serve them," said Wang.
"That's how most of these social media sites were built.... There were all these other companies that helped feed this ecosystem, but as soon as the parent company felt that these third-party apps were taking users away from them, they cut off access," she said.
On Bluesky, users can navigate between different feeds, follow specific accounts, or explore content through the platform's Discover algorithm.
Currently, especially in the US, the service attracts left-leaning users seeking refuge from X's perceived toxicity and right-wing bias.
Despite its growth, Bluesky's user base remains dwarfed by competitors like X and Meta's Threads (launched in 2023), which claims nearly ten times as many users -- though many were inherited from Instagram.
- 'Coming-out year' -
Bluesky distinguishes itself from alternatives like Mastodon, where joining requires navigating complex server selection and understanding the underlying "fediverse" technology. Instead, Bluesky prioritized simplicity: users can register with just an email address, like most mainstream apps.
"Users don't need to know everything happening underneath," Masnick explained at SXSW.
This accessibility comes with trade-offs. The platform's openness allowed its content to be used for AI training, as revealed last year when tech news outlet 404 Media discovered a dataset of one million Bluesky posts on Hugging Face, an AI platform.
Jasmine Enberg, VP and Principal Analyst at Emarketer, observes that creators increasingly prioritize platforms offering more control and this "could benefit Bluesky, especially as it introduces creator-friendly features like longer videos."
However, she notes, "even as Bluesky grows partly at X's expense, it still lacks the scale and sophisticated tools of established social platforms."
Wang remains optimistic about Bluesky's trajectory.
"We really see this as our coming-out year," she said.
"People want to know what's happening in the world and need a safe, moderated space to discuss it, have fun, and make friends. Right now, they're not finding that anywhere else."
Related Links
Satellite-based Internet technologies
| Subscribe Free To Our Daily Newsletters |
| Subscribe Free To Our Daily Newsletters |
