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VANCOUVER—At the Web Summit conference here, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber brought a fault-tolerant pitch for the decentralized X alternative: If we mess up what she called a “conversation infrastructure for society,” our open architecture protects your ability to fix it.

“If we don’t get everything right, there’s alternatives for people to build other approaches,” Graber told Katie Drummond, global editorial director Wired.

In fewer words: a right to repair.

‘We Know Ads Work’

That includes how Bluesky will make money as a commercial service, a priority that management has sometimes pushed back to deal with periodic surges of signups and build new, distributed mechanisms to address such growing pains as verifying accounts.

Bluesky has already said it plans to charge for subscriptions that unlock additional features, possibly for $8 a month. On Tuesday evening, Graber assured Drummond that subscriptions “actually are on the way” but also opened the door a little farther to selling ads.

“We know ads work their way into every attention economy long term,” Graber said. “It’s just, you know, we don’t want to spam your feed with ads.”

She described that as a practical imperative, in the sense that Bluesky’s open-source AT Protocol foundation allows people to create their own algorithmic feed on the platform, allows users to choose their own hosts, and allows developers to write their own apps.

So Bluesky could not adopt X’s approach to selling ads, with “one feed where the most attention is directed and the most ad revenue can come from.” Overdoing ads in other ways would invite any user to switch to a different feed or an alternative app.

“Creating these constraints for ourselves at the beginning means we get more creative about how we’re approaching this problem,” Graber said. “We make sure that users always have the right to leave.”

Bluesky has also publicly renounced one popular monetization strategy among online platforms, letting generative-AI platforms train on users’ content. Graber repeated that pledge this week.

“We don’t train gen AI on users’ posts, because we’re not an AI company,” Graber said. But with only 25 full-time employees, she added, “we have to use AI ourselves” to keep up with the challenges of content moderation.

Choose Your Timeline

Earlier in the roughly 25-minute panel, Graber emphasized how Bluesky’s audience—now a bit over 36 million users—has already taken advantage of its support for user-created feeds. “You get to choose what kind of timeline you’re on,” she said. “This is an open market that allows innovation to happen around the most important part of social, which is what you see.”

Graber further pointed to apps built on AT Proto that let users leverage their existing audience. Skylight, for example, builds on Bluesky’s recent support for vertical video feeds to offer a spying-free TikTok alternative; billionaire investor Mark Cuban, one of Bluesky’s more prolific posters, has since funded a pre-seed round for the app.

Said Graber: “We see Bluesky as this lobby to the open social web.”

Barely 15 months ago, that lobby had a velvet rope out front, an invitation requirement that Bluesky dropped last February. Graber touted how Bluesky has since drawn a diverse set of communities, citing such examples as a feed she found for fountain-pen fans and starter packs she discovered for commodities trading and medieval studies. (Be sure to follow PCMag’s starter pack of experts.)

The audience here seemed to be among those enthusiastic adopters, to judge from the reaction to Web Summit emcee Casey Lau asking for a show of hands about who was on which social platform. Only a minority of the crowd indicated they were still on X, with even fewer apparently on Meta’s Threads, but his mention of Bluesky drew cheers.

Companies, however, have been slower to adopt Bluesky or have yet to go beyond putting a toe in the decentralized social-media water. Adobe, for example, joined the platform in April, promptly got roasted by users angry about its pivots towards selling subscriptions and leveraging AI, and has not posted since.

Web Summit itself has appeared unconvinced by Bluesky’s pitch: Through Tuesday, the conference event firm’s Bluesky account had not posted anything in eight months. But then on Wednesday morning, it began posting about this event, starting with a clip from Graber’s talk.

(Disclosure: I’m moderating three panels at this conference, with the organizers picking up my airfare and lodging.)

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