Bluesky, the emerging alternative to Twitter, has been gaining remarkable traction since Donald Trump’s reelection as U.S. president earlier this month. Within a week, its user base surged from 15 million to over 19.5 million, pushing the small development team to its limits. CEO Jay Graber, however, embraces the challenge with optimism. “We as a team take pride in our ability to scale quickly,” she said in a recent New York Times interview, acknowledging inevitable “growing pains.”
Interestingly, Graber’s leadership seems destined. Her mother, who immigrated to the United States from China in the 1980s, named her “Lantian,” meaning “blue sky” in Mandarin. As Graber shared in a Forbes profile last year, her mother chose the name to symbolize “boundless freedom” — opportunities she herself never had during China’s Cultural Revolution.
Graber joined Bluesky as a developer before being offered the CEO position in 2021 by Parag Agrawal, then Twitter’s CEO. Despite her symbolic name, Bluesky’s moniker was coined earlier in 2019 by Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder. Since taking over, Graber has navigated significant upheavals in the social media landscape, particularly Elon Musk’s $44 billion Twitter acquisition, which transformed the platform into an echo chamber of misinformation.
In stark contrast, Bluesky has prioritized user-driven innovations under Graber’s leadership. Features like customizable content algorithms empower users rather than promoting the CEO’s personal views — a departure from Musk’s directive to prioritize his own tweets. Bluesky’s commitment extends to ethical technology practices; the company recently vowed not to exploit user content for AI training, unlike X’s controversial policies.
The platform’s growing user base and ethical stance signify a brighter horizon for social media. As Graber aptly states, “We want to build something that ensures users have the freedom to move and developers the freedom to build.”