Bluesky didn’t set out to be the go-to destination for internecine progressive political discourse, as COO Rose Wang is quick to note. “That was not by design, but by circumstance.”
But thanks to an accident of timing and the uniquely open digital framework, or protocol, on which it operates, Bluesky has become one of the rare social media startups to grow large enough to compete with the likes of Meta and X, garnering some 40 million users in just two years. Many of them are Twitter refugees who skew left, but that’s not all the app has to offer.
“We’re seeing that academics are coming here, because they lost access to reliable data and research communities. Journalists came because their reach and distribution were being throttled,” Wang told Semafor’s Max Tani and Ben Smith on the Mixed Signals podcast. “Links are downranked on a lot of platforms. And what we’re seeing is there’s a majority of new users that are coming on, who are just people who want a simple chronological feed, or genuine connections, or freedom from engagement bait.”
The question of how to make a business out of those connections has proven as vexing for Wang and Bluesky as for any number of earlier startups, and the community’s top users have been experimenting with a variety of ways to make money.
The company’s other big task, Wang acknowledged: how to give millions of people a place to talk politics without letting things get too toxic — and without having to “lock eyeballs into one feed.”
“It’s a difficult challenge of: How do we build tooling so that people can create safer spaces for themselves, or turn off or tune off content when they want?” Wang said. “Because I do think it can be overwhelming, but I don’t think the answer is to not have that content.”
Wang also broke down how her company is playing with AI, and why protocols could be a solution to our algorithmic woes.