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.
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