Who is behind Bluesky? Everything about Jay Graber, the digital activist at the head of the social network on which users disappointed by X are moving

Jay Graber he is 33 years old, with a past as a digital activist, another as a welder of equipment for cryptocurrency mining and, for three years now, one that still lasts today: that of CEO of Bluesky, a social network that has given back a little of enthusiasm to Twitter users disappointed by the performance of the platform. Although the network has been operational for the public since February 2023 (with invitation-only access until February this year) and reached its first million users in just two months, it had never grown as much as in the last 15 days. The electoral victory of Donald Trump and the support received from Elon Musk (owner of Twitter, now X, since 2022) were some of the ingredients of one of the largest digital exodus of recent years.

To give you an idea, as of September this year Bluesky had nine million users. Yesterday it exceeded 20 million, and continues to grow at a rate of around one million users per day. In Spain, as in many other countries, it has become the most downloaded mobile app and much of the community from Twitter’s early years is reliving old feelings on the platform, which offers more privacy and control tools to those who were disappointed by the direction Elon Musk’s network had taken.

The strange thing is that Bluesky, which until last year didn’t even have a logo and was still in permanent testing, was born inside Twitter years ago, before Musk took control of the platform. Among other targets, the creator of Twitter Jack Dorsey was looking for a way to simplify content moderation, the big digital problem of recent years. And what Graber’s team got (a dozen people, most of whom are currently part of the Bluesky organization chart, which has only 20 employees) was a new platform, where algorithms do not have a predominant role and where each user can choose not only who to follow, but also what type of content to see or avoid. Bluesky is only as complicated as you want it to be and as simple as the first Twitter. A good example of another of Dorsey’s intentions: that digital identities, users, had more power in the face of the impositions of algorithms. Does anyone remember that for years Instagram showed in chronological order what the people we followed posted and nothing else? Here, that’s how it is.

All this time, the main protagonist has been Lantian Graberwho (despite being called Jay and being born in Oklahoma) has an almost prescient maternal name. As she herself said on several occasions, in Mandarin Chinese Lantian means «blue sky», the literal English name of the platform: Bluesky. A name that his mother, who grew up in the China of the cultural revolution of Mao Zedonghe gave her as a symbol of the “unlimited freedom” he wanted for his daughter, after having “lost everything” when she left China (Graber also clarified that the coincidence is just that and is purely accidental, however symbolic).

Graber decided to turn that freedom to the digital world. After graduating in Computer Science, Technology and Society at the University of Pennsylvania, she took her first professional steps in the world of blockchainsince during his years of study he had discovered cryptocurrencies and bitcoin. Part engineer, part digital activist, her first jobs were related to the world of cryptocurrencies to the point that she ended up working for a bitcoin mining equipment company located in a former munitions factory. Everything would have changed after approaching Twitter.

Yet, Graber unexpectedly became the protagonist of this story. After leading an internal development team for Dorsey for a couple of years, the Twitter creator’s abandonment of the command chair in 2021 did not represent the end of the project, but rather a new beginning for Graber: a phone call from Twitter’s new CEO, while the IT expert was on holiday in Hawaii, actually put her in charge of the future platform. Those were the days when Dorsey had ousted Trump from Twitter and the fight against misinformation and extremism loomed as the internet’s next big problem.

Since then, the challenges have been as varied as they are frantic. Musk’s entry into Twitter in 2022, in exchange for a $44 billion payment and the company’s IPO, meant the end of Twitter’s internal funding and support for Bluesky. Orphaned and still unknown to the public, Bluesky was rescued by Dorsey, who agreed to join the board of directors and helped Graber manage the first rounds of funding. Meanwhile, Bluesky was preparing its public debut by setting goals for all of 2023, such as “reaching 10,000 users,” which, according to what Graber said five days ago, now happens every 10 minutes. But Dorsey, one of the most unpredictable personalities of the modern internet, ended up turning his back on the platform: he closed his Bluesky account, resigned from the board of directors and went on to blindly support Elon Musk.

From February this year to today, the platform had already experienced several leaps in popularity. Twitter ban in Brazil, after a tug-of-war with the government of Lula Da Silva which lasted weeks and was lost by Musk, brought three million users to the platform. The American elections were the definitive turning point, even if in reality they overlapped with some of Musk’s decisions which scared users (especially in terms of privacy, blocking and security) pushing thousands to permanently close their accounts on the old platform (only in the United States there were 116,000 the day after the elections) and to seek that unlimited freedom on the new network.

Of course, there is no shortage of doubts. Graber has tapped cryptocurrency funds for funding rounds and has yet to overcome the biggest hurdle for any startup: after growth, money has to come. Graber assures that he doesn’t want to “shit” the platform, and that the answer doesn’t even lie in a future where everything is filled with advertising. Meanwhile, for the disappointed, including media like The Guardian And The Vanguardwho abandoned Twitter in the face of the prevalence of misinformation and toxic hoaxes, Bluesky has become a good place to start from scratch.