Bluesky’s new CEO wants a big tent, not a bubble

Today, I’m talking with Toni Schneider, the new head of social platform Bluesky who formally took over after a short stint as interim CEO. This is one of my favorite kinds of interviews, because a couple years ago we had Bluesky’s prior CEO, Jay Graber, on the show — she’s now the company’s chief innovation officer. All of that kind of shuffle is pure Decoder bait: a new CEO often brings with them new priorities, which is perhaps the most Decoder subject of all. Read the ⁠full interview transcript on The Verge⁠. Links: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber | Decoder (2024) Bluesky CEO Jay Graber steps down | TechCrunch Staying in the game | Toni Schneider The messy WordPress drama, explained | The Verge Proton CTO Bart Butler | Decoder Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Decoder’s producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Eileen Felix. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:31Speaker 02

  Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today, I'm talking with Tony Schneider, the brand new CEO of the social platform Blue Sky. Tony just took over after a short stint as the interim CEO. This is one of my favorite kinds of interviews to do here on Decoder. A couple of years ago, we had Blue Sky's founding CEO, Jay Graber, on the show. And she is now the company's chief innovation officer. All that kind of shuffle is pure Decoder bait. And a new CEO often brings with them new priorities, which is perhaps the most Decoder thing of all. And Blue Sky in particular is a company pulling in a lot of different directions. There's the Twitter-like social media app, which is what most people are familiar with. And then there's the underlying technology behind that app called App Protocol, which

• 2:14Speaker 02

  allows anyone to build social networking products that interoperate with Blue Sky and one another. As you'll hear Tony say, that ecosystem is vibrant and growing. It's now called the atmosphere, which is frankly adorable. But the users of Blue Sky, the app, are not the same as the people building on App Protocol. And the goals of a company founded to push forward the ideas of open interoperable social standards are not necessarily aligned with all the things the users of the app might need or want. This is a fight that bursts into view on Blue Sky itself all the time. And I wanted to know how Tony thinks about balancing all of that with what remains of fairly small team. Tony's an interesting guy to talk about all this with, because he was formerly the CEO of Automattic, which makes the huge WordPress web content management platform.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  And you'll 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 other big players, that that might all take a decade to fully develop. That's quite a vision. But here and now, the open web is falling apart, and the social products that today are fragmenting, and in many cases, either getting smaller or getting full of AI slop. So we talked about all that, and about Blue Sky's 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 Blue Sky might start to generate revenue. Interestingly enough, it's not just ads. This is a fun one. I think Tony and I hit on every single Decoder theme there is. I think you're gonna like it.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Okay, Blue Sky CEO, Toni Schneider. Here we go.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Toni Schneider, you are a venture partner at True Ventures and, more importantly, the now permanent CEO of Blue Sky. Welcome to Decoder.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  Thank you. Thanks for having me.

• 4:04Speaker 02

  I am very excited to talk to you. I think 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's something very big happening on these interoperable social networks. And 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 company that makes WordPress. So let's just start at the very start. Describe what you think Blue Sky is today and what you think the opportunity with these new kind of networks are.

• 4:36Speaker 03

  So Blue Sky today is really two things. There's the Blue Sky app, which is what a lot of people are familiar with. It's a social network. We think it's a better social network. It's more human-focused, doesn't have ads, doesn't have algorithms. But more importantly, underneath Blue Sky is an open protocol called App Proto. And Blue Sky is only one of now over 1,000 apps built on that protocol. And the whole point of Blue Sky was to demonstrate that this open protocol could scale and attract other builders, building lots of apps, lots of social experiences that all interoperate

• 5:18Speaker 03

  and connect with each other, which is what we believe the future of social media should look like and what actually is gonna make social media something that we believe in, which is that the future of social media should serve the public good. And that is what motivates us, and that's why we built the protocol first and then the app.

• 5:39Speaker 02

  There's a lot in there already that is just pure Decoder bait, including the notion that Blue Sky, the product, and the atmosphere, and App Protocol, the standard, are all intermixed in one company that you now run. And then right next to that is maybe the purest Decoder bait of all, which is the fact that Jay Graber, who was the CEO of Blue Sky, she was on the show about two years ago, stepped down 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 Decoder 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?

• 6:16Speaker 03

  I think it's actually really cool and inspiring that a founder, after, you know, she worked on this for six years, got it off the ground, started inside Twitter, got it out of there, made it an independent thing. I mean, there are a lot of reasons why, you know, really, Blue Sky is facing long odds, and she got into this place. And then felt like, you know, it's at a scale now where her sweet spot, the things that she loves working on, which is vision, innovation, new ideas, she felt pulled towards, back towards building, especially also because of the advent of AI and how AI and App Proto can interoperate.

• 6:56Speaker 03

  So she felt like that's what she wants to go work on, and it's time to find somebody else for the CEO job. 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. And we became investors, True Ventures. So I've been following it, you know, as an investor, supporting it. And, you know, the team approached me and said, you know, that my background with WordPress and open source was really a really good fit. And so I agreed to be interim CEO really initially because I was still a general partner at True.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  And, you know, it's a firm I helped build, it's an amazing firm, that didn't want to leave behind. But also, at True, we've had this model where we've moved back and forth between operator and investor. I did that while I was running Automattic. So I stepped into it, and then really, you know, after working on it hands-on for a few months, it just got more and more fun, more and more energizing. It just, you could just feel the momentum. And also, True just switched to a new fund. So it was actually, the timing was good, where I could say, okay, I will go, I will switch my true role to part-time, become a venture partner, which is what I used to

• 8:19Speaker 03

  be when I ran Automattic, and I'll go all in at Blue Sky.

• 8:24Speaker 02

  Tell me about the difference between being the interim CEO and the full-time CEO. When you're 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 a full-time CEO can do. What did you feel like the boundaries were as interim CEO?

• 8:39Speaker 03

  On the inside, it hasn't felt very different. I actually think the move to drop the interim is more important on the outside, especially for the atmosphere and the App Proto community and people building, you know, building on this platform and in this ecosystem, just to say like, no, I'm here for the duration. This isn't just some interim gig, and then somebody else is gonna show up. So I felt like, to the outside, that makes a big difference. On the inside, the job really hasn't changed much.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  So many of my conversations here on Decoder are really about the time scale of decisions, right? I'll make the comparison to my newsroom, because it's easy and it's easy to understand. Our reporters make decisions in like 30-minute increments, right? 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 gonna cover? Where are the resources gonna go? It seems like the interim CEO role, the time scale of those decisions is necessarily short, or it has the appearance of being short. And then I'm reading your note that you published when you became the full-time CEO. In the very beginning of it, you say, "We're at the very beginning of the story with a decade of exciting work ahead."

• 9:54Speaker 02

  And I'm wondering if the time scale of the decisions you're making now are a decade.

• 10:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, it touches on something really fascinating with this project, which in general, with decision making, I, one of the frameworks I really like is the reversible and irreversible decisions. I feel like a lot of decisions we make are actually reversible. Like, and 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. And then there's a few decisions that really do have very long-term implications. They're much harder to reverse. And with this project in particular, it, there are decisions made at this protocol level that we're going to have to live with for a long time. And so there's a part of the company and this community

• 10:45Speaker 03

  that thinks very, very, very long-term. Like, this is a protocol that, you know, it's going to be around for decades. Already, it's in enough use that it's going to be around for a long time. So those decisions, you really need to be careful about. And then it goes all the way to, you know, things we try in the product that work or don't work. I wasn't in the interim mindset as much also because I am also an investor in the company. So I care very much in the long-term picture. And what attracts me to this whole endeavor is that it can have a really important long-term impact. So I'm, I'm very, I always think about, okay, how, how will this play out? Is this truly served the core mission? And

• 11:30Speaker 03

  it's okay to make some of these harder decisions now that, you know, will pay off for a long time because this is going to take a while. And, and it's not just one company. It's really, again, it's, it's already thousands of others that are building together. And that's just a different timeframe and decision-making process than your typical, just go fast, scale as quickly as possible. And I, I like it. I'm comfortable with it.

• 11:58Speaker 02

  I just want to stick with Blue Sky, 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, right? The user base of Blue Sky is or is not interested in the development of that protocol, is or is not interested in the wider atmosphere. I think under Jay's 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. And you could see that back and forth. And 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. But now the product is big, it

• 12:41Speaker 02

  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, how do you see the balance inside of Blue Sky 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?

• 13:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I see the, the Blue Sky app and the product as enabling the atmosphere. It's an on-ramp, or maybe a lobby to the atmosphere, where it's, it's a great way to get lots of people in, get, get, get people exposed to the idea and then realize as you use the product, oh, there's, there are other things here. This isn't just a microblogging app. An example from the last couple of months that's gone super well is this format called Standardsite that emerged. So basically, the history of that is that, you know, Blue Sky is a microblogging app. People are asking for longer-form posting. A bunch of other

• 13:46Speaker 03

  apps started popping up that were for newsletters and blogging. In particular, three apps called Leaflet, Pocket, and Offprint. And they got together and said, hey, why don't we define a format for all of us to work together on the atmosphere, for all of our published, the posts that we publish? And then we looked at it and said, great, we can now take that and surface it in our app. So now, if, you know, if you're posting a blog post on Leaflet, it just shows up in the Blue Sky app. And we can make that a seamless experience. And this went over really well to the point where now, you know, we're pressed to supporting

• 14:29Speaker 03

  Standardsite, lots of other publishing platforms. They're realizing the benefit of, oh, if I just publish to this new format now, it's just going to show up and work across all these other platforms without me having to do anything. And it's 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 or no money has to change hands. And it's just taken off. I'm hoping more and more Blue Sky users will see those kinds of integrations, go, oh, cool. I'm not just getting Blue Sky content here. I'm getting content from all these other apps, all these other networks.

• 15:11Speaker 03

  And it just works. I don't have to do anything. I don't have to go sign up for 10 different apps. It's just one sign up, one account, and it just works.

• 15:20Speaker 02

  You're describing two different kinds of things, right? There's a lot of work to be done at the protocol level. There's a lot of work to be done to support new kinds of experiences like Standardsite. And then there's Blue Sky, a product which is 45 million people, 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. And it 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 Blue Sky the company now? And how is it structured to point in two different directions?

• 15:52Speaker 03

  We're now at 50 people, still very small. And biggest challenge is clearly trying to do all of, everything you've described with a small team. We do have, again, an ecosystem of hundreds and thousands of others working on it. So that helps. And, you know, we, we do our best to coordinate everyone. But I, I would say, we're, we're making good progress. We're, you know, we're, we're seeing, again, we're seeing good momentum, especially on the atmosphere side. You know, the things we look at are like number of daily active apps on the network that has doubled since the beginning of the year. It's about to hit 1,000. We look at SDK downloads for our tools that has tripled. It's going to hit

• 16:36Speaker 03

  a million downloads a month by, you know, later this year. So those are the numbers that show like, oh, this, not only is it scaling, but we're able to scale it with the team that we have.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  How is that team structured?

• 16:51Speaker 03

  About 50 people, all remote, structured into small teams, big believer in, I, I believe, six to eight-person teams, highly aligned, highly incentivized and motivated are the way to get things done, probably maybe the only way to get things done. So there's three core product teams. There's the app team that deals with the Blue Sky app. There's the atmosphere team that does all the developer-facing stuff. And then there's a third product team called the exploration team. And that's a new team that Jay has stood up and is running. And that, we actually just launched a new version of the product they're working on, Addy, which is, and think of it as AI layered on top of the atmosphere

• 17:36Speaker 03

  and what you can do with that. So those are our three core product teams and they each, they're each customer-facing. So consumer-facing, developer-facing, and then sort of probably we'll find, we'll find out on the AI product where the, the market fit is there. And then we have a bunch of just support teams that support those three core teams that are pretty, pretty typical. You know, we've got a legal team, et cetera, et cetera. And, and yeah, very, I would say, it's a team that's very low ego, high agency. It's kind of the ethos. So kind of low drama, just a lot of get shit done energy, really collaborative.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Whenever I think about new social products and how they might scale, especially with explosive user growth, up until recently, the conventional wisdom is you've got to scale trust and safety and moderation linearly with the size of your user base. And maybe we're going to add AI to this and that linear relationship will break, or maybe it'll actually get even more costly because token spend will get more costly than having human moderators, or there'll be more false positives and we're only even angrier. So you got to have more humans in the loop. It's really unclear to me how that's going to work. You've obviously been scaling, Blue Sky is a consumer social product. Then you have the complexity of we're hooking on to lots and lots of other products that are putting content in front

• 19:02Speaker 02

  of people. How does the moderation layer work? And have you seen it be a linear increase in costs with the size of the network and the user base?

• 19:12Speaker 03

  Moderation is, is huge in any social product. And we do, in addition to our 50-person team, we do have contractors that help us with moderation. What's, what we've done differently is that our whole moderation system is composable or pluggable. And so it's not just us that can label content and moderate it. Anybody can do it and add labels onto the, it's part of the protocol. And then 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's say, AI slot, everybody else who's, who's building in

• 19:56Speaker 03

  this ecosystem can take advantage of that piece of data. They don't have to, but they can. So what we're seeing, and what we've seen is we have our moderation team, but then there are other teams that are, have decided. To moderate label content the way they want. So for example, maybe the first non Blue Sky project on the protocol was Black Sky. And it's now become a thriving company on its own. It's a team building all kinds of interesting things. And they started out by saying, hey, 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.

• 20:37Speaker 03

  And they are able to do that and plug that in. But all of everything they're doing is still part of the larger network. And now there's again hundreds, soon thousands of these kinds of systems. So this has really helped where the moderation burden isn't all on one team that has to scale and look at everything. And frankly, 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. And so we feel like this kind of distributed moderation approach is more powerful. That said, yes, we were continuing to scale up ours, but it's manageable.

• 21:22Speaker 03

  I mean, it's not, it's a lot of work, but it's manageable. And again, it's worth it when the whole network can benefit from it. And the next part of that story that's going to be really interesting is that the biggest thing we're actually working on with App proto, the next evolution of the protocol is private data. So we all know that the public square, public social networking is, has reached a certain scale. And there's a lot of people who are, they want to retreat into more private spaces. And we've seen explosive growth in group chats. We're all in a million group chats. And this has been the number one request from our community, from our developers

• 22:05Speaker 03

  is let us build more private, membership based, you know, various versions of private spaces on this protocol. So we're in the middle of building that. It's a community effort. It's rolling out very soon. And now moderation moves in, you know, gets broken up into even more smaller spaces. And people can decide like, if I don't, if I don't like a network or I don't like the way it's moderated, go start your own, go start your own community. And so that's, I think, the most interesting thing ahead of us. As because right now, everything on App proto is public. It's, it can only be used for a completely public product.

• 22:48Speaker 03

  And once we enable private data, I think that I just, it's like 10 or 100x the number of use cases we can serve.

• 22:57Speaker 02

  Not to be reductive, but I think it's useful to talk about this in comparison to other social products people might be more familiar with. App protocol right now in 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're describing is much more like a Reddit style approach. Right. We have smaller closed communities. Some of them can be totally private unless you're invited in. And yet they're still on the atmosphere in some ways. Is that, is that right?

• 23:30Speaker 03

  That's right. So you have, so the trade off traditionally has been, well, if you want to be on a large network, you have to be on a public network. Or if you want to control, have your own, you've been really 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, you know, run your own forum. And there's clearly a need for that because there's lots of those out there. But the challenge is each one of those is now a little island, right? They're, and you have to convince people. So we think we can pull off as the best of both worlds. It's when you build a community or private space on that proto, it's absolutely 100% owned by you.

• 24:14Speaker 03

  It's not owned by Blue Sky or by any company. It's just like everything else in a protocol. It's, it's owned by the users, not by the platform. So it's really truly yours. You can move it around. You can make all the decisions, but because it's on a shared protocol, all of these communities plug together. You can go to a place like Blue Sky and get all your notifications from one place. You can see what's 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. So that is something that no other platform can do right now. You sort of have to, you know, you're either on, you know,

• 24:56Speaker 03

  the, the, the large sort of platform owned and controlled place, or you run your own and you're, you're a little silo. I think we can have, we can solve that. And, and again, we see just the energy behind this idea. The number of things people are already prototyping is, is very palpable.

• 25:20Speaker 02

  We have to pause here for a short break. We'll be back in just a minute.

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• 27:13Speaker 02

  Welcome back. I'm talking with Blue Sky CEO Toni Schneider about how he makes decisions.

• 27:19Speaker 02

  I got to ask you the other decoder question because I'm very curious where this idea came from and how you decided to bet on it. How do you make decisions? What's your framework for making decisions?

• 27:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, you talked a little bit earlier about the reversible and irreversible decisions. The hardest thing about running any project is just, especially if it's successful, it's just an endless flow of things you have to prioritize and decide on. So, but I find you could make that a lot less daunting and exhausting if you move a lot of decisions into this category of just, they're, they're not that big a deal. Let's, let's make it easy to, to experiment and reverse things and, and really only focus on, on the truly long-term impactful things that we have to get right. And then, so you sort of have this likeness or almost playfulness about some of these things.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  Or it's like, it's just not that big a deal. Let's just try something like, let's be, let's be creative and improvisational about it. This is a lot of how automatic runs. And I actually credit a lot of that to Matt Mullenweg's approach to first running an open source project. And then inside automatic, there are a lot of jazz analogies because Matt started out as a, as a jazz musician. And just this sort of improvisational, like, don't take it so seriously if you don't have to. But then there are very serious decisions we have to make as well. And those, we, I like spending just a lot of one-on-one time with the leaders

• 28:56Speaker 03

  and then just gathering and going through the list and talking through the trade offs and just making sure that at least, you know, in a good cadence, monthly or maybe quarterly, we go through and make those hard trade off decisions and don't leave the room until we're like, no, we're only doing these two things. Like this, on the important list, right? It's like, we can't do everything and let's, yeah, let's, let's voice all the ideas, but you know, get to agreement on what, what we're really, the few things we're trying to get done. If we get those done, then we're actually in good shape and, and we keep making forward progress.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  And that's kind of the, the ongoing sort of flow that, that we go through. And it's, it seems to be working.

• 29:47Speaker 02

  I have to call out an email I got from a listener, ex Amazon, who said, everyone always comes on your show and talks about reversible decisions and irreversible decisions. And I just want to point out, if you have enough money and time, every decision is reversible. And I was like, yeah, that's right. Especially at Amazon scale, that's certainly right. What's the line for you? What makes a decision irreversible? How much money and how much time does it take to reverse it?

• 30:12Speaker 03

  To me, it's less the money, it's more the time. I mean, some things just take years to unwind. So I think anything that's like, you'd say, let's call it like a five year time horizon, where it'd just be really painful to change course. Or maybe on the positive framing, it's more like, hey, if we get this right, we don't have to think about it again for five years. And it's just, then that's, that's kind of the category of things where, you know, people talk a lot about like, for examples, with startups, it's, it's your investors. Right. If you, especially early on, you, the first investors you work with, they're going to be with you for five or 10 years. And that's a pretty big decision. Like you shouldn't just take the first check that comes along.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  Like you should really think that through because I've, you know, I've, I've lived that, you know, if I true have invested in 500 startups for the last 20 years. And we've seen every possible way that that plays out. And that's a good thing to really, really pay attention to early on, not just rush. Early in my career, I was like, I just, I just need money. Just give me a check and I'll keep building. I just want to build things like, so that's, that's kind of an example of the timeframe where I feel like, yeah, you don't, it's really nice when you.

• 31:32Speaker 03

  When it just works for several years, you have to go back and yeah, invest more time, more money to reverse something.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  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 Blue Sky, to become the permanent CEO of Blue Sky. You're calling that a 10-year decision, right? I mean, it's in your note, we've talked about it here. How did you make that decision? Did they come to you and say, you're going to be the CEO now? Sorry, we're stripping the title away. Did you have to write a memo? How did that all happen?

• 32:04Speaker 03

  I 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. So and the Blue Sky team and board from early on said, hey, we think this is working really well. Like, can we make this permanent? So then it was probably a couple of months of just, yeah, working through how a transition would work.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  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?

• 32:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, that sounds about right.

• 32:45Speaker 02

  It's quite a timeline. And then the second one, maybe much more importantly, is, okay, we're going to make this big bet on private communities. We're going to extend the protocol. Logically, you're going to have to extend the Blue Sky app itself. You're 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 Blue Sky, the community on the Blue Sky app does not like change. So you're going to have to endure some change with them. This is a bet. This is a big decision. This has to be the future of the protocol, the future of the atmosphere. How did you make that decision? And what made you convicted that it was the right one?

• 33:25Speaker 03

  The decision to extend the protocol has been underway. I think that, I don't know, that's a year, two years ago, or maybe even from the very beginnings of the protocol, people are like, hey, what are we going to do about private data? And so that, that's been building. And it's kind of natural. I mean, once people start building on your protocol, it's the first question. Right? It's like, oh, this is great, but I do have some private data. Even inside the Blue Sky app, we have DMs. Those aren't on the protocol. You don't want those out in the public, right? So we have features inside the app that we had to build off protocol, because it couldn't support private data. So we have our own use cases. We got lots of them. So that, that's kind of an obvious, like, we just have to

• 34:08Speaker 03

  do it. How it affects the community, that's what our app team is working through right now. So and one of the things that I feel like we've gotten better at in the last few months is to do that out in the open. So Alex Spencer, who's our head of product, who makes those decisions around what goes in the app and what doesn't, has been posting about it and just inviting feedback and saying, look, this is coming. What do you think? What kind of communities do you want? Do you want, you know, how similar should they be to the current app? How different? I think we've got 500 people who've signed up to want to give us feedback. So we're going through user interviews and people are already building

• 34:51Speaker 03

  communities on Blue Sky, actually, because we have, we have this functionality where people can make custom feeds. It's a whole, you know, one of the huge differences in Blue Sky, it's right? No algorithms. You get to make your own. You can plug in your own. People have made over 100,000 feeds. And some of those are really communities themselves. There are things like BookSky and AstroSky, and where it's just communities of people talking about a certain topic within a custom feed. So if people have sort of taken what we have to kind of bend it to into a community shape. So it's already happening

• 35:34Speaker 03

  in the network. So that makes it a lot less scary. It's not like, oh, we're going to stop on thing and pivot somewhere else. It's like, no, we're just doing more of a thing that some users are already doing. And I think we can do it in a way that doesn't disrupt. Like, if you never want to join a private community, you don't have to. Like, you can still use, like, Blue Sky, the app as it stands today isn't going to change. Like, the public part of it is, you know, it's popular, it's growing. So we're not going to mess with that.

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Well, let me ask you about Blue Sky, the app isn't going to change, because I think that's the thing that I'm poking at. It feels like every other social network is sort of, you know, everything evolves into a crab. Everything is evolving into TikTok. We can just see it happening every single day. Meta today announced a test in which the big blue Facebook app will, will open for some set of users into just full screen video. They're just, screw it. We're just going to turn Facebook into TikTok. Everything heads in that direction. X has headed in that direction. That's the competition. And maybe that's the thing the market wants. You're saying, okay, we're going to build private data. We'll have a more Reddit-like experience. Blue Sky may be the last really text-first social platform of its kind that exists. Do you feel that pull into different

• 36:50Speaker 02

  directions, into different formats? Because that's a thing that your user base also pushes against.

• 36:55Speaker 03

  This is the beauty of an open protocol. Like, let somebody else build the TikTok of App Proto. Let somebody else go push into new formats. We're, we're perfectly happy with text-first microblogging network. We love it. We think, honestly, I'm glad if others are chasing off in other directions, because we like, we like what we have. We talked earlier about traffic. So a lot of these other networks, as you know, you're going to turn Google Zero right there. All these walled gardens, all these other platforms are getting more and more walled, right? They're like, okay, once, you know, we're open enough to attract an audience, and then once, once you're here, we're not going

• 37:38Speaker 03

  to let you go. We're just going to keep trying to find ways to keep you in there. Blue Sky is the opposite. Because of the protocol, it's locked open by default. We couldn't keep you in there, 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 Blue Sky and leave. Like, we're still a place that we, we don't down rank links. We love sending traffic to people. We send, I think it's 2 million clicks a day to publishers. And, you know, we're the number one referrer to a bunch of, a bunch of publishers. And we want, we want to do more of that. I think we love that way, that the open web works. And just people come to Blue Sky to, to connect, to learn, to have fun, and then to find interesting things

• 38:21Speaker 03

  to go to. And that's, that's, yeah, there's, there's no way we're going to change that.

• 38:30Speaker 02

  I think I'm, I'm 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 kind of pointed at text. And I'm wondering if there's something you need to do to be better at video, to compete with what all of the closed platforms are chasing at much larger scale?

• 39:01Speaker 03

  No, I think at the protocol level, it's, it's easy to do. We can define your own records on the protocol. I mean, yes, ours are text-focused, our posts, our follows, our likes, things like that. But there's already people publishing all kinds of different things on the protocol. I was just, I saw yesterday that, you know, somebody's publishing a bunch of patent, like a patent database onto App Proto, so everybody else can just tap into that patent information. There's somebody who's like, publishing the, the health data off of their Apple Watch, onto their PDS, that are just like live streaming their health data onto the protocol. Like, people are putting all kinds of things. So the, the protocol is, can be used for anything. And what's harder is that you need people

• 39:45Speaker 03

  there, right? So when you, you build the next, you know, the TikTok on App Proto, that when you launch that app, it launches into, you know, millions and millions of people who are already there. And that's what we're working on, to just keep getting more and more people onto the atmosphere, so that you don't have that Coldstar problem as a, as a new developer, right? Where you have to, you want enough people. We don't need, you know, eventually, you know, our 10-year goal is a billion people on App Proto. You don't need a billion to, you know, have success with a new product, but you need a critical mass, so that when people show up, they're like, oh, where are my friends?

• 40:24Speaker 02

  So, but this is the dynamic that I'm really interested in, with the, the Blue Sky app and then the protocol itself. So it's no secret that I've been talking about federating The Verge for like 100 years. And we're going to do it one of these days. And one of the issues here is, like, we publish in a lot of formats in a lot of different places. And if I just immediately federate The Verge tomorrow, we have a lot of video. Where's the video going to go? And it's just going to go out in the, it's going to go out in the network. And maybe I can convince a lot of people to download a Verge app, and they'll see a bunch of stuff in it. And that would be great. But if what you're describing is Blue Sky, the app, will be the entrance point for a lot of different people, and

• 41:05Speaker 02

  Blue Sky, the app, has not prioritized video, right? As part of the core part of the user experience, for any number of reasons, where you might not prioritize video, then that part of the network won't get the, that effect, right? It won't get what feels like a network effect, which is, oh, there's lots of people here. The way that if I federate The Verge, I'm like, look at all these great posts from other tech writers. I could do that tomorrow, right? Like, it's, it's almost like easy to do, at least, it's easy to vibe code that prototype, I will tell you. It's hard to like, get it all the way to the finish line. That's the dynamic, right? If you want the Blue Sky, 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

• 41:47Speaker 02

  might dilute the app, and make it lose its product-market fit. How do you think about that back and forth?

• 41:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think what we're seeing works well, and I'll go back to the standard side example, is if it's if the other piece of content that's not text is something that can show up inside a post, so a we call them link cards, but and that could be a video. It could be a game. It could be something where somebody can post about and say, hey, check out this new game and somebody can see it and then go there. That's 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 to that place. So same with video, right? As long as somebody can sort of embed it and promote it on our end.

• 42:38Speaker 03

  We're not, again, we're not going to try and become a video network where we then say, oh, all video has to be watched on Blue Sky. It's like, no, no, no, go off to the verge, go somewhere else, go explore. It's just, I think Blue Sky as an app is a great place to to surface things and notify people of of new things, but it does have to somehow fit inside the post. It can give people a preview essentially and say, okay, now go play this game, go subscribe to this publication, go donate to this cause, go, you know, that that's the kind of action we're trying to surface for for everybody else in the atmosphere and then just send people off on their way.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  I want to ask you to compare your role at Blue Sky to your role at Automatic, when you're the CEO of Automatic, right? These are big companies or they we want them to be big companies that operate on standards and protocols and the open web in different ways. At Blue Sky, you control the standard itself, right? This is like a very important piece of the puzzle, that the standard is in development and you're making products on top of it. You want other people to build on top of the standard. A lot of people can say a lot of things about Automatic's relationship to the web, but technically you don't control the standard, right? And maybe it has enough scale so that the way Automatic does it becomes the way everyone else does it. But at Automatic, you didn't make the browsers. You weren't on the steering committees of the big standards in a way that allowed you to actually dictate what they were.

• 44:01Speaker 02

  You were making a web server product that interacted with an ecosystem of other open products. Do you want Blue Sky to get there where it's just one player among many? Or do you want to retain control of the standard too? And how do you think that's different from how Automatic exists in the web ecosystem?

• 44:17Speaker 03

  We 100% do not want to control the standard at Blue Sky. We are actually very actively doing everything in our power to divest control of it. We, you know, first was to design the network in a way that if Blue Sky goes down or goes away, the rest of the network is fine. So that's that's a big test case for us. It actually, a couple of months ago, got tested, not the way we had hoped, but, you know, we got a DDoS attack on the Blue Sky network, very, very massive one. And it did take us down for several hours. Other parts of the network, like I mentioned, Black Sky earlier, they operate it just fine, totally independently.

• 44:59Speaker 03

  So so that's a big part, just just the practicality of it is can other nodes in this network operate independently? Are there any things, are there things left that Blue Sky runs that everybody else is dependent on? And if so, what can we do to fix that? The a big part of that too is when people look at this, you know, this is gets a little nerdy into the whole like stack and the protocol, but people look at the design of this network and they, you know, like to find out, like, is it truly decentralized or not? And there is one thing at the heart of it that is absolutely like no company should

• 45:41Speaker 03

  control, and that's the the identity directory, like the lookup. So the actual, you know, when you log in, your identity in the atmosphere, like where does that lookup happen? And it's kind of like DNS on on the web, where when somebody looks up a URL. And so we have been running that core directory and we're actually in the process. We've set up a a Swiss nonprofit with a separate board, completely separate entity, and we've handed over that directory and and they're in the process of handing over the domain to it. So so that's one example. We also, the protocol spec itself, we're handing to the IETF.

• 46:26Speaker 03

  There was last week, IETF met in Vienna and App proto is now a work stream, an official work stream to make, take that out of Blue Sky and hand it to the IETF. And it's going to become a blessed internet standard with, you know, run by a completely separate entity. So we're constantly sort of taking all the pieces that we had to bootstrap and handing them off to other other entities. And we're super serious about that. So the end state is that we, yes, we are one app of of many, one company of many running in this protocol and we we won't, we won't control the protocol.

• 47:07Speaker 03

  The parallel to Automatic is that, you know, WordPress, the core software that Automatic is hosting is open source and it's it's GPL. So anybody can use it, but anybody who uses it and changes it has to give back to open source so that, in our case, it's a protocol where anybody can build on the protocol and you can, you know, the beauty of building on App proto is as a developer is all the data is owned by users and it's accessible to any other app. But you as an app, then your data also goes into those user repositories. It makes it better for everybody else on the network. So there's a similar to the way open source gets better through collaboration.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  The this network gets better through just everybody having their data shared and and remixable and interoperable. And when you get that balance right, or you have a a company that helps bootstrap the whole thing, but by definition keeps itself separate and, you know, makes sure it can't control the the shared resource, then it can work. And we did this successfully with with Automatic and WordPress. Their Automatic became a big company. WordPress became a huge open source ecosystem and then tons of other companies formed around it. And we always, our test case was always, okay, what if Automatic goes out of business or gets acquired by somebody evil? Is WordPress going to be okay?

• 48:36Speaker 03

  And that's why we put the WordPress trademark into a foundation so the company couldn't mess with it. And and it's, you know, those, it's it's complicated to set those things up. And this is one of those, like, not even five years, like 20 years out decisions, like, if this thing gets big, will it be truly independent? Or could somebody come in and change their mind and mess with it? And we think about that constantly at Blue Sky and getting that balance right and again, handing off pieces so that, because it's not going to work if if one company tries to control, we're just right back at square one and we're just another walled garden, which is completely the opposite of what we're trying to achieve.

• 49:19Speaker 02

  We're going to take another quick break here. We'll be right back.

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• 51:05Speaker 02

  Welcome back. I'm talking with Blue Sky CEO Tony Schneider about an existential question for the company. How is it going to make money? There's a lot of drama with WordPress and the open source community and other companies monetizing open source in different ways. There's drama with the foundation. I'll stop at all side. People can go listen to Matt's episodes. We did it in detail and certainly we'll have him back. I like talking to Matt a lot, but that's all coming for you too, because at some point, all of this has to make money. And a real theme on Decoder is we've set up complicated structures so that capitalism can't ruin everything. We just had Proton on the show, complicated Swiss foundation structure so that capitalism can't ruin everything and

• 51:45Speaker 02

  all the promises they make to their customers. You don't have that problem yet. As far as I can tell, there's no revenue flowing into this and probably thus no push to make that revenue number go up in bad ways. At some point, there is going to have to be some revenue. You're an investor. I'm assuming you want to get paid out into your own fund. How is Blue Sky going to make money on the app level? And how is the protocol going to make any money?

• 52:11Speaker 03

  The way we're going to make money as a company, we're only interested if that model, if that economic model works for the entire atmosphere. So we make money when everybody else makes money. So that rules out a bunch of things that would be purely app-based. I'm not ready to announce the specifics, but we will start monetizing this year. And the way I look at it is, there's already money being made on this network. People are, again, we're sending lots of traffic to people who then convert that traffic into subscriptions. And I think our job is to just help more of that happen so that, you know, we're, right

• 52:54Speaker 03

  now, it's just organic and we can, we can build things into our app and into the protocol that just make it easier for people to start making a livelihood on this protocol and start doing commerce with each other. So that's, that's the direction we're headed in. We're going to do it in a way, again, where the whole idea is for the pie to get huge and for us to be a small slice of a big pie and for everybody to make money. And if we can, we can help you as a publisher make more money, then we can do business together.

• 53:30Speaker 02

  I know you said you weren't going to do specifics, but I have to poke at this a little bit. Your options, if you want a small piece of a big pie, are we're going to let you run ads for your subscription newsletter, and then that'll convert. And so that's Facebook's model, right? We're going to let you run ads at whatever CPM, and that'll, your return on ad spend will be high enough so that enough subscribers signed up based on how many ads you were on. And the other one is, we're just going to take a percentage of every signup fee. Which direction do you think you're headed in?

• 54:05Speaker 03

  Definitely be the latter. And, but only, we would only take a percentage of anything that we actually enable. So if we send extra traffic to you, then it would be a percentage of that.

• 54:19Speaker 02

  So basically affiliate style monetization. So if I'm selling a newsletter for $10 a month and you send me a new subscriber, you're going to get some of that back?

• 54:29Speaker 03

  Affiliate style and in a way that works for the entire network. So anybody on the network that sends you traffic can participate. We want, we want everybody to have a part in it.

• 54:39Speaker 02

  Can you decentralize the, like, the billing and financial layer of that?

• 54:44Speaker 03

  We can make it work in a decentralized network. Billing does require some centralized trust, and that's certainly something we're looking at.

• 54:53Speaker 02

  I asked you that question because I was terrified of a crypto scheme, basically, but it does not sound like you're going to do crypto schemes.

• 54:59Speaker 03

  No, no, it's, I mean, you know, that similar intentions, but definitely not a crypto approach.

• 55:08Speaker 02

  One of the things that you've been describing is we have to build all these structures to withstand the bad incentives, right? If somebody shows up and buys Blue Sky and they've got bad intentions, or they just want to use it to do crypto schemes, we have to build the structure that will withstand it. Adding monetization in whatever form, and I agree, the network should be monetized in some way, that creates a bunch of these incentives at first blush, right? It will be your first contact with those incentives. You have some experience with this. Certainly, you've been thinking about it. How do you expect that to go, both with your team and with the user base of Blue Sky itself?

• 55:46Speaker 03

  The team is eager to figure this out because we realize that, you know, there has to be an economic model for this network. Otherwise, you know, we're, we're in the early bootstrap phases still, and lots of people are getting excited to build on this. But it's the number one question, you know, for my team, from the rest of, you know, from all the people building, it's like, so how, what's that model going to be? So everybody's eager to figure this out and to do it in a way that, yeah, we don't, we don't fall into the traps of trying to create the incentives that, you know, we've seen in other networks, just cause all kinds of unintended consequences. Looping back on the WordPress example, it can work really nicely. I mean, WordPress, it's a slightly

• 56:30Speaker 03

  different model because it's a hosting model, but there are thousands and thousands of WordPress hosts out there that are doing just fine. And it just works. It all, you can host your site anywhere, you can move it anywhere. They compete to be the best host for your content. But it's a very, it's a very good model. It hasn't, you know, as far as I can tell, it hasn't created any, you know, anybody to take all the market share or create these weird incentives where the product gets worse. There's a very nice dividing line there between, well, I'm, I'm your host, and then you go and do whatever you want. You can, you can build a network, add network if you want. You can build a store, you can build something else. We're not, our business model doesn't dictate what

• 57:13Speaker 03

  your business model should be, which is kind of what happens in these other networks when it's only ads. Like, you know, you're like, oh, yeah, come here, build your following on here, and then we're going to put ads on it. And if you want to do anything else, like, no, no, no, it's going to be ads. So it's, you know, that, those are the kinds of things we, yeah, we think about. And, yeah, talking about irreversible decisions, I mean, that's going to be a huge one, right? When we, we start to zero in on the right model to make sure that, again, we can picture this scaling to billions of users and all kinds of businesses emerging on this network, not just one type that we happen to think about.

• 57:55Speaker 02

  You've mentioned Black Sky a handful of times in this conversation. I've been lucky enough to be at a dinner with Rudy who runs Black Sky. He's prolific in talking about what it's like to actually build on the atmosphere and what a lot of the challenges have been, right? Because it hasn't yet really, truly been decentralized. And I, now, now it's my turn to say, I won't go into the weeds of the protocol, but there are parts of the Blue Sky stack and parts of the atmosphere that have been pretty heavily centralized up until fairly recently. Is it easy to stand up a competitor in the way that you're describing? People can stand up competitors to WordPress and operate on their own, in their own universe, using the same tools and same access to, and customers? Or is there still work to

• 58:38Speaker 02

  be done there? Because it hasn't been easy up until now, at least using the example of Black Sky.

• 58:43Speaker 03

  Rudy deserves a lot of credit for taking those early, early risks and when it was much harder to build and being the first to prove that it can be done. But it's getting easier and easier. We're now, we are seeing more and more Blue Sky and Black Sky style networks pop up pretty often. And we're actually seeing a whole bunch of energy in Europe. We've got, we've got EuroSky, we've got W Social just launched, there's, there's another one, I think, that's about to launch. So it's getting easier. And we're, we're investing a lot to make it as easy as possible. In addition to being an open protocol, all of Blue Sky is open source. So you can take the Blue Sky app and just

• 59:29Speaker 03

  fork it and go do your own Blue Sky. And that's great, but we're really also interested in people building other things that aren't microblogging on the network. And that's, and making that super easy. So, you know, we're seeing, tangled is an example that a lot of people like to use recently because it's a great project. They raised VC funding. It's a social coding platform, like a social GitHub that's growing really nicely, using App Proto for the social layer of the social coding aspect. It has nothing to do with microblogging, but it's another thing that we can collaborate and integrate. And so people use both tangled and Blue Sky, it all just works together. But those are examples

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  where that's, it's, it's getting really easy to just build a new app on App Proto and make it, you know, have it have social functionality. It doesn't have to be an entire Blue Sky style network that you have to run. We put effort into making it easier. But, but yeah, it was, you know, when, when Black Sky started, two, three years ago, it was, it was a big lift. You had to be very technical to do it. Now, it's, it's gotten easier and easier. And finally, we haven't talked about AI yet. AI makes it even easier. I mean, a lot of the growth we're seeing now is, you know, you can point one of the AI coding tools

• 1:00:52Speaker 03

  at App Proto and say, hey, build me, build me a social app, build me a community. And that just makes it that much easier. And those are, you know, some of the tools and integrations that we're working on, on Jay's new team. But that really changes, changes the game pretty substantially for just how easy all this stuff is getting.

• 1:01:12Speaker 02

  I do have to ask you the AI question here. Software CEO again, how do software companies work in the age of AI? Have you rethought your teams? Do you have the traditional product manager, designer, engineer trio? Or is everybody doing everything? It's a small team, so you get to, and you're the new CEO. So you have lots of opportunity to rethink everything.

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  It is very empowering. Once you get it right. And when we have, to use our exploration team as an example, I mean, that's a three, four person team that's, that's launching at very high velocity, launching brand new products. It's really fun when you have an existing company with existing resources and, you know, very senior talented people could, can then go after a new greenfield opportunity with these new tools. That's when you see a ton of velocity. If you have an existing product with all the complexity of how it's been built, it's, you know, AI helps, but you're still dealing with that same complexity for a while. But I, I see it accelerate everything, just in terms of the development pace. But yeah,

• 1:02:15Speaker 03

  you still need great product managers, you need great designers, you need, like, the, like, how to build, the, the building part is faster, but what to build and the ideas are just as hard as ever, actually, in a way harder, because it's, there's so much noise out there and so many things popping every day. So, setting yourself apart, building something just really great that, that lasts is, is, you know, just because it's faster with AI doesn't make it any easier.

• 1:02:46Speaker 02

  We've talked a lot about standards and making App Protocol and the atmosphere a more standardized project at the IETF and whatever Swiss foundation is going to do name lookups. It, it feels like we're going to recapitulate ICANN, but again, that's a totally different episode of Decoder, and we'll come to that drama when everything is successful. There is another standard that has already gone through all this. There's Activity Pub. Mastodon runs Activity Pub. Famously Threads runs on Activity Pub, to whatever extent Threads runs on Activity Pub. There's an argument that Meta did all of that just to satisfy European regulators, and that's all it's there for. Have you talked to the Threads team about integrating with Activity Pub or moving them to the atmosphere? Once you

• 1:03:29Speaker 02

  become an official standard, I imagine that must be easier for them to continue throwing bones to European regulators. That would be the big unlock, right? That is the hundreds of millions of users on a nominally open network. Have they shown any interest?

• 1:03:44Speaker 03

  We have not talked to Threads. We're definitely talking to Mastodon and Activity Pub. They definitely feel we were very aligned. I mean, our missions are very aligned. We're all on Team Open together. And, you know, but these are two different standards that do slightly different things. And some use cases for Activity Pub are great, and some are great for App Protocol.

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  What are use cases that are good in Activity Pub and what are, what are use cases that are better in App Protocol?

• 1:04:09Speaker 03

  So Activity Pub is, is based around this notion of a server, right? At the heart of it is, you set up your own server, you control it, you run it, that's your community. And then all the servers can federate, if you want. You don't have to, you can just run, run it by yourself, or you can have, you know, you can plug into the federation, into the Fediverse, and then that's how their system works. So, it works really well if you, like, I think they have a lot of successful, like, governments who want to set up their own server infrastructure and run their own community infrastructure. App Proto has a, has a different goal. We don't have a server at the heart of it. We have the, the

• 1:04:48Speaker 03

  PDS, the personal data server that is your data. So, the, the heart of App Proto is personal identity and portability and ownership of that, so that you, whatever you create and the social graph that you create is owned by you and lists wherever you want to host it. So, it's, it's really a federation of millions and millions of these tiny little personal servers that, that can all talk to each other. And that works if your social product is focused on, on, on people, not on an entire server with, with a community on it. So, slightly different shape. And, and there's, they interoperate too. There's,

• 1:05:33Speaker 03

  there's something called Bridgefed that connects these two worlds together. So, if you want to, you've, you've built products on this yourself. So, if you want to post or publish across all of it, you can. And the end user doesn't even have to know. And that's, and that's the beauty of an open, of an open protocol is, you shouldn't have, like, consumers of this should never even hear about these two protocols, right? It's like, it's one of these things where you have to get the protocol right and it has to be open, but then it, people should just forget about it, it should just disappear. Like, the, the examples we use are a lot is, you know, email and websites, right? If

• 1:06:15Speaker 03

  I'm on Outlook and you're on Gmail, we can just email each other. You never think about the fact that those are two completely separate systems. It just works. But on social media, it just doesn't work that way, right? If you're on Instagram and I'm on TikTok, we can't talk to each other. You have to, like, do everything five different times and five different apps, and it's crazy making. So, if we get this right at the protocol level, that just goes away. Just all this stuff just works, just like email does, or just like websites do. Our job is to make all of that work under the hood, but nobody has to think about it. In the end, you just have, oh, one account, you log in anywhere, and it just works. And all your friends are there, and all your data's there. And you never

• 1:06:58Speaker 03

  have to be, you know, locked in again into somebody's system, and you can't leave.

• 1:07:03Speaker 02

  This is very nice, but it's rare that two standards that nominally seek to achieve the same thing coexist forever, right? There's not two Bluetooths, there's not two WiFi's, it's not even two webs. People can argue with me about how many webs there are, but there's not even two webs, right? Do you expect Activity Pub and App Protocol to coexist? Do you expect, I don't know, Blue Sky to be able to show content from Mastodon servers and then slowly eat Activity Pub as a protocol? That's, that's one very common pattern that kind of happens in these situations. Or do you expect long-term coexistence?

• 1:07:39Speaker 03

  I, I expect long-term coexistence because both of these protocols have enough users and use cases that want to continue on. And they can talk to each other when you want, but it's not, that's not the main use of it. And I don't, there's a lot of people who run Activity Pub instances who, they don't even want to talk to other Mastodon servers, they just want to run their own thing. And they don't want to talk to App Proto, but they, they can if you want. I don't know, it's a good example from other, you know, from other platforms. But, uh, yeah, they're both going to be around for a long time. And they don't, there's just slightly different tools. They're both in the social space, but they're, they're different tools that you reach through for different

• 1:08:19Speaker 03

  types of, of use cases. I'll put it this way, for, I, in my mind, both can be wildly successful, and they don't, it's not one or the other. Like, I don't need to, App Proto doesn't need to eat Activity Pub to be successful, or vice versa. We're already seeing that.

• 1:08:37Speaker 02

  I want to end by just talking about the, the consumer app a little bit more. We've talked a lot about the protocol, the atmosphere, the standards. We've gotten all the way to the Internet Engineering Task Force in this conversation. We've been in the weeds of how the technology works and how it's governed. And right next to that is, well, it's an election year here in the United States. And a lot of people truly believe that Blue Sky is the wild, progressive, social media network, and it is a bubble of one kind. And X is a very different kind of bubble. It's the hard right network that has vastly more AI-generated anime porn on it. And there's not something that is actually the global town square, right? That, that thing has maybe gone away, and all the social networks

• 1:09:20Speaker 02

  have fragmented. Do you want Blue Sky to have the reputation it has? Do you want it to get bigger? Do you think that the right answer is someone starts a, a mega Blue Sky and it interoperates the way that it needs to? This is the perception of the consumer product. Do you want that to change, and how would you change it?

• 1:09:37Speaker 03

  Yes, we definitely want that to change. It is already changing. I mean, there is, it certainly wasn't designed to, to attract, you know, one specific group of people. It works for anyone. What we see is, there is a lot of political discourse on Blue Sky and any of these open networks. People are very engaged. What we've seen in the lead up to the election so far, we have, we've hosted a lot of live election feeds. And we see a lot of really good feedback from our users, a lot of engagement, a lot of like, oh, this is actual, really interesting content about this topic. Whereas on other platforms,

• 1:10:19Speaker 03

  I think these, these election topics just get completely overwhelmed by, by slop and spam, and it's just noise and chaos. And so what we're focusing on is just deliver a, a live experience. We do it around elections, we do it around sports as well, very successfully, where it, the, the people on the network that participate get a really good experience and get really good content. And once we have that, then hopefully, you know, we can just keep expanding to more and more types of, of users and use cases. We're not, yeah, we're an open network for anyone. And we don't, we don't want to serve just one, one

• 1:11:01Speaker 03

  type of user base. I've seen it already in the last few months, really trend in the right direction, where we just have more and more people show up and build their own corners of the network. And it sort of balances out over time. We don't just have, you know, a few topic you're super deep on, topics you're super deep on, but it just gets more and more diverse. And we don't- My opinion, yes, it's a public square, but we don't need everybody talking at the same time. It's okay if you, you know, if your politics is very loaded, but you know, if you're super into sports, you're not going to be into all sports. You're going to be, you know, I'm super into the San Francisco Giants. So that's what I want to follow. I

• 1:11:44Speaker 03

  don't need to follow all of sports and that's fine. And I think with, it can be like that with all topics. It just needs to be civil and positive and we need to have the tools that if it goes off the rails, people can regulate it and can have a good experience instead of it just devolving into a shouting match.

• 1:12:03Speaker 02

  By people can regulate it, you mean people can moderate their own feeds, not regulators can moderate speech?

• 1:12:09Speaker 03

  A hundred percent. Yes.

• 1:12:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, just checking. That's important.

• 1:12:12Speaker 03

  Build their own feeds, pick their own feeds. We have very good tools for people to mute and block and, you know, and we, yeah, we, we spend a lot of energy on making sure it's, it stays positive because again, we're, we're interested in, you know, social media that actually serves the common or the public good. And that's, that's not going to work if it's just people yelling.

• 1:12:34Speaker 02

  You've talked a lot about the network. Even in this answer, I said, Blue Sky, the app has this reputation and you started talking about the network. And it's true, the network can serve everybody, right? Anybody can start whatever kind of app on the atmosphere they want and they can go target the users they want. But I want to push you again on Blue Sky, the app, the thing that has a brand that exists out in the world that is totally divorced from the technical specifications of the atmosphere. There is Blue Sky, the app, and it, it does have a reputation. Do you want more users from X to leave X and join Blue Sky and expand what that brand is for people?

• 1:13:12Speaker 03

  Yes. I mean, it can stay on X too. I mean, you don't have to pick one or the other.

• 1:13:18Speaker 02

  Have you talked to Elon about federating X? I suspect he's not interested.

• 1:13:23Speaker 03

  No, same answers with threads. I'd be, you know, the, it would be full circle, right? Blue Sky started inside Twitter and then Twitter went away and became X. And then if X adopted at proto, then the whole original idea of the project would actually come to fruition.

• 1:13:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. This is Jack Dorsey saying Twitter wants to be a protocol, not a product. And here we are. And that's Blue Sky in, in big ways, but it is a product. Like it is also a product. People know what that logo means. Political pundits say the blue sky crowd and that has it, that signifies whatever they want it to signify. And I'm just wondering if you want to break that branding in any, in any meaningful way.

• 1:14:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, we want to expand it. Upbreaking is, I think, maybe the wrong word, but yes, we want to expand more and more so that blue sky means not just one thing, not just liberal politics, for example. And, and again, I will point to sports as an example from the last year. We've made a very concerted effort to bring on sports leagues and sports writers and it's worked really well. There's a ton of sports conversation now on the app and those people come here for the sports, not for the, for the liberal politics. So it's, it's possible to, to expand. In politics, it's, it's, it's probably our hardest challenge because we are, you know, we have one type of user base there. That's, that's, that's

• 1:14:46Speaker 03

  very active. That's good too. I mean, it's, they are super active and, and they're very much at, you know, the forefront of politics and very engaged and very informed. But yeah, I think we can, we can just keep adding more, more communities so that it balances out.

• 1:15:04Speaker 02

  It feels like we're going to have to have you back, particularly as these private communities launch to talk about where things go from here. But this has been great. Thank you so much for being on Decoder.

• 1:15:13Speaker 03

  Thank you very much for having me.

• 1:15:16Speaker 02

  I'd like to thank Toni Schneider for taking the time to join me on Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode, or really anything else at all, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected]. We really do read every email. Or hit me up directly on threads or Blue Sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at DecoderPod. It's the same handle on TikTok and Instagram. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get podcasts. Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Show is produced by Kate Cox, Nick Stat. This episode was edited by Eileen Felix. Our editorial director is Kevin McShane. Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

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