Bluesky's Radical Idea: Let Users Set the Rules of Social Media

The platform could spark an internet renaissance if it does not get caught up in dry technicalities.

- Parmy Olson

If you are a child of the 1970s or 1980s in the United States, your first experience of the internet was probably AOL. The hum, crackle and static screech of the connecting modem ushered you into busy chatrooms and vibrant forums.

That era did not last long. Through the 1990s and early 2000s, AOL's walled garden crumbled as millions of websites populated what we now call the open web. Protocols like "HTTP" and "SMTP" allowed people to jump between pages or send e-mails between international servers.

Yet today's web experience is less open and more like AOL again. Those who "surf the web" now spend at least half their time on a few sites owned by companies like Meta Platforms, Alphabet's Google and Amazon.com. The sprawling, creative wilderness of the early internet is a distant memory—one that Ms. Jay Graber is trying to bring back.

The chief executive officer of Bluesky Social wants to "change the model of social media", so that after a decade of industry consolidation, consumers can have more control over feeds, algorithms and profiles, she tells me. Bluesky was created inside Twitter, but then spun off after Mr. Elon Musk took over. Ms. Graber, a former software engineer, became CEO in 2021, and so far its rapid expansion has been keeping her busy.

A year after its public launch, Bluesky has amassed 32.5 million registered users, many of them refugees from the now-named X who dislike the site's more chaotic direction under Mr. Musk.

What makes Bluesky unique is the control users have over what they can do on the platform. Instead of scrolling posts and images picked by an algorithm, they can choose from more than 50,000 feeds made by other users. The "science feed", for example, is curated by a handful of experts, including a zoologist and marine biologist.