When Bluesky CEO Jay Graber walked on stage at SXSW 2025 for her keynote dialogue, she wore a big black T-shirt along with her hair pulled again right into a bun. At first look, it’d seem as if she’s following the identical playbook that so many ladies in tech management have performed earlier than: downplaying her femininity to be taken significantly.
The reality is far more attention-grabbing than that. What may appear like your common black T-shirt is a delicate, but clear swipe at Mark Zuckerberg, a CEO who represents the whole lot that Bluesky is attempting to work towards as an open supply social community.
The Meta founder and CEO has straight in contrast himself to the Roman emperor Julius Caesar. His personal shirt declared Aut Zuck aut nihil, which is a play on the Latin phrase aut Caesar aut nihil: “Either Caesar or nothing.”
Graber’s shirt — which straight copies the fashion of a shirt that Zuckerberg wore onstage lately — says Mundus sine caesaribus. Or, “a world without Caesars.”
With the best way Bluesky is designed, Graber is actually placing her cash the place her mouth (or shirt) is. As a decentralized social community constructed upon an open supply framework, Bluesky differs from legacy platforms like Fb in that customers have a direct, clear window into how the platform is being constructed.
“If a billionaire came in and bought Bluesky, or took it over, or if I decided tomorrow to change things in a way that people really didn’t like, then they could fork off and go on to another application,” Graber defined at SXSW. “There’s already applications in the network that give you another way to view the network, or you could build a new one as well. And so that openness guarantees that there’s always the ability to move to a new alternative.”
In the meantime, Meta has alienated customers by interfering in how individuals expertise its platforms, and Bluesky has straight benefitted from that. After Meta pushed controversial updates like coaching its AI on public consumer posts, or culling its third-party fact-checking packages, Bluesky skilled bursts of consumer development.
Nonetheless, Bluesky has a protracted method to go if it needs to topple the Roman Empire of Meta. Whereas Graber’s platform is closing in on 33 million whole customers, Meta has 3.35 billion every day energetic customers throughout all of its merchandise: Instagram, WhatsApp, and Fb. For Meta, that’s round 40% of the world’s inhabitants.
However for a fledgling social community, Bluesky has created sufficient of a cultural footprint that it’s certain to stay round. Rome was not constructed — nor was it toppled — in a day.
