Rewind: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on the future of federated social media

21:49For different things, there's a bit of both that kind of depends per design decision. One example here is that we don't show a like tabs in the Blue Sky app. That was something where it was an intentional decision early on, and actually now we show it to you. So since we don't have bookmarks, you can kind of use your own likes as a bookmark, but we don't show it to everybody. So if I go look at your profile, I don't see your likes. On the other hand, that is public information. So there's other sites that do show it. But this was just a little bit of friction that we added to say that even though the protocol supports anyone seeing your likes, we think that there's some downsides to just having everyone's likes on their profile.

22:26So we didn't show it by default. Another example is we give you an opt-out of the public web interface in the Blue Sky app. So all the data is public on Blue Sky, All your posts are public. Your likes are public. And anyone can build an app that shows all of that. And anyone can look at the fire hose. But if you don't want a lot of people to click through and see your post, and let's say one of the blue sky posts gets embedded in a news article or something, you can opt out of having it be click-through if someone's not signed in. And that's just some extra friction that we've added. And we've really learned through building and running a social app how much these kinds of little frictions and defaults matter in terms of shaping people's experience and giving a good experience, even if the protocol really enables, you know, something that can be done in a different way.

23:07We have to take a quick break. When we're back, Jay and I talk about the Blue Sky app and how it's grown to more than 5 million users over the last year.

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24:34We're back with Blue Sky CEO Jay Graber discussing her perspective on growing the platform and where she thinks it can go from here.

24:45I think this means I should probably split this up into two parts. I want to ask about the app and where you are with the app. And then I promise you the nerdy questions about the protocol are coming. I warn you. If you're listening to this, just be warned. They're coming. I would have spent the whole hour doing nerdy protocol questions. But I think we should talk about the app first because the app's on a roll, right? It's growing. You have 5 million users. I'm assuming some of the funding you raised is around the success of the app or at least driven by the success of the app. And then, as you mentioned, developers are attracted to the protocol because there are users there.

25:14I would say, and I hope you agree, Blue Sky has a very distinct culture from the other kinds of social networks that have sprung up in the sort of wake of the Twitter to X situation. I'm not going to get myself into trouble by describing the cultures of threads or Mastodon or whatever. But I will say Blue Sky is funnier. It's a little more chaotic. It's a little weirder. Why do you think that is? Yeah, I mean, early on, we had several waves of users come over that were all really big posters. And most social networks, you have this dynamic where you have like 1 % of people posting and then a smaller percentage of people liking.

25:52and then a lot of people lurking and just looking at stuff. And early on, we had this crazy ratio of 90 % posters. And so it was extremely active and tons of people firing off shit posts, essentially, like really fast, funny takes on things and memes and a lot of stuff. And then since we've grown, I think the majority of people tend to use social in a more consumption mode. And so it has shifted a bit more towards lurkers. but still relative to other apps, I think there's a lot of posters, people who like posting and engaging that way. And then that results in a pretty chaotic and playful culture, I think.

26:29Do you think that culture comes from moderation? Is it luck? Is it something that you are trying to preserve? Where do you think it comes from and how do you keep it going? This, I think, might actually just be a community element. And partially early on, a lot of the team, we all were posters. We all were social media users and we engaged a lot. We still post and talk to people and stuff. not just me, like quite a few people on the team, like the devs talk to dev users. Like we have, you know, people who've worked in journalism. And so we kind of have this culture of just like active discussion and using the app.

27:02And then there's been lots of interfaces for creativity, both intentional and unintentional. So intentional ones are like the ability for anyone to build a custom feed. Like we created this nice interface in the app. Anyone can build a feed. And so now there's really niche feeds. Like, I really like the Moss feed that just shows you like nice woodland pictures of moss. And then you can, you know, find a post from some user with like five followers, but they posted a moss picture. Now it shows up in the moss feed. And so this is a way where like engagement gets like spread out beyond one central algorithm into all these little niche communities.

27:35I guess another intentional way that it's creative is there's all sorts of different clients and experiences you can build. So people have built these different experiences that show you things a different way, show you who's in your social network and all these little visualizations that people have played around with. And then the unintentional ones are for a while, we had actually a bug in the app that caused this very long thread to break and it became actually one long thread called HellThread that people were posting very aggressively into. That bug has since been fixed, but for an era, there was kind of this crazy culture that formed around this bug that almost became a feature.

28:09So that was an example of this kind of playful, chaotic energy taking place through both the intentional interfaces for experimentation and creativity and the unintentional ones like the bugs that became features. That second part, the unintentional bugs became a feature, those emergent properties of social networks or communities, that always feels like the most special thing. The people who run the platforms don't really know what's going to happen. The users decide what's going to happen in ways that are completely chaotic. and the best platforms to have reinforced that and build upon it. And that is a really healthy feedback loop.

28:43I would actually put up Twitter as the best example of this feedback loop ever, right? So many core Twitter features were invented by the users. Is that on your mind that you need to watch your user base and take the ideas into the platform directly and build upon them? Because I don't see a lot of other platforms really leaning into that anymore. Totally, yeah, we do. You know, there's things that we've had on the roadmap and longer things that we try to stay focused on, like this vision of algorithmic choice and composable moderation. Those are things we prioritized because from the start, we were going to do that.

29:14And then other things like hashtags. First, we thought, well, I think the custom feeds will allow you to do hashtags within feeds. People did do that for a while, but people still wanted standalone hashtags. And we got enough takes from users saying, just bring us hashtags that eventually we added them. Same with mute words. Actually, composable moderation is going to let you do with something that is much more granular and higher powered than just mute words. But people want the simple interfaces too. So that's something we've learned. So we added mute words and we have like mute lists and block lists and these are simpler building blocks.

29:47And then now you're going to have bigger, more complex building blocks, the full dashboard of power tools under the hood. Do you think you're going to end up in a place where you have what I will just call the Microsoft Excel problem, where so many people have asked for so many familiar features that it's actually hard to bring them into a new paradigm like composable moderation or adjustable filters? Every big software product has this problem where there's an obviously better way of doing a thing, but then people are familiar with the way they've been doing it, and so you end up with both, or you never have the social capital to do the better way.

30:24Do you think about that problem? If the future feeds in the protocol, but everybody wants the sort of brute force moderation of the past, you're going to end up in that tension. Yeah, we actually do think about that a bit. And this is where having some amount of ecosystem guidance from a team that's really thought about it might help. But also then if we get it wrong, the whole app is open source. And so people can fork off it and strip things out, add things, take things a different direction. And so maybe if our app gets really bloated or if it's just not working right anymore, somebody who has a strong idea for how to do it differently or do it better can fork it off and say, all right, we're going to clean it up.

31:07This is the way we're going to do it now. So a lot of ways that we try to design things is so that we can provide good leadership in the ecosystem. And centralization has its benefits when someone has a plan and they know where they're going and it's a good place and people want to follow. But then if that leadership fails or gets things wrong or changes, then there's other options and people can vote with their feet and go over to the better option. And new entrants can come in and provide another example of doing something differently, doing it better. So I feel this in my soul. This is something that we have long wanted across a number of products.

31:41We've talked about it at the Verge for a long time. I talk to the CEOs of other companies that are in these kinds of relationships with protocols or standards or open source. And at the end of the day, they often come back to, but we also have to make money. And the best user experience is often the one that we control. And so sometimes the protocol slides by the wayside. Sometimes the commitment to open source gets diminished because we have to make some money here. And if we control the user experience, the user experience gets ahead of the protocol. So be it. We got to eat. We got to pay the team.

32:13In particular, I'll give an example of this. And Twitter had a huge ecosystem of third-party clients. It was a playground for developers. So many cool things happened and were built. So many tools were built that had nothing to do with posting or reading tweets in the end of the day. And they had to monetize, and they realized they couldn't put the ads in all those clients, and they shut down all those clients. Do you see that problem coming? Is that, oh boy, we're going to have to monetize this thing somehow, and we're going to have to reclaim some control to do that? Or do you have another idea for how you'll manage that tension?

32:43I mean, yeah, we do want to make money, and we are trying to do our best. Part of this is sort of, you know, tying yourself to the mast, like Sisyphus style. This is the ways that we've committed to openness. We've already open-sourced the app, and we've open-sourced everything you need to run your own version of Blue Sky on the app protocol. And we have built into the protocol ways for users to move all their identity and relationships and data around. The idea is that each user has all their data as this package. We actually call it a repository. If you're familiar with Git and GitHub, it's like your data repository is like your GitHub repository.

33:21And then a lot of people use GitHub, and that's a centralized site, but then they can take their Git repository and move it to GitLab or some other site. That's the sort of built-in vote-with-your-feet piece, is you can take your stuff and move it. And then Federation is an important piece that we just started for self-hosting, Federation, a few weeks ago. And that means that you can run your own server, host your own data, and then if we try to close things down or whatever, you can just say, well, now I'm just going to use a different service because I control my own data and it's on my own server.

33:53I control my identity, my data, and where it's hosted. And then that means if a lot of people are federating and self-hosting, that ecosystem can just shift around piece by piece to the services that haven't shut down their APIs and that haven't let users feel betrayed. Those are the things that keep you from making money in the bad ways. What's the plan to make money? So yeah, we're building marketplaces within the app, essentially. We've got creation marketplaces, moderation marketplaces. This is a direction that we're going to lean into. We're also providing a service, and we're already making a small amount of money through one step we've made into custom domains.

34:30So the idea here is you can use your website that you own, like jgraber.com, as your user handle. But you have to be technical to set that up. You have to go buy your domain. You have to change the TXT record of your DNS settings. And a lot of people don't want to do that or don't know how. And so then we sell you a domain through us. We've partnered with Namecheap to do that. That makes us a little bit of money. And then that's an example of the kinds of services we're going to expand into over time. Do you think that that is infinitely scalable? I have a quote here that one of our community people at Vox Media gave me.

35:03Mark Zuckerberg talks about Facebook being a community of over a billion people. And my colleague said, that just makes me cringe. There's no such thing as a community of over a billion people. Is that something you think about? We should have these smaller communities or we can preserve the vibe and the funniness of Blue Sky now, even as we scale, because it will splinter naturally with federation, with decentralization. Yeah, I mean, there's lots of sort of joints on which it can splinter. There's already the sort of feeds and there's going to be the moderation services. These will create different experiences just within even the Blue Sky app and are already creating different little corners.

35:41Then there will be different servers, there will be different apps running, different entire pieces of the network. So that will, I think, cause a lot more variety in the ecosystem. Part of the idea of having an underlying protocol is social network systems tend to go through periods of consolidation and then fragmentation. And a protocol that connects them all lets this happen naturally. So the example is the web itself is a protocol. Websites come and go. Some of them consolidate a lot of users. And then over time they get worse and worse or they shut down and then users go somewhere else. And that sort of consolidation and fragmentation happens on the web.

36:15So this is trying to do that for social. So sites like Blue Sky can come and go and grow. And then if we someday aren't doing the best anymore, something else can come along and users can fragment out and then maybe recohere around someone else who's doing things really well. You mentioned that plan for monetization is around the marketplaces for algorithms and feeds. I assume that will take place inside the Blue Sky app, the one that you control, right? That makes the most sense. Here's all these users. You can buy an algorithm from us and see what you want. Maybe it's about Moss. Maybe that's something else.

36:45Is the plan to make money inside the app, or is the plan to make money with the protocol? There's ways to explore both. Right now, we have a lot going on in the app that we're really focusing on. But also, I think one insight is we're trying to make social more like the web. And early on, people didn't know how the web was going to monetize, but it definitely did. Services definitely monetized on the web. There's tons of services that made lots of money built on open protocols, right? And nothing that's gotten to massive scale on the internet has ever just totally failed to monetize. And so that's something that we just think we need to show people, first of all, that this vision is something that can work, that is fun, useful, good, better than the alternatives, and also good for society, creating healthier social media ecosystems.

37:33And then we really believe that money follows value. If we can demonstrate this value and people really want this, then it's something where we'll be able to make money offering services in this ecosystem. Service is on top of the protocol, though, not the protocol itself. The protocol itself is not a blockchain, not something with any built-in monetization mechanism. It's like SMTP for email or HTTP for the web. It's just a way for computers to talk. That's a great preview of my next question. Well done. Those protocols, HTTP, SMTP, whatever, they're maintained by standards bodies. Some big companies volunteer, some people, right?

38:08They don't make money themselves. They're maintained by a bunch of people who are invested in those protocols existing and growing so they can put services on top. That's more or less what you're describing. Would you ever turn over at protocol to a standards body? Yeah. And we've already begun talking to some standardization bodies, like starting the very early stages of that work, socializing the idea, taking around the pieces that are relatively more solid, as I mentioned earlier. The app protocol is actually made up of several pieces that, you know, the way identity works, the way data works.

38:37And these pieces we aim to get standardized and then, you know, stewarded by governance bodies. We have to take another break. When we're back, Jay and I dive into the part of decentralized social media we've been dying to talk about. And yes, I mean standards and protocols.

39:28We're back with Blue Sky CEO Jay Graber to discuss the At-Protocol, how it compares to ActivityPub, and where decentralized social media is headed next.

39:40All right, get ready. It's time for some extremely deep standards drama around protocols. I told everyone it was going to happen, and that's here. So you've got a protocol, App Protocol. There's a competitor protocol called ActivityPub. Amazon runs an ActivityPub. Threads is going to federate using ActivityPub. What in your mind are the pros and cons? What are the differences? Yeah, so ActivityPub was around when we got started. I did an ecosystem review of all the decentralized protocols that existed in 2019, including ActivityPub. and we looked at it and decided that we needed to build something different because there were some critical pieces that we thought were missing.

40:20One of them was around the composability and the interfaces for composability we've designed. Like the way that we do custom feeds and all these moderation labelers, that's really not possible with the way that things are very server-centric in ActivityPub right now. Your server is very much your community where all of this happens. And we have split things up into these microservices on the backend, and mirroring a bit more of how a large-scale social network works with the global feed. The other thing was the global feed. Having global search and discovery be sort of a first-class thing that we were building for, and also having all of our users at the start know that this is public data and it will be remixed in all sorts of ways by global feeds is something that both technically and culturally we had to design for.

41:02Because ActivityPub sort of has clustered more around servers that they federate and they talk to each other, but there isn't a service that scrapes all of it and gives you this big fire hose. And even if it's technically possible to build, there's been community resistance to people doing that. Even someone in the community who was building a bridge between App Protocol and ActivityPub recently got a lot of pushback from the ActivityPub community on not wanting that bridge. So that's just sort of both cultural and technical. Another thing was we really wanted to get account portability. So this ability to leave with your identity and your data and have fallbacks where, you know, with the way that we've designed your repo, you can even back up all your posts on your phone or back it up on your server that you control.

41:45And then you don't have to have any sort of friction when you want to move. And so you can move between services and activity pub. But if, for example, queer.af recently, their.af domain was seized by Afghanistan, and then people were kind of stuck because there was no warning, and then they have to rely on the old server to help forward their stuff over to a new place. So we wanted to get around that problem and make sure people always had the ability to move. And then we wanted to have good UX. There was just a lot of complaints with users around the UX of Mastodon, and we wanted to provide something that was more tailored for the mainstream user who was used to Twitter, who could come on and not have to worry about, oh, what server do I pick when I sign up?

42:25What does it mean? Is this going to shape my experience forever? On Mastodon, you have to know that right when you sign up because it is going to shape your experience. Here, you can sign up on our server, which is kind of the default lobby or gateway into the ecosystem, and then you can move to another server and shift to your own. So when we opened up Federation, several of our team members moved their main accounts off onto their own server. And it was pretty seamless. Nobody notices that people are running on their own servers and it's still just all one experience in the app. Let me be very reductive here and see if I got this right.

42:56It feels like the first order bit for MassCenter and ActivityPub is the server, and you're saying your first order bit is the user. You have a user account, it can kind of live anywhere, and that's the thing you're in control of. And on Mastodon, there are servers, and the server administrators are more in control. Is that too productive? Is that accurate? Is that a good way to think about it? That's actually a pretty good way to think about it, yeah. And this is where earlier on, since we're getting technical now, I said we were borrowing from peer-to-peer systems. Peer-to-peer systems really try to do everything at entirely the user level with no servers.

43:28And that actually creates a complicated user experience, but that means that every user is fully in control of all their data all the time. We have the ability for users to do that, but we have servers to make your life easier. So you don't have to have your phone be trying to directly communicate with like, you know, five million other phones or your computer trying to do that. But then you can always move off of our server and move off of these services. And so it's the property that we really tried to get out of this piece of decentralization is the right to leave. And so you can use a service, you can use even a big service, but you always have the right to leave built in because we've designed around the user.

44:04And actually, the other way we've designed around the user is not just at the technical level, but at the UX level. So trying to design for what do users really want, how do we get that sort of convenience and ease of use for the user, and thinking from a UX as a first-class thing that we're designing for. So there's some trade-offs there. Some are really obvious, right? Like Macedon server administrators often find that they're running a server and they have software costs and overhead and they have to maintain a server for a bunch of users. At the same time, they're in charge, for better or worse.

44:36And if something goes wrong, they can shut it down or they can delete stuff. They are in control of the content. They can set different kinds of content moderation policies. There's a decentralization of authority in that way. It feels like at protocol is much more individualistic in that way. Like ActivityPub points you towards groups of collectives that may wish to interact with each other. and at protocol and blue sky are much more like you're on your own. Like if you like it, you can leave and there'll be a sort of larger sort of market of individuals. How do you think about, okay, if someone doesn't like the server they're on, they're going to leave.

45:13They might not actually be sending any signal at all that the server administrator was doing a bad job because they just, you can't tell. Whereas on, I think a mass zone, it's like, oh, somebody just left this account behind. I think actually collectives are going to merge and they already have in some ways. collectives aren't formed at the server infrastructure level. So one of the ideas that we had was on Mastodon, your moderation is very much tied to who runs your server. But often the type of person who wants to do DevOps, essentially, and manage a service online is different from the type of person who's a community builder and wants to organize a group of people together to set a different set of community norms and moderate.

45:50And you can get those people together to run a Mastodon instance, but it has to be kind of tied around the instance. And so we separated those pieces. So now you can get a group of people together and run a moderation service. We give you software to manage reports and stuff, like admin tooling. And you can do this with a whole team. Then you can get a bunch of people to use it. And then you can get a whole community based around a moderation sort of culture that you've created. You can do that with a feed as well. And then all these things, as I mentioned, in being composable, can be bundled and unbundled in different ways.

46:22So you could recreate the Mastodon, and everything is tied to your server experience by setting defaults on your server of, this is the moderation regimes we're going to be using, here's the labellers we're using, here's the feeds we're using, et cetera. A server operator still has power at the end of the day because they control where your stuff is literally hosted. But then there's all these other interfaces beyond that where control and agency can happen. So any service in the network has the ability to set rules, and then users have these interfaces where even if they're non-technical, they can go in and create rule sets.

46:53You mentioned the controversy around the bridge software. It was called BridgyFed. This is some of the most intense GitHub comments I've ever seen in my entire life. Truly out of control for basically a piece of middleware. Why do you think that happened? That the idea of bridging at protocol onto ActivityPub led to one of the most intense recent developer flame wars that I can think of? Is it the cultures of the protocol? Is it the culture of Mass Sun versus Blue Sky? What in your mind led to that conflagration? I think it's a big part of the culture of Mastodon. This was, as I mentioned, one of the reasons that we didn't try to get ActivityPub to change towards the direction of what we wanted to build.

47:38Because not just the technical primitives being different, there was also this culture of resistance to kind of global feeds and global algorithms. that means that people who had tried to do, you know, a search engine for all of Macedon in the past or things like this had gotten shut down like this even before Bridget fed in the past. And I'd seen that even back in like 2020, 2021. I think it's just a continuation of that culture. And the key thing is, you know, even if you have a protocol that lets servers talk to each other and federate, part of it is human governance. And if people who run that server don't want to talk to you, then, you know, even if the computers can talk, they don't have to talk.

48:14And so that's essentially people in Macedon expressing their preferences of the kind of communities they want, which is, you know, they don't want to talk to Blue Sky users. So, okay, they can just not federate. And then there was a lot of discussion there was around opt-in versus like opt-out, right? So it's sort of discussions around what kind of governance norms do we want to set as protocol communities? Part of the argument in favor of the Macedon culture that I've heard over and over again is it allows more safer spaces to form for certain kinds of groups, that the service can be closed, It is mostly opt-in that people defederate all the time in the Mastodon community.

48:51The number of servers that have defederated from threads or have sworn a blood oath to never federate with threads, it's very high. Do you think about Blue Skies providing the same kinds of tools that make people feel like the spaces are safer? Yeah, I mean, that has been our goal, is to give users the tools to build spaces that are as safe as they want. And I think one thing that people have said the protocol is missing right now is private accounts. That's something we'd like to get there. But so far, in our mission statement, we focused on public data and the open Twitter model. And there's other protocols out there for private communication.

49:26There's Matrix and Signal and other protocols that do private communication. So we focused on the hard problem of global public conversations and algorithmic choice. But even within that, we want people to have the ability to feel like in Blue Sky right now, They're participating in public data, public posting. But you want to not interact with people who are going to harass you. You want to not see stuff that's going to be damaging and stuff. So you want to be able to partition off your little piece of the network. And so we've tried to give people all the tools to do that, not just at the architectural level of, here's servers that you can run and here's services you can host, but also at more user-friendly levels, like the user lists and block lists and the ability to run your own labeling service where someone non-technical can do that through software that we've built for you to go in and just say, all right, I want to start setting rules and filtering out this kind of content for me and my community.

50:19We've mentioned Threads several times now. Obviously, Meta is starting Threads. When you think about onboarding the non-technical user onto decentralized social, Threads seems like it's way ahead of the curve. They have 100 million users or something like that. They're going to use ActivityPub, right? They've already started testing it. I think Adam Masseri's account can be followed on Mastodon through ActivityPub. Does that represent a competitive threat to you? Is that something that you're watching, or are you trying to build something else? It's really interesting that the ecosystem is moving this direction.

50:48Overall, I also, at the end of the day, want everything to be on an open protocol. And I think that our protocol is the most resilient long-term and is going to give the most flexibility and guarantees of this being a healthy ecosystem where people can move around. but also I'm just excited to see things starting to move this direction. Like Mike Masnick, who wrote Protocols Not Platforms as a paper, said that he shopped this around to all the big tech companies at the time. And this is one of the things that convinced Jack to do Blue Sky. So Twitter listened, but Meta was like, no, this is never going to happen.

51:21But since then, they seem to have moved on that position. And maybe we were one of the things that have started moving things. I think that overall, it's a healthier direction to go towards open protocols. One of my concerns about ActivityPub and the sort of threads model is because it's so server-based, if you have one massive server come on, like the thread server, things really centralize around that. And so it might functionally not be very open because people are tied to the server. It's kind of hard to move, right? And it's going to be really up to threads whether they ever become fully protocol compliant and let people move off threads easily.

51:57And then, you know, is there going to be that composability there? Are users really going to have that much control? Those are open questions and we'll see where Threads takes things. But I think that we've built that in from the start, this openness and composability. We're also open source, and so that's the other guarantee. Our code is open source, all these interfaces we've built, that's not the case at Threads. It's going to be something that if it becomes fully protocol compliant, I think there will still be risks to users. One of the reasons you can see why Threads might prefer ActivityPub just based on this conversation is it's very server-based.

52:28I'm guessing Meta loves the idea of running the big server. There's some benefits to that too. Meta has a giant compliance department and a huge content moderation team. There are parts of the blue sky approach that seem like it will be very challenging to run at scale. Just really dumb. The data is everywhere. It seems undeletable because it's so public. If there's a copyright claim, can you actually pull something down? Can you get rid of it? Ultimately, data has a place where it's being hosted. So wherever server that you're running, the server runs in a jurisdiction where you've hosted it.

53:04Whoever is running that server is going to have to be responsive to their legal jurisdiction. So there ultimately is a host for data. It just moves around more. Are you thinking about that stuff? Like, boy, we're going to run in a bunch of jurisdictions. And the Indian government wants Blue Sky to have an actual person in India that it can arrest if they don't get the moderation rules they want. Those seem like very thorny issues for a company that's very early, especially one that has to explain, hey, maybe we don't have all the controls that you're used to from a TikTok or a YouTube. This is one of those things where I'm really glad we just hired Aaron because he has experience with platforms at scale and government requests.

53:43And our goal right now is to grow and get to that kind of scale where these will be a good set of problems to have. but bringing in the expertise early so that we can be prepared to deal with it. And someone who really understands our whole architecture and can help us navigate those questions is like where we are right now in terms of preparing for that. One of the things you talked about rolling out soon is some of the composable moderation. I read your blog post about it. Again, just to be reductive and tell me if I'm wrong, it seems like the core idea here is more people should be able to label more things in more ways, right?

54:13We're going to allow the users to say, here are the labels and we'll get the labels out there. It's an election year. I feel like the election year experiments with labels or the COVID year experiments with labels have taught us all a lot. What are you pulling from all of those previous experiences with big platforms doing labels to say, OK, our big idea is labels, but decentralized? last. Birdwatch was this project that we thought was really cool in Twitter and seeing community notes come out of it. That was a success in terms of them pioneering an algorithm that could, you know, usefully augment and annotate, you know, information out there.

54:49And basically the interface we've built is for a thousand algorithms like this to be experimented with. And for some of them to be complex algorithms that were like, you know, very specialized algorithms like the birdwatch algorithm, community notes algorithm, or some of them to be very manual. Like people are like, I'm an expert in this thing. I'm just going to label for this thing. So then that allows all these things to come together and do an experience that, again, it's about harnessing collective intelligence, letting experts, people with local context, move faster on these things than the company whose interests might not be entirely aligned in solving this niche problem or like this jurisdiction, or that's just too slow because it's a big company or it's a small team or whatever.

55:31And so our goal is to let that whole ecosystem just iterate and experiment. And then we try to, you know, have some amount of leadership in terms of what we're encouraging people to build, like how we're curating and surfacing the best stuff that gets built and bringing it to users' attention and helping them install it. It is going to produce a better system. And there's some ideas right now in the academic world of this concept of moderation middleware that they've been kind of designing and thinking around doing this within the centralized platform paradigm of offering, hey, instead of the only way to make change at these companies, to have nonprofits, interest groups, governments lobby the company for change, maybe you could create a middleware interface where people could directly add some of their input into things.

56:17Composable labeling is kind of like middleware, but as a first-class thing built in where anyone can build something like this. And because it's fundamentally open, it's taking that from the fundamental premise rather than trying to add that as an intervention into a centralized system not designed for it. Can I ask you a question that I always ask the AR companies, but I think plays in the world where we have different kinds of labeling systems. I can imagine a world where someone posts a picture of the U.S. Capitol. For an AR company, this is very difficult, right? You're looking at the United States Capitol and your Apple Vision Pro has to tell you what happened there.

56:51and you can either put January 6th or you can put, I don't know, the passage of Obamacare. Like two things that would enrage different people in very different ways. If you have composable moderation, you have different kinds of algorithms appending different kinds of labels. You still might break that shared reality. Someone might post a picture of the U.S. Capitol and one person might tell you this is where Donald Trump did a coup and someone else might say this is where the election was stolen from Donald Trump. Are you worried about that sort of breaking of reality, or do you think the market will actually converge on the truth?

57:23Both. I think that basically, to go very meta with this for one moment, I think that every new form of technology that comes along causes a lot of disruption, particularly information technology. So when the printing press happened, people said, this is going in the world, we're going to have heresies, revolutions. All those things did happen, and there was a lot of chaos for a while because the shared truth of the old order kind of broke down. But then eventually we developed new institutions that built around the printing press, and we developed new ways of understanding the written word and arriving at truth.

57:55We developed encyclopedias. We developed the academic citation system. We developed the legal system that's very text-based and builds off previous texts. And so we developed all these systems that helped us create a society that works. I think the information era has, once again, totally fragmented, shared reality that the printing press had established and the written word and then broadcast media. And so now everyone can broadcast on social media. And how do we develop new kinds of systems where we can come to shared truth again? We'll have to develop systems that new algorithms like community notes that kind of approximate shared truth from all these people broadcasting into the web.

58:33How do we do that? Is it going to be a centralized effort where one company just funds and develops that and gets the right answer? Or are we going to open it up to experimentation and then maybe lots of people going at the problem start to arrive at the right answer? Our approach is the latter, which is opening up the system, having lots of people experiment on building new ways of curating, like arriving at approximating truth, like pulling lenses apart to look at this shared kind of information, and then combining them again will approximate at some point. People will start to converge around new ways of doing things.

59:04And so we also, as a company in the ecosystem, will be trying to approximate, you know, what is a good way to do this? What is the sort of the best labels out there? How do we bring those in? Like maybe if we've talked to a reputable fact-checking org and they're running a really good fact-checking service, we'll like promote this, right, in the app. But then someone else could build a different app. And then how is this ecosystem going to evolve? Well, it's an open system. And eventually at some point, we'll probably reach a point where we know what the good sorts of ways of arriving at truth are and like the good institutions, like providing objective stuff or stuff that gets things right most of the time.

59:36And then we'll converge around that. That's a very high-minded idea. You have to fund it. It sounds like your plan to fund it and be sustainable is to operate those marketplaces, right? To take a cut. So I buy an algorithm from you and you'll take a piece of that transaction. Yeah, as a company. But then also because this is an open ecosystem, it's not just limited to our funding model, right? Like we are in the early stages of building out this vision. And so, you know, we need to keep going, like prove out the vision, like show this, like make money as a company, create a marketplace. But then also like somebody running one of these services on its own, already people building clients, like other services in the ecosystem are, some of them are charging.

1:00:17Some of them are taking donations. I think some things will end up nonprofit funded. Like if you look at things like email, like you have big companies that, you know, run email services. You also have nonprofits that run their own email servers and you have institutions like your university might give you an email or your company might provide you an email, right? And so this is something where, you know, if we show value, once again, like money follows value, we show enough value in this ecosystem. Like some of these might become institutions funded by nonprofits who are interested in a better information ecosystem.

1:00:48They might fund moderation services, might fund feeds, things like this. Institutions might run them. Volunteers might. Communities might get together, self-fund. Some of them might be paid services that payments happen outside of us. Other might be paid services where the payments happen through us. Do you think any of them will be businesses unto themselves? I'm reminded of this Bill Gates quote about Windows as a platform, where he's like, a platform is when the economic value of everybody that uses it exceeds the value of the company that made the platform. So all the people who built companies on Windows, you add them all up, they exceed the value of Microsoft.

1:01:23You're kind of talking like that, right? You're going to build a platform, you're going to let people buy and sell on it and build products on top of it. Do you see someone saying, okay, there's an opportunity to build a great content moderation company that runs on top of App Protocol that Blue Sky users can buy? We've already seen some people start to move in that direction. I think that is something that's going to happen. How long until that happens? I wish I could see the future, but I don't actually have that ability. You're probably better at seeing it than I am. I'm very curious. This feels like there's some inkling of this is how it should work, but you've got to train a whole bunch of people to think differently.

1:01:59And they're right up next to, I don't know, Elon Musk being like, I'll just do it for you. Just like show up and tweet. Like that seems like the hard part, right? Right now, a lot of what we're doing is trying to communicate the vision. Like, you know, talking to you early on before we built stuff out. Yeah, like last year I was turning down a lot of media because we had to build this out. And we really want to show, not tell. Now we have examples that we can point to, and it makes it a lot more real rather than me just sitting here expounding on the printing press. It's very high-minded and not concrete.

1:02:27But now we actually have examples of many different feeds and many different services that have been built in this ecosystem. And so one of the things we're starting to do is to fund the developer ecosystem. We've started a grant system. We're going to start giving money to some projects just to help boost this ecosystem. but I think over time, these funding models are going to shift and change and we're going to experiment with a lot of them because a whole ecosystem that's like the web means a whole variety of experiments like the web itself kicked off. And I find that really exciting because social has been in a period of stagnation because it's consolidated in a few companies and early on people built all sorts of Twitter clients and experiments on social and even Facebook was more open back in the day and then that whole ecosystem kind of got closed down when these companies shut down their APIs.

1:03:12But if we open that up again, I think social will be another period of experimentation. There will be lots of companies and people, hobbyists, just people trying things and playing around again. It will be like a playground era of social. But in a next iteration where we're aware of a lot of the problems that happen through platforms and mass broadcast at scale. And we have a lot of new tooling. Like machine learning has moved on a lot since the last time we had a lot of growth in social. So I think a lot of interesting things are going to come out of this era of building. Let me end by bringing us all the way down on the ground.

1:03:44You have a lot of big ideas about protocols and platforms. I'm obviously obsessed with them. But you run a social network that's growing in an election year. You've had to deal with some very real content moderation controversies on Blue Sky already. There's been some real problems with racism. There's been problems with death threats. And you've just had to do some direct moderation, like just take some direct moderation decisions. It's an election year. It's going to be weird. There's going to be a bunch of like AI deep fakes of both candidates coming. Do you think your new tools are going to let you address that stuff in a new way?

1:04:19Or are you going to have to go back to the old ways and just take some direct moderation decisions as you've had to in the past? I think the new tools will help a lot. And we're also not relying entirely on them. We, as with everything we've done, we're doing a hybrid approach where we are running our own moderation team with experienced leadership, and we are going to do our best. And then we also have all these open interfaces where other people who are more experts or any people who think we're not doing it well come in and do it themselves. And then we'll, you know, stitch a hole together out of both all the open experimentation and the decisions that we're directly making and, you know, what we decide to carve out as like, this is stuff we're doing really well and that we think the foundation we need to set for this to be a good experience.

1:05:02Are you worried about the flood of AI-generated garbage on every platform? Is that coming for Blue Sky right now? Not quite yet. I mean, we've been dealing with spam and all the other problems that networks run into, but we've also been building our own automated tooling. And it's a constant cat-and-mouse game, but we're trying to stay cutting-edge in terms of how we address these things using a combination of human moderation and automated tooling to catch stuff. And then also, part of the open interface is, we've already seen some cool experimentation going on. Like we had a hackathon a few weeks ago at YC.

1:05:37There were some groups that made deepfake detectors using, you know, state-of-the-art models that do deepfake detection. And so it's this cat-and-mouse game of, you know, AI is being built to create deepfakes. Also, there's deepfake detectors now. And so those things can come together into things that, you know, if we don't pull them in directly, they can run as independent services in this composable moderation thing. And if they're running really well and super critical to the ecosystem, then we'll find ways to integrate them more into the app experience. Are you seeing that already taking place on Blue Sky or are you just watching this sort of Taylor Swift deepfick problem on X and hoping it doesn't hit you before that stuff is ready?

1:06:15We haven't seen a lot of it yet, but we're preparing to deal with it through both our policies and training, making sure everyone's aware, and then also making sure that we've gotten this moderation tooling built out, which you'll be able to see in action soon that's going to let people start to make these interventions. All right, last question. It feels like the people who run the more centralized platforms have lately become utterly beholden to their own posters. Like Elon Musk seems very responsive to the posters on Twitter. Adam Masseri in the middle of the night is like, I don't know, I'll look into it.

1:06:50Like you see that reaction, like I'll be the face of the thing. To some extent, you're the face of Blue Sky. You're here doing this interview. but you have an out, right? It's come up several times in this conversation. Like, I don't know, we'll see what the marketplace does. We'll see what the community does. Do you feel that pressure to be the face and to be responsive? Or do you think that that out will actually take hold? I do, and I've accepted it to some extent. And I've also told people, you know, like I am sort of the, you know, steward of this ecosystem right now and the creator of, let's think of it as like a city state and an ecosystem we're trying to build.

1:07:25like my bio on Blue Skies, let's build a federated republic starting with this server. And so there'll be lots of other federations out there. I encourage you to start one, you know, and I will do my best on this one. I also am not, something we joke about on the app is like a poster's madness is a real thing that people can get on social media. So we try to, you know, do some internal awareness on becoming audience captured by our own audience and stay aware of that. And then also, yeah, I'm like try to do my best to also, I'm a poster, engage with the community, but not be the main character all the time.

1:07:59There was a joke at Blue Sky I found very funny, which is like, the one thing I love most about this app is I don't know who the CEO is. I'm just like, you know, great. If it's a thriving enough community where it doesn't even need me as a main character, that's great. That is an incredible place to end it. You're a great main character, by the way. Thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you.

1:08:21I'd like to thank Jay Graber for taking the time to join Decoder today. and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. Decoder is now publishing twice a week. Our classic interviews with CEOs, like this one, are now on Mondays. And on Thursdays, we're bringing you shorter episodes explaining big topics in the news with Verge reporters, experts, and other friends of the show. So if you have ideas on what we should cover or who we should talk to, we'd love your feedback. You can email us at decoderatheverge.com. We really do read all those emails. Or you can hit me up directly on threads on MattReckless1280.

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