Bluesky CEO Jay Graber took a clear swipe at Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg when she took the stage at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin this week wearing a shirt that copied an infamous one he’d worn last year at a Meta product reveal event.
Graber’s shirt read Mundus sine Caesaribus, or “A world without Caesars” in Latin. It was the same design as Zuckerberg’s shirt from last year that read, Aut Zuck aut nihil, which is a play on the phrase, Aut Caesar aut nihil: Either Caesar or nothing.
Graber’s not-so-subtle message seemed to be that decentralized platforms, like the one she’s building with Bluesky, prioritize users over the platform’s bottom-line interests.
“If a billionaire came in and bought Bluesky or took it over or, if I decided tomorrow to change things in a way that people really didn’t like, then they could fork off and go on to another application,” &pp=ygUPc3hzdyBqYXkgZ3JhYmVy">Graber said while onstage. “There’s already applications in the network that give you another way to view the network or you could build a new one as well. And so that openness guarantees that there’s always the ability to move to a new alternative.”
Seeking freedom from billionaire control
Bluesky, which is built on the open-source AT Protocol, really took off after the November presidential election, when X owner Elon Musk gained a large stake in President Trump’s campaign and subsequent administration. Users like the fact that Bluesky’s open social media ecosystem ultimately means that no one person controls it. So far, it’s amassed more than 33 million total users.
To be sure, it’s still a long way from reaching the user numbers that Zuckerberg’s Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp enjoy. Meta said in its full-year 2024 earnings report that it has 3.35 billion daily active users across its whole family of apps.
Still, Graber is optimistic in Bluesky’s model. “We want to give people real choice—not just a new platform, but a new paradigm,” she said.
Jelentkezéshez jelentkezzen be
EGYÉB POSTS Ebben a csoportban
A software engineer became X’s main character last week after being outed as a serial moonlighter at multiple Silicon Valley startups.
“PSA: there’s a guy named Soham Parekh (in India) w
The flash floods that have devastated Texas are already a difficult crisis to manage. More than 100 people are confirmed dead
Amazon is extending its annual Prime Day sales and offering new membership perks to Ge
How would you spend $342 billion?
A number of games called “Spend Elon Musk’s Money” have been popping up online, inviting users to imagine how they’d blow through the
On Tuesday, AI lab Moonvalley
As Elon Musk announced plans over the Fourth of July weekend to establish a third political party,
