I did an interview with Jay Graber back in 2019 at the Decentralized Web (DWeb) Camp a few years before she officially became the Bluesky CEO, which is currently the new hot social media platform that’s a Twitter clone built on top a decentralized architecture using the Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol. At the time, Graber was working on a decentralized events application called Happening, but she had a lot aspirations to build out a fully-fledged decentralized social media platform. The challenge was the bootstrapping problem of getting a critical mass of users, which was a bit too much to overcome with all of the friction involved in making the onboarding and overall user experience of DWeb systems easy and intuitive. At the time, her solution was to start with a centralized onboarding process, and eventually integrate more decentralized aspects over time, which happens to be a very similar strategy to what Bluesky is currently doing.

I wanted to dig up this July 19, 2019 interview with Graber from my archives of unpublished interviews because she articulates a lot of the deeper philosophical inspirations and motivations she had back in 2019 that are being carried to their logical conclusions at her current position as CEO of Bluesky. The Facebook Cambridge Analytica scandal from March 2018 was a turning point for Graber that motivated her to start to working towards decentralized social networks that have better privacy protections and stronger agency over data, but also to work on peer-to-peer models that can be more resilient to censorship and natural disasters where our supercomputer phones are often bricked without working cell service or Internet connectivity.