Today, I\u2019m talking with Toni Schneider, who is the brand new CEO of the social platform Bluesky \u2014 he formally took over after a short stint as interim CEO. This is one of my favorite kinds of interviews to do on Decoder<\/em>, because a couple years ago, we had Bluesky\u2019s prior CEO, Jay Graber, on the show \u2014 she\u2019s now the company\u2019s chief innovation officer, and all of that kind of shuffle is pure Decoder <\/em>bait. And a new CEO often brings with them new priorities, which is perhaps the most Decoder <\/em>subject of all.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Bluesky in particular is a company pulling in a lot of different directions: There\u2019s a Twitter-like social media app, which is what most people are familiar with, and then there\u2019s the underlying technology behind that app call AT Protocol, which allows anyone to build social networking products that interoperate with Bluesky. As you\u2019ll hear Toni say, that ecosystem is vibrant and growing \u2014 it\u2019s called the ATmosphere, which is adorable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n But the users of Bluesky the app are not the same as the people building on AT Protocol, and the goals of a company founded to push forward the ideas of open and interoperable social standards are not necessarily aligned with the things all those users might need or want. This is a fight that bursts into view on Bluesky itself all the time, and I wanted to know how Toni thinks about balancing all of that with what remains a fairly small team.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Verge<\/em> subscribers, don\u2019t forget you get exclusive access to ad-free Decoder<\/em> wherever you get your podcasts. Head here<\/a>. Not a subscriber? You can sign up here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Toni was formerly the CEO of Automattic, which makes the huge WordPress web content management platform, and you\u2019ll hear him make the case that this period in social networking feels a lot like the early days of the web, and that success looks like a vibrant ecosystem with lots of big players that might take a decade to fully develop.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s quite a vision, but here and now, the open web is falling apart, and the social products of today are fragmenting and in many cases either get smaller or full of AI slop. So we talked about all of that, and about Bluesky\u2019s reputation as a bastion of leftists insulated in their own little bubble sitting next to the increasingly hard right bubble of X. And of course, we talked about how Bluesky might start to generate revenue \u2014 and interestingly enough, it\u2019s not just ads.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This is a fun one that touches on almost every Decoder <\/em>theme there is. I think you\u2019re gonna like it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Okay: Bluesky CEO Toni Schneider. Here we go.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Toni Schneider, you are a venture partner at True Ventures, and more importantly, the <\/strong>now permanent CEO<\/strong><\/a> of BlueSky. Welcome to <\/strong>Decoder.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Thank you. Thanks for having me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I am very excited to talk to you. What is happening with the open social web is maybe the most important thing happening for media. It does not get as much attention as AI, but there\u2019s something very big happening on these interoperable social networks. I know that you are a believer in it in the same way that you believed in the web when you were the CEO of Automattic, which is the company that makes WordPress. So let\u2019s just start at the very start. Describe what you think BlueSky is today and what you think the opportunities with these new kinds of networks are.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n BlueSky today is really two things. There\u2019s the BlueSky app, which is what a lot of people are familiar with. It\u2019s a social network. We think it\u2019s a better social network. It\u2019s more human focused, doesn\u2019t have ads. It doesn\u2019t have algorithms. But more importantly, underneath BlueSky is an open protocol called AT Protocol. And BlueSky is only one of now over a thousand apps built on that protocol.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The whole point of BlueSky was to demonstrate that this open protocol could scale and attract other builders, building lots of apps, lots of social experiences that all interoperate and connect with each other, which is what we believe the future of social media should look like. It\u2019s what is actually going to make social media something that we believe in, which is that the future of social media should serve the public good. That is what motivates us, and that\u2019s why we built the protocol first and then the app.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s a lot in there already that is just pure <\/strong>Decoder <\/em><\/strong>bait, including the notion that BlueSky, the product, and the ATmosphere and AT Protocol, the standard, are all intermixed in one company that you now run. Right next to that is maybe the purest <\/strong>Decoder <\/em><\/strong>bait of all: the fact that Jay Graber, who was the CEO of BlueSky \u2013 <\/strong>she was on the show<\/strong><\/a> about two years ago \u2013 <\/strong>stepped down<\/strong><\/a> into the role of chief innovation officer. You were the interim CEO, and now after four months, you are the full-time CEO. Fundamentally, that is just the story that <\/strong>Decoder <\/em><\/strong>loves to tell the most. Talk me through that. What made you step in as the interim CEO, and why did you decide to become the full-time CEO?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s actually really cool and inspiring that a founder, after she worked on this for six years, got it off the ground. She started inside Twitter, got it out of there, made it an independent thing. There are a lot of reasons why BlueSky is facing long odds and she got into this place, and then felt like it\u2019s at a scale now where [it\u2019s in] her sweet spot, the things that she loves working on, which is vision, innovation, new ideas. She felt pulled back towards building, especially also because of the advent of AI and how AI and AT Proto can interoperate. She felt like that\u2019s what she wants to go work on, and it\u2019s time to find somebody else for the CEO job.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I was already involved with this project because I met the team a little bit over two years ago, probably around the same time Jay was on your podcast. We became investors through True Ventures. So I\u2019ve been following it as an investor, supporting it. The team approached me and said that my background with WordPress and open source was a really good fit. And so I agreed to be interim CEO initially because I was still a general partner at True and it\u2019s a firm I helped build. It\u2019s an amazing firm that I didn\u2019t want to leave behind. But also, at True, we\u2019ve had this model where we\u2019ve moved back and forth between operator and investor. I did that while I was running Automattic.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So I stepped into it. After working on it hands-on for a few months, it just got more and more fun, more and more energizing. You just feel the momentum. Also, True just switched to a new fund. So actually the timing was good where I could say, \u201cOkay, I will switch my true role to part-time, become a venture partner,\u201d which is what I used to be when I ran Automattic, \u201cand I\u2019ll go all in at BlueSky.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Tell me about the difference between being the interim CEO and the full-time CEO. When you\u2019re the interim CEO, it feels like there are probably some boundaries in what you can do. And then the full-time CEO can obviously do everything that a full-time CEO can do. What did you feel like the boundaries were as interim CEO?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n On the inside, it hasn\u2019t felt very different. I actually think the move to drop the \u201cinterim\u201d is more important on the outside, especially for the ATmosphere and the AT Proto community, and people building on this platform and in this ecosystem just to say, \u201cNo, I\u2019m here for the duration. This isn\u2019t just some interim gig and then somebody else is going to show up.\u201d So I felt like, to the outside, that makes a big difference. On the inside, the job really hasn\u2019t changed much..<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So many of my conversations here in <\/strong>Decoder <\/em><\/strong>are really about the timescale of decisions. I\u2019ll make the comparison to my newsroom because it\u2019s easy and it\u2019s easy to understand. Our reporters make decisions in like 30-minute increments. A story comes up, they write it, they publish it, they move on to the next thing. I make decisions maybe in like week- or month-long increments. What are we going to cover? Where are the resources going to go?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It seems like in the interim CEO role, the timescale of those decisions is necessarily short or it has the appearance of being short. And then I\u2019m reading <\/strong>your note<\/strong><\/a> that you published when you became the full-time CEO. In the very beginning of it, you say we\u2019re at the very beginning of the story with a decade of exciting work ahead. And I\u2019m wondering if the timescale of the decisions you\u2019re making now are a decade.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yeah. It touches on something really fascinating with this project. In general with decision making, one of the frameworks I really like is the reversible and irreversible decisions. A lot of decisions we make are actually reversible. I like to optimize to just make those decisions quickly and then make sure you can undo the decisions if you need to change them.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n And then there are a few decisions that really do have very long-term implications. They\u2019re much harder to reverse. With this project in particular, there are decisions made at this protocol level that we\u2019re going to have to live with for a long time. There\u2019s a part of the company in this community that thinks very, very, very long term. This is a protocol that is going to be around for decades already. It\u2019s in enough use that it\u2019s going to be around for a long time. Those decisions you really need to be careful about. Then it goes all the way to things we try in the product that work or don\u2019t work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I wasn\u2019t in the interim mindset as much because I am also an investor in the company, so I care very much about the long-term picture. What attracts me to this whole endeavor is that it can have a really important long-term impact. I always think about, okay, how will this play out? Does this truly serve the core mission? It\u2019s okay to make some of these harder decisions now that won\u2019t pay off for a long time because this is going to take a while.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s not just one company. It\u2019s already thousands of others that are building together. That\u2019s just a different timeframe and decision-making process than your typical just \u201cgo fast, scale as quickly as possible\u201d [methodology]. I like it. I\u2019m comfortable with it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I just want to stick with BlueSky, the company that is both responsible for the standard and the protocol, and the product that a lot of end users love and sometimes hate. That is the core tension of the company. The user base of BlueSky is or is not interested in the development of AT Protocol, is or is not interested in the wider ATmosphere.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Under Jay\u2019s tenure, the company was very focused on building out the protocol because the product literally could not exist unless the protocol was robust enough to stand up the product. You could see that back and forth. I have always felt that the company is far more interested in the protocol than the product, that the product was merely there to show what people could do.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n But now the product is big. It might be waxing or waning. It will come to whether you need to turn it into TikTok or not. Tell me where you, as a CEO with a decade-long vision for all of this, see the balance inside of BlueSky between the product, the thing that looks like a Twitter app, and the protocol, the thing that should enable thousands upon thousands of other social experiences?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I see the BlueSky app and the product as enabling the ATmosphere. It\u2019s an on-ramp, or maybe a lobby to the ATmosphere where it\u2019s just a great way to get lots of people in, get people exposed to the idea, and then realize as you use the product, \u201cOh, there are other things here. This isn\u2019t just a microblogging app.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n An example from the last couple of months that\u2019s gone super well is this format called Standard Site that emerged. The history of that is that BlueSky\u2019s a microblogging app. People are asking for longer-form posting. A bunch of other apps started popping up that were for newsletters and blogging. In particular, three apps called Leaflet, Pocket, and Off Print. They got together and said, \u201cHey, why don\u2019t we define a format for all of us to work together on the ATmosphere for all of the posts that we publish?\u201d We looked at it and said, \u201cGreat, we can now take that and surface it in our app.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So now, if you\u2019re posting a blog post on Leaflet, it just shows up in the BlueSky app and we can make that a seamless experience. This went over really well to the point where now WordPress is supporting Standard Site and lots of other publishing platforms. They\u2019re realizing the benefit of, \u201cIf I just publish to this new format now, it\u2019s going to show up and work across all these other platforms without me having to do anything.\u201d It\u2019s caused this really nice ripple effect throughout the ecosystem where people can work together just by using this format. Nobody has to do deals with each other. Nobody has to get permissions and no money has to change hands. And it\u2019s just taken off.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019m hoping more and more BlueSky users will see those kinds of integrations and go, \u201cOh, cool. I\u2019m not just getting BlueSky content here. I\u2019m getting content from all these other apps, all these other networks. And it just works. I don\u2019t have to do anything. I don\u2019t have to go sign up for 10 different apps. It\u2019s just one signup, one account, and it just works.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You\u2019re describing two different kinds of things. There\u2019s a lot of work to be done at the protocol level. There\u2019s a lot of work to be done to support new kinds of experiences like Standard Site. Then there\u2019s BlueSky, a product which has 45 million people, and probably needs to be substantially bigger if it wants to be the aggregator for a massive network that can displace some of the other social products out there. That needs to be a lot of things to a lot of people. It needs to find different kinds of product market fit. How big is BlueSky the company now, and how is it structured to point in two different directions?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n We\u2019re now at 50 people, still very small. The biggest challenge is clearly trying to do everything you\u2019ve described with a small team. We do have an ecosystem of hundreds and thousands of others working on it, so that helps. We do our best to coordinate everyone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I would say we\u2019re making good progress. We\u2019re seeing good momentum, especially on the ATmosphere side. The things we look at are the number of daily active apps on the network, which has doubled since the beginning of the year. It\u2019s about to hit a thousand. We look at SDK downloads for our tools that have tripled. It\u2019s going to hit a million downloads a month by later this year. Those are the numbers that show that not only is it scaling, but we\u2019re able to scale it with the team that we have.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n How is that team structured?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n About 50 people, all remote, structured into small teams. I\u2019m a big believer that six to eight person teams, highly aligned, highly incentivized, and motivated are the way to get things done. Probably the only way to get things done. There are three core product teams. There\u2019s the app team that deals with the BlueSky app. There\u2019s the ATmosphere team that does all the developer-facing stuff. And then there\u2019s a third product team called the exploration team, and that\u2019s a new team that Jay has stood up and is running. We actually just launched a new version of the product they\u2019re working on, Attie. Think of it as AI layered on top of the ATmosphere and what you can do with that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Those are our three core product teams, and they\u2019re each customer-facing. Consumer-facing, developer-facing, and then we\u2019ll find out from the AI product what the market fit is there. We have a bunch of support teams that support those three core teams and that are pretty typical. We\u2019ve got a legal team, et cetera, et cetera. I would say it\u2019s a team that\u2019s a very low ego, high agency. That is kind of the ethos. Low drama, just a lot of get-shit-done energy. Really collaborative.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Whenever I think about new social products and how they might scale, especially with explosive user growth \u2013 up until recently, the conventional wisdom is you\u2019ve got to scale trust and safety and moderation linearly with the size of your user base. Maybe we\u2019re going to add AI to this and that linear relationship will break, or maybe it\u2019ll actually get even more costly because token spend will get more costly than having human moderators, or there\u2019ll be more false positives and we\u2019re going to be even angrier. So you have to have more humans in the loop.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s really unclear to me how that\u2019s going to work. You\u2019ve obviously been scaling BlueSky as a consumer social product. Then you have the complexity of, \u201cWe\u2019re hooking onto lots and lots of other products that are putting content in front of people.\u201d How does the moderation layer work? And have you seen it be a linear increase in cost with the size of the network and the user base?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Moderation is huge in any social product. In addition to our 50-person team, we do have contractors that help us with moderation. What we\u2019ve done differently is that our whole moderation system is composable or pluggable. It\u2019s not just us that can label content and moderate it. Anybody can do it and add labels. It\u2019s part of the protocol. Anybody else who builds products can decide if they want to use those labels or not. So if somebody on our moderation team labels something as, let\u2019s say, AI slop, everybody else who\u2019s building in this ecosystem can take advantage of that piece of data. They don\u2019t have to, but they can.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So what we\u2019re seeing and what we\u2019ve seen is we have our moderation team, but then there are other teams that have decided to moderate label content the way they want. For example, maybe the first non-BlueSky project on the protocol was BlackSky. And it\u2019s now become a thriving company on its own. It\u2019s a team building all kinds of interesting things. And they started out by saying, \u201cHey, we want to build a version of this network that is optimized for Black users and their needs. And we want to have our own moderation policies.\u201d And they are able to do that and plug that in. But everything they\u2019re doing is still part of the larger network. And now there are hundreds and thousands of these kinds of systems.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This has really helped where the moderation burden isn\u2019t all on one team that has to scale and look at everything. There should be lots of different teams and lots of different systems because each network, each community has its own idea of what moderation should look like. So we feel like this kind of distributed moderation approach is more powerful. That said, yes, we\u2019re continuing to scale up ours, but it\u2019s manageable. It\u2019s a lot of work, but it\u2019s manageable. It\u2019s worth it when the whole network can benefit from it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The next part of that story that\u2019s going to be really interesting is that the biggest thing we\u2019re actually working on with AT Proto, the next evolution of the protocol, is private data. We all know that the public square, public social networking has reached a certain scale. And there are a lot of people who want to retreat into more private spaces. We\u2019ve seen explosive growth in group chats. We\u2019re all in a million group chats. This has been the number-one request from our community, from our developers: \u201cLet us build more private, membership-based, various versions of private spaces on this protocol.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We\u2019re in the middle of building that. It\u2019s a community effort. It\u2019s rolling out very soon. Now, moderation moves and gets broken up into even more and smaller spaces. People can decide, \u201cIf I don\u2019t like a network or I don\u2019t like the way it\u2019s moderated, [I can] go start my own.\u201d Go start your own community. That\u2019s the most interesting thing ahead of us, because right now everything on AT Proto is public. It can only be used for a completely public product. Once we enable private data, I think that it\u2019s like 10 or 100X the number of use cases we can serve.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Not to be reductive, but I think it\u2019s useful to talk about this in comparison to other social products people might be more familiar with. With AT Protocol right now and the ATmosphere, everything is very public. The models in my head are Twitter, and RSS, and massive broad-based publishing platforms, right? One-to-many. I think what you\u2019re describing is much more like a Reddit style approach, where you have smaller, closed communities. Some of them can be totally private unless you\u2019re invited in. And yet, they\u2019re still on the ATmosphere in some way. Is that right?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n That\u2019s right. The trade-off has traditionally been that if you want to be on a launch network, you have to be on a public network. Or if you want to control, have ownership over your own community, you have to set up your own thing. You have to run your own server or you have to run your own forum. There\u2019s clearly a need for that because there are lots of those out there. But the challenge is each one of those is now a little island. And you have to convince people.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We think we can pull off as the best of both worlds. When you build a community or private space on AT Proto, it\u2019s absolutely 100% owned by you. It\u2019s not owned by BlueSky or by any company. It\u2019s just like everything else on a protocol. It\u2019s owned by the users, not by the platform. So it\u2019s really truly yours. You can move it around. You can make all the decisions. But because it\u2019s on a shared protocol, all of these communities plug together. You can go to a place like BlueSky and get all your notifications in one place. You can see what\u2019s going on across everything. You just need one login, one place to check, but you still have the independence and the identity of these individual communities.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n That is something that no other platform can do right now. You\u2019re either on the large platform owned and controlled place, or you run your own and you\u2019re a little siloed. We think we can solve that. We see the energy behind this idea and the number of things people are already prototyping is very palpable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I have to ask you the other <\/strong>Decoder <\/em><\/strong>question because I\u2019m very curious where this idea came from and how you decided to bet on it. How do you make decisions? What\u2019s your framework for making decisions?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I already talked a little bit earlier about the reversible and irreversible decisions. The hardest thing about running any project is that, especially if it\u2019s successful, it\u2019s just an endless flow of things you have to prioritize and decide on. I find you could make that a lot less daunting and exhausting if you move a lot of decisions into this category of \u201cthey\u2019re not that big a deal.\u201d Let\u2019s make it easy to experiment and reverse things, and really only focus on the truly long-term impactful things that we have to get right.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n You have this lightness or almost playfulness about some of these things, where it\u2019s just not that big a deal. Let\u2019s just try something. Let\u2019s be creative and improvisational about it. This is a lot of how Automattic runs. I actually credit a lot of that to Matt Mullenweg\u2019s approach to first running an open-source project. Inside Automattic, there are a lot of jazz analogies because Matt started out as a jazz musician. Just this improvisational, \u201cdon\u2019t take it so seriously if you don\u2019t have to.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There are very serious decisions we have to make as well. For those, I like spending a lot of one-on-one time with the leaders, and then gathering and going through the list and talking through the trade-offs. Making sure that at least in a good cadence, monthly or maybe quarterly, we go through and make those hard trade-off decisions and don\u2019t leave the room until we say, \u201cNo, we\u2019re only doing these two things on the important list. We can\u2019t do everything. Let\u2019s voice all the ideas, but get to agreement on the few things we\u2019re trying to get done. If we get those done, then we\u2019re actually in good shape and we keep making forward progress.\u201d That\u2019s the ongoing flow that we go through, and it seems to be working.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I have to call out an email I got from a listener, ex-Amazon, who said, \u201cEveryone always comes on your show and talks about reversible decisions and irreversible decisions. And I just want to point out that if you have enough money and time, every decision is reversible.\u201d And I said, \u201cYeah, that\u2019s right. Especially at Amazon scale, that\u2019s certainly right.\u201d What\u2019s the line for you? What makes the decision irreversible? How much money and how much time does it take to reverse it?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n To me, it\u2019s less about the money. It\u2019s more the time. Some things just take years to unwind. I think anything that has \u2013 let\u2019s call it a five-year time horizon, where it\u2019d be really painful to change course. Or maybe on the positive framing, it\u2019s more like, \u201cIf we get this right, we don\u2019t have to think about it again for five years.\u201d That\u2019s the category of things where \u2013 people talk a lot about, for example, with startups, it\u2019s your investors. Especially early on, the first investors you work with are going to be with you for five or 10 years. And that\u2019s a pretty big decision. You shouldn\u2019t just take the first check that comes along. You should really think that through because I\u2019ve lived that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n True has invested in 500 startups over the last 20 years, and we\u2019ve seen every possible way that that plays out. That\u2019s a good thing to really pay attention to early on, not just rush. Early in my career, I was like, \u201cI just need money. Just give me a check and I\u2019ll keep building. I just want to build things.\u201d That\u2019s an example of the timeframe where I feel like it\u2019s really nice when it just works for several years. You [don\u2019t] have to go back and invest more time, more money to reverse something.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So I want to put two decisions in practice here. And your framing here is perfect for this question. You decided to be the CEO of BlueSky, to become the permanent CEO of BlueSky. You\u2019re calling that a 10-year decision, right? It\u2019s in your note. We\u2019ve talked about it here. How did you make that decision? Did they come to you and say, \u201cYou\u2019re going to be the CEO now. Sorry, we\u2019re stripping the title away\u201d? Did you have to write a memo? How did that all happen?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It was a gradual process. The job is great. The team is great. The mission is what I want to work on for the next 10 years. So that was not a hard decision. It was really that I already had a job, and just figuring out a way to make those two pieces work together and to make a transition work. From early on, the BlueSky team and board said, \u201cWe think this is working really well. Can we make this permanent?\u201d It was probably a couple months of just working through how a transition would work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n So you were the interim CEO for two months, and you spent two months figuring out how the transition worked and then you became the permanent CEO?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Yeah. Yeah, that sounds about right.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s quite a timeline. The second one, maybe much more importantly is, \u201cWe\u2019re going to make this big bet on private communities. We\u2019re going to extend the protocol.\u201d Logically, you\u2019re going to have to extend the BlueSky app itself. You\u2019re going to have to make a big bet on both the standard itself and how the consumer app will work. I would say, and maybe this is too reductive, the community on the BlueSky app does not like change, so you\u2019re going to have to endure some change with them. \u201cThis is a bet. This is a big decision. This has to be the future of the protocol, the future of the ATmosphere.\u201d How did you make that decision, and what made you convinced that it was the right one?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n The decision to extend the protocol has been underway. A year or two years ago, or maybe even from the very beginnings of the protocol, people said, \u201cWhat are we going to do about private data?\u201d So that\u2019s been building, and it\u2019s natural. Once people start building on your protocol, it\u2019s the first question. \u201cThis is great, but I do have some private data.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Even inside the BlueSky app, we have DMs. Those aren\u2019t on the protocol. We don\u2019t want those out in the public. We have features inside the app that we had to build off protocol because it couldn\u2019t support private data. So we have our own use cases. We got lots of them. That\u2019s an obvious \u201cwe just have to do it.\u201d How it affects the community, that\u2019s what our app team is working through right now. One of the things that I feel like we\u2019ve gotten better at in the last few months is to do that out in the open.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Alex Benzer, who\u2019s our head of product, who makes those decisions around what goes in the app and what doesn\u2019t, has been posting about it and inviting feedback and saying, \u201cLook, this is coming. What do you think? What kind of communities do you want? Do you want them? How similar should they be to the current app? How different?\u201d I think we have 500 people who\u2019ve signed up to give us feedback. We\u2019re going through user interviews.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n People are already building communities on BlueSky actually because we have this functionality where people can make custom feeds. One of the huge differences in BlueSky is no algorithms. You get to make your own. You can plug in your own. People have made over 100,000 feeds. Some of those are really communities themselves. There are things like BookSky and AstroSky, where it\u2019s just communities of people talking about a certain topic within a custom feed. People have taken what we have to bend it into a community shape.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s already happening on a network. That makes it a lot less scary. It\u2019s not like we\u2019re going to stop one thing and pivot somewhere else. We\u2019re just doing more of a thing that some users are already doing. I think we can do it in a way that doesn\u2019t disrupt. If you never want to join a private community, you don\u2019t have to. BlueSky the app as it stands today isn\u2019t going to change. The public part of it is popular, it\u2019s growing. So we\u2019re not going to mess with that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Let me ask you about BlueSky the app not changing, because I think that\u2019s the thing that I\u2019m poking at. It feels like every other social network evolves <\/strong>into a crab<\/strong><\/a>. Everything is evolving into TikTok. We can see it happening every single day. Meta today announced a test in which the big blue Facebook app will open for some set of users into full-screen video. \u201cScrew it. We\u2019re just going to turn Facebook into TikTok.\u201d Everything heads in that direction. X has headed in that direction. That\u2019s the competition, and maybe that\u2019s the thing the market wants.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n You\u2019re saying, \u201cWe\u2019re going to build private data. We\u2019ll have a more Reddit-like experience.\u201d BlueSky may be the last really text-first social platform of its kind that exists. Do you feel that pull into different directions, into different formats? Because that\u2019s a thing that your user base also pushes against.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n This is the beauty of an open protocol. Let somebody else build the TikTok of AT Proto. Let somebody else go push into new formats. We\u2019re perfectly happy with a text-first, microblogging network. We love it. Honestly, I\u2019m glad if others are chasing off in other directions because we like what we have.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We talked earlier about traffic. A lot of these other networks, as you know\u2026 You\u2019ve coined the term Google Zero right there. All these walled gardens, all these other platforms are getting more and more walled. They say, \u201cOnce we\u2019re open enough to attract an audience, and then once you\u2019re here, we\u2019re not going to let you go. We\u2019re just going to keep trying to find ways to keep you in there.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n BlueSky\u2019s the opposite. Because of the protocol, it\u2019s locked open by default. We couldn\u2019t keep you in it even if we wanted to. We want people to build other apps and experiment with other things. We want people to find great content on BlueSky and leave. We\u2019re still a place where we don\u2019t downrank links. We love sending traffic to people. We send two million clicks a day to publishers. We\u2019re the number-one referrer to a bunch of publishers, and we want to do more of that. We love the way that the open web works and people come to BlueSky to connect, to learn, to have fun, and then to find interesting things to go to. There\u2019s no way we\u2019re going to change that.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I\u2019m curious, if someone wants to build the TikTok of the ATmosphere, is there a bunch of protocol-level work that needs to be done to support it? I know there are attempts to do this. Skylight, I think, is a TikTok-like app on the ATmosphere. There are others. But all of your technical innovation on the standard itself is pointed at text. I\u2019m wondering if there\u2019s something you need to do to be better at video to compete with what all of the closed platforms are chasing at a much larger scale.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n No, I think at the protocol level, it\u2019s easy to do. You can define your own records on the protocol. Yes, ours are text-focused or posts, they\u2019re follows, they\u2019re likes, things like that. But there are already people publishing all kinds of different things within a protocol. I saw yesterday that somebody\u2019s publishing a patent database onto AT Proto, so everybody else can just tap into that patent information. There\u2019s somebody who\u2019s publishing the health data off of their Apple Watch onto their PDS. So they\u2019re just live-streaming their health data onto the protocol. People are putting out all kinds of things.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The protocol can be used for anything. What\u2019s harder is that you need people there, so that when you build the next TikTok on AT Proto and you launch that app, it launches into millions and millions of people who are already there. That\u2019s what we\u2019re working on, to just keep getting more and more people onto the ATmosphere so that you don\u2019t have that cold start problem as a new developer where you want enough people. Eventually our 10-year goal is a billion people on AT Proto. You don\u2019t need a billion to have success with a new product, but you need a critical mass so that when people show up, then they ask, \u201cOh, where are my friends?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n This is the dynamic that I\u2019m really interested in with the BlueSky app and then the protocol itself. It\u2019s no secret that I\u2019ve been talking about federating <\/strong>The Verge<\/em><\/strong> for like a hundred years, and we\u2019re going to do it one of these days. One of the issues here is we publish in a lot of formats in a lot of different places. If I just immediately federate <\/strong>The Verge <\/em><\/strong>tomorrow, we have a lot of video. Where\u2019s the video going to go? It\u2019s going to go out on the network. Maybe I can convince a lot of people to download a <\/strong>Verge <\/em><\/strong>app and they\u2019ll see a bunch of stuff in it, and that would be great.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n But if what you\u2019re describing is that BlueSky the app will be the entrance point for a lot of different people, and BlueSky the app has not prioritized video as part of the core part of the user experience \u2013 for any number of reasons why you might not prioritize video \u2013 then that part of the network won\u2019t get that effect. It won\u2019t get what feels like a network effect, which is, \u201cOh, there are lots of people here.\u201d The way that if I federate <\/strong>The Verge<\/em><\/strong>, I\u2019d say, \u201cLook at all these great posts from other tech writers,\u201d I could do that tomorrow.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s almost easy to do. It\u2019s easy to vibe-code that prototype, I will tell you. It\u2019s hard to get it all the way to the finish line. That\u2019s the dynamic. If you want BlueSky, the consumer app, to be the entry point to the diversity of the network, the app itself has to be diverse in a way that might dilute the app and make it lose its product market fit. How do you think about that back and forth?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n I think what we\u2019re seeing works well, and I\u2019ll go back to the Standard Site example. If the other piece of content that\u2019s not text is something that can show up inside a post, we call them link cards, and that could be a video. It could be a game. It could be something where somebody can post about it and say, \u201cHey, check out this new game.\u201d Somebody can see it and then go there. That\u2019s a perfect fit because then it fits our mode of how people discover things. But then when they want to engage with it, we send them off to that place.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Same with video. As long as somebody can embed it and promote it on our end, we\u2019re not going to try and become a video network where we then say, \u201cOh, all video has to be watched on BlueSky.\u201d No, no, no. Go off to The Verge<\/em>, go somewhere else, go explore. I think BlueSky as an app is a great place to surface things and notify people of new things, but it does have to somehow fit inside the post. You can give people a preview essentially and say, \u201cOkay, now go play this game. Go subscribe to this publication. Go donate to this cause.\u201d That\u2019s the kind of action we\u2019re trying to surface for everybody else in the ATmosphere and then just send people off on their way.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n I want to ask you to compare your role at BlueSky to when you were the CEO of Automattic. These are big companies, or we want them to be big companies that operate on standards and protocols and the open web in different ways. At BlueSky, you control the standard itself. This is a very important piece of the puzzle that the standard is in development. And you\u2019re making products on top of it and you want other people to build on top of the standard.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n A lot of people can say a lot of things about Automattic\u2019s relationship to the web, but technically you don\u2019t control the standard. And maybe it has enough scale so that the way Automattic does it becomes the way everyone else does it. But at Automattic, you didn\u2019t make the browsers. You weren\u2019t on the steering committees of the big standards in a way that allowed you to actually dictate what they were. You were making a web-server product that interacted with an ecosystem of other open products. Do you want BlueSky to get there where it\u2019s just one player among many, or do you want to retain control of the standard too? And how do you think that\u2019s different from how Automattic exists in the web ecosystem?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n We 100% do not want to control the standard at BlueSky. We are actually very actively doing everything in our power to divest control of it. First was to design the network in a way that if BlueSky goes down or goes away, the rest of the network is fine. That\u2019s a big test case for us. It actually got tested a couple of months ago, not the way we had hoped, but we got a DDoS attack on the BlueSky network. A very, very massive one. It did take us down for several hours. Other parts of the network, like I mentioned BlackSky earlier, operated just fine, totally independently. That\u2019s a big part. Just the practicality of it is, can other nodes in this network operate independently? Are there things left that BlueSky runs that everybody else is dependent on? And if so, what can we do to fix that?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n A big part of that, too, is that \u2013 this gets a little nerdy into the whole stack and the protocol \u2013 when people look at the design of this network and they like to find out, is it truly decentralized or not? There is one thing at the heart of it that absolutely no company should control, and that\u2019s the identity directory, the lookup. When you log in your identity in the ATmosphere, where does that lookup actually happen? It\u2019s like DNS on the web when somebody looks up a URL. We have been running that core directory, and we\u2019re actually in the process of setting up a Swiss nonprofit with a separate board, a completely separate entity, to which we\u2019ve handed over that directory. We\u2019re in the process of handing over the domain to it. So that\u2019s one example.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n We\u2019re also handing the protocol spec itself to the IETF. Last week, the IETF met in Vienna, and AT Proto is now a work stream, an official work stream to take that out of BlueSky and hand it to the IETF. It\u2019s going to become a blessed internet standard run by a completely separate entity. We\u2019re constantly taking all the pieces that we had to bootstrap and handing them off to other entities. We\u2019re super serious about that. The end state is that, yes, we are one app of many, one company of many running in this protocol, and we won\u2019t control the protocol.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The parallel to Automattic is that WordPress, the core software that Automattic is hosting, is open source and it\u2019s GPL. Anybody can use it, but anybody who uses it and changes it has to give back to open source. In our case, it\u2019s AT Protocol where anybody can build on AT Protocol. The beauty of building on AT Proto as a developer is all the data is owned by users and it\u2019s accessible to any other app. But as an app, then your data also goes into those user repositories. So it makes it better for everybody else on the network. It\u2019s similar to the way open source gets better through collaboration. This network gets better through everybody having their data shared and remixable and interoperable.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you get that balance right \u2013 or you have a company that helps bootstrap the whole thing, but by definition keeps itself separate and makes sure it can\u2019t control the shared resource \u2013 then it can work. We did this successfully with Automattic and WordPress. Automattic became a big company. WordPress became a huge open source ecosystem, and then tons of other companies formed around it. Our test case was always, \u201cWhat if Automattic goes out of business or gets acquired by somebody evil? Is WordPress going to be okay?\u201d That\u2019s why we put the WordPress trademark into a foundation so the company couldn\u2019t mess with it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n It\u2019s complicated to set those things up. This is one of those, not even five years, like 20 years out decisions. If this thing gets big, will it be truly independent? Or could somebody come in and change their mind and mess with it? We think about that constantly at BlueSky and getting that balance right. Handing off pieces so that this \u2013 because it\u2019s not going to work if one company tries to control it, we\u2019re right back at square one and we\u2019re just another walled garden, which is completely the opposite of what we\u2019re trying to achieve.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n There\u2019s a lot of drama with WordPress and the open-source community and other companies monetizing open-source in different ways. There\u2019s <\/strong>drama with the foundation<\/strong><\/a>. I\u2019ll set that all aside. People can go listen to <\/strong>Matt\u2019s<\/strong><\/a> episodes<\/strong><\/a>. We did it in detail, and certainly will have him back. I like talking to Matt a lot. But that\u2019s all coming for you too, because at some point all of this has to make money.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/platform.theverge.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/chorus\/uploads\/chorus_asset\/file\/24792604\/The_Verge_Decoder_Tileart.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&crop=0,0,100,100\")
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