When Bluesky CEO Jay Graber walked to the stage in SXSW 2025 for your key discussionHe wore a big black shirt with his hair left back in a bow. At first glance, it may seem that you are following the same play book as so many women in technological leadership have played before: minimizing their femininity to be taken seriously.
The truth is much more interesting than that. What his average black shirt might seem is a subtle, but clear Slide Mark ZuckerbergA CEO that represents everything with which Bluesky is trying to work as an open source social network.
The founding goal and CEO has been compared directly to the Roman emperor Julius César. His own shirt declared Aut Zuck Aut Nihilwhich is a play in the Latin phrase Aut Nihil Aut Caesar: “Or Caesar or nothing.”
The Trder shirt, which directly copy the style of a shirt that Zuckerberg used on stage recently, he says Mundus Sine Césaribus. Or, “a world without Caesars.”
With the way Bluesky is designed, Graber is certainly putting his money where his mouth (or shirt) is. As a decentralized social network based on an open source frame, Bluesky differs from inherited platforms such as Facebook in which users have a direct and transparent window on how the platform is being built.
“If a billionaire entered and bought Bluesky, or assumed it, or if tomorrow he decided to change things in a way that people really did not like, then they could disburse and continue with another application,” said Enger on SXSW. “There are already applications on the network that give you another way of seeing the network, or you could also build a new one. And that opening guarantees that there is always the ability to move on to a new alternative. “
Meanwhile, goal has alienated users by interfering with how people experience their platforms, and Bluesky has directly benefited from that. After the goal pushed controversial updates such as training their AI in public user publications, or sacrificing their verification programs for third -party facts, Bluesky experienced explosions of user growth.
Even so, Bluesky has a long way to go if he wants to overthrow the Meta Roman Empire. While the engrar platform is approaching 33 million users in totalTarget has 3.35 billion daily active users In all its products: Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook. In order, that is about 40% of the world’s population.
But for an incipient social network, Bluesky has created a sufficient cultural footprint to be forced to stay. Rome was not built, nor was it overthrown, in one day.