The New Yorker:

X and Facebook are governed by the policies of mercurial billionaires. Bluesky’s C.E.O., Jay Graber, says that she wants to give power back to the user.

By Kyle Chayka

Jay Graber, the C.E.O. of the upstart social-media platform Bluesky, arrived in San Francisco the Sunday after Donald Trump’s reëlection and holed up in a hotel room. She’d spent the previous days road-tripping down the West Coast from her home, in Seattle, stopping at beaches and redwood groves along the way, and in San Francisco she’d hoped to remain half in vacation mode. But now Bluesky was seeing a surge in new users, and it was looking as if she’d need all hands on deck. “There was momentum,” Graber recalled recently, adding, “It was just picking up day by day.”

Since launching, in early 2023, Bluesky had positioned itself as a refuge from X, the site formerly known as Twitter. For nearly two decades, Twitter had been considered the internet’s town square, chaotic and often rancorous but informative and diversely discursive. Then, after the tech billionaire turned Trump backer Elon Musk acquired the platform, in October of 2022, it devolved into a circus of right-wing conspiracy theories. Liberals began fleeing, and Bluesky in turn accumulated more than ten million users by the fall of 2024, making it one of the fastest-growing social networks. But the post-election influx proved to be of a different order, turning Bluesky into what one tech blogger compared to a Macy’s at the start of Black Friday sales.

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