Bluesky Wasn’t Supposed to be a Twitter Rival. Now It Is.
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From the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Channels. With Peter Kafka, that is me. I'm also the chief correspondent at Business Insider. And today we're talking about how to build a new social network. That might sound familiar to you, and there's a good reason for that, because a couple weeks ago I was talking to Adam Mosseri about building threads, which is Meta's attempt to make a Twitter competitor.

This week, I'm talking to Jay Graber, the CEO of Blue Sky, who is also building a Twitter competitor.

Most of you have probably heard about Blue Sky. Some of you may be regular users, particularly if you dislike Donald Trump and or Elon Musk. What many people don't know is that Blue Sky wasn't really supposed to be a Twitter competitor. It was actually started within Twitter, and it's really supposed to be a platform that let people build their own versions of Twitter or any other social network they could dream up. Whether people, normal people, actually want to do that is an open question.

But in the meantime, the version of Blue Sky that Jay Graber and company built as sort of a demo has taken off. And my hunch is that is going to be the version of Blue Sky that most people end up using. This is confusing, right? I know. But maybe it will make more sense by the end of this conversation, which we taped live at Web Summit Vancouver. So here's me and Jay Graber. Hi, Jay. Hi.

Hi, how's it going? We're going to test our mics right now. If they can't hear us, someone's going to come from backstage and yell at us. Yeah, I think that's good. Welcome, Jake Rayburn. She runs Blue Sky. I'm assuming everyone here uses Blue Sky. Can we do a show of hands? It's not a good idea for an audio podcast. Less than I thought. A lot of new potential Blue Sky users. How many users are you at right now? 36 million. 36 million, give or take. And you were like 25 million in December, right? Uh...

We're about 13 million sometime like October last year. What is propelling that growth? We'll talk about how Blue Sky works and all that, but I just want to catch us up to where we're at right now. Why are people flocking to this site and this service?

Well, there's been multiple growth waves. It tends to come in stages, and in each one, people have come over and found it to be an interesting new alternative for the way social media could work. But why are people coming over? Where are they leaving? Is there something they're trying to pull off? Because I have a thought, but I want to hear your answer. I mean, they want alternatives. They want alternatives to the way social currently works. So my assumption is there's a lot of people on Blue Sky who came over sort of during the first wave of Elon Musk's Twitter takeover.

and then a lot more showed up this year once Mark Zuckerberg came

made a really sort of ostentatious pivot to Donald Trump. Is that a good working theory? That's one of our biggest recent growth waves. We also, when we opened up last February, we got a huge growth wave of like one to three million users, which is a lot at the time. And a lot of those folks were coming from Japan and looking for, you know, just an alternative to the way Twitter was being run. So I think it happens for various reasons in different places. But in general, people want to branch out, try new things. And in the U.S. recently, we've seen a lot of uptake since November. Yeah.

And so when you say people want an alternative, is it they want a service that gives them something they don't have somewhere else, or is it that they don't like the service they're using either because of the people that are on there or the people who are running it/owning it?

Yeah, it's all sorts of reasons. It's moderation policies, it's sense of toxicity and fatigue, it's people wanting to just try something new, it's people finding their community here, and I think in general it's both people looking for something and people looking to get away from something. There's both. So let's back up. Let's explain what Blue Sky is because it's not a really simple answer. It's a slightly complicated answer. There's Blue Sky, the service that looks and acts a lot like Twitter. That's the one I use.

But that's not the idea behind Blue Sky. So why don't you explain what Blue Sky is supposed to be?

Yeah, well, Blue Sky started as a protocol that Twitter would run on. And so it was an alternative foundation for Twitter. It has turned into an alternative app that people treat as a microblogging alternative. But it was originally actually started by Twitter, which is interesting. And then once Twitter became X, a lot of people thought, well, I want to try what Twitter used to be. But it's both that and not. Because we built an app that is very familiar, and that's both...

Good and bad because people think, hey, this is exactly like Twitter. I can post. I don't have to worry about figuring out anything new. That's good. It's good because it's familiar so people don't have to feel like it's this big learning curve to use it. On the other hand, it's also bad because people think that's all it is.

And what it actually is, is a lobby to the open social web, which is what we set out to build this open protocol ecosystem that you could build apps like Twitter on. And you could build apps like every other social site out there, including new kinds of apps. So you were asking backstage if this is a technical conference. And I think it's for people who like technology but aren't necessarily coding. So I'm sure there's coders here. So let's just start really basic. When you talk about a protocol.

I know this is an idea that Twitter was talking about, really from the very first days the site was, the app was created, that maybe there should be a protocol instead of a company or a service. What does protocol mean? What's a good analogy for that?

Yeah, the protocol is like a toolbox for building social apps. And a way to think about it is it's a bit like email or blogs. And email is just a way to build email services that talk to each other. And so the protocol is, you know, a way to build a microblogging service that talks to other services. And so you can build versions of apps that all interact with Blue Sky. People are building a lot of these.

So no one owns email. There are big email clients, right? But the reason someone who's using Gmail can speak to someone who's using Outlook is there's an agreed-upon language. The protocol is a language that computers talk in order to transfer data.

information. And so essentially there can be companies that build on the protocol. So Gmail is built by Google. And then I can email you over at your Yahoo address. That's owned by another company. And then I can email you at your university address. That's run by your university. And then maybe I can email you on your own email server if you're technical enough to set that up. You can do that too. And so it's very similar. There's users on Blue Sky that host their own Blue Sky service at home in their closet. And they talk to everyone else just like

they're on the service like anyone else. So I don't know how deeply you know the history of Twitter, I bet reasonably deeply, but mid-2000s these guys are working on a podcast service that's not going anywhere. They come up with an idea for a microblogging sort of text app. I'm doing this, it takes off, and there immediately is a discussion about should this be a protocol versus a company. Do you know why they made it a company instead of a protocol? I think ultimately the pressures around advertising drove it there.

Advertising slash business, right? They want to build a business. Can you build a business on a protocol? No one owns email, right? Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of companies built on the open web. The web is all protocols. You've got lots of websites built on it. You've got search engines. You've got backend infrastructure. And you've got services like email and even social sites. They're built on protocols. They just kind of close in your identity and your relationships as a user. So, yeah.

The purpose of the app protocol was to build another web protocol that can work like email and these other things, but lets you take your identity and your relationships, which got siloed into these social sites, and move that around with you. So it places the user back at the center of the web. So Jack Dorsey, who was the guy pushing for the protocol idea and lost, and then became CEO of Twitter, and then was fired, and then came back as CEO. There's multiple books about this.

I think there's going to be movies at some point. And then at some point in 2019, he says, that protocol idea was a good one.

And I want to build it even though I'm running this publicly traded for profit company. And so he says, I'm going to make this thing called Blue Sky. And it's kind of a sandbox within Twitter. And that's what you went to work on. Exactly. Yeah. So Blue Sky is really part of this moment where me and other people were all saying, let's make protocols work for social and let's preserve privacy.

these early principles of the open web, which a lot of people were motivated by, and even a lot of the early companies were motivated by. And now it's seeming like a lot of that is getting lost. And let's bring that back for the next generation of applications. So it's confusing. So why did Jack Dorsey, who again is running a company called Twitter, say, I also want to make

basically a Twitter competitor or something that would allow people to build their own Twitters? What was his thinking as far as you understand? Well, Jack's motivation at the time was build a protocol and then Twitter runs on it. And so it's not an alternative to Twitter. It's like Twitter actually just replaces the foundation. Maybe stays the same as the application. You can keep using it the same. You wouldn't even know that the foundation changed. But then you'd start seeing all these other apps pop up. It would open the APIs back up again. He was also opening up the APIs at the time. So he

meaning letting developers come in and build on the open interfaces that they let you start accessing the social data on. That was a big part of early Twitter. That was a big part of early Twitter. Then they sort of shut that off again because they said, we think this is bad for our business. We originally said what's good for our business is for people to build on Twitter. Then they said, actually, it's bad for people basically to run essentially competing ad networks. That was the main concern. And then Jack said, actually, let's open it up again.

Yeah. And so Blue Sky was a sort of foundational, let's open it up structurally and make sure we rebuild everything from the ground up again. Very ambitious project. That's why it's called Blue Sky. I didn't name it. Twitter did, which was, you know, how do we reimagine a Blue Sky way of doing a social protocol? And then there were other steps in that same vision, which was opening up the Twitter dev API again. So it's 2019. There's Twitter, there's Facebook, there's

smaller networks. I think we're sort of pre TikTok, but there's lots and lots of social networks out there. What was the thing that you, that pulled you towards blue sky? What was the problem you thought existed with social networks that you wanted to solve?

Well, I've been working on something similar to this my whole career. I started off my career, I studied science, technology, and society, so I've always been interested in the way the internet's changing society. I feel like we live in this very pivotal moment that's playing out over decades, but it's information, communications, technologies reshaping things.

I went to work as a digital rights organizer around privacy, net neutrality, various open access issues, open web principles. And then I became a programmer. I was working as a cryptocurrency developer for a bit. That's also another approach to decentralization. And then I started building my own social network around 2018. What was that called? Hackathon.

It was an event site. And I ended up there because I wanted to build an open social protocol. So I actually prototyped something similar to the app protocol around 2018. But the problem is getting users. And you have to start from scratch when you build new social networks. So I had to identify a place where you can get users on starting with zero and grow the network effect. So I went into building an event site because then you can get just a cluster of people who all know each other to use the site.

So that was the approach I was taking when Twitter announced Blue Sky. And then I'd been publishing a lot of my research on decentralized social, and they pulled me in as this external expert on decentralized social networks, which is how I got involved. So you're someone who was enamored with the idea of decentralization in different forms, including crypto.

Jack Dorsey says we want to do decentralized social networking. So that appeals to you. But what is it about decentralization that excites you? Why do you think that's inherently a good thing? Is it inherently a good thing? I think that there's...

benefits to both centralization and decentralization. There are ways to build things. There are system properties. You see it across animals and the organic world, and you see it in organizations, and you see it pretty much everywhere once you start looking for it. And what decentralization is good for is parallel experimentation and resilience. So you can do a lot of things at one time because it's

It's like all the arms of an octopus. There's just like many things going on at one time as opposed to one thing going on. Because when you're centralized, you can concentrate resources, move one direction very fast. But if you get that wrong, then you have no fallbacks. And so the benefits of decentralization, you can try all these things and then you pick the experiments that win. And so it lets you evolve in a more open manner. And I think that produces better outcomes in a time when you have a lot of rapid change. Because if you bet...

on a centralized direction, you're putting all your eggs in one basket. And if you open up a decentralized approach, then you have all these different experiments. And then if the centralized one fails, you can fall back on one of the alternatives. So I get why that appeals to a programmer, a developer, someone with that sort of mindset saying, oh, I can't do what I want because Jack Dorsey or Mark Zuckerberg controls the way this thing runs and it's not the way I want to do it and I want to monkey around with my own project.

Um, why is that good for a normal person who probably doesn't know that this thing is decentralized, probably has not heard the word protocol? Like why would they care about whether something is centralized or not?

Yeah, it really takes developers to show you what you can build, but we've tried really hard to make it possible for people who don't know how to code to be able to experience some of the benefits of decentralization. And that means having control over your timeline and the way that you moderate the app. You can build your own moderation service and you don't even have to know how to code. You can use one of the open source tools we've put out there and just go in there and

run your own little moderation service for you and your friends. You can do the same for your own feed. Build your own timeline. So a lot of people have built feeds that are basically home timelines, and they can replace the timelines that we give them and say, I want to spend my time on the quiet posters feed, for example, which is just my friends who don't post that often. So you're on Blue Sky app, but you have created a customized feed using the tools that are there. Yeah. So sometimes we say it's a choose-your-own-adventure app because...

you can come into the default experience and it's like the main storyline is familiar, looks like Twitter, works like that. But then if you go deeper under the hood, you can find all these different little universes. And if you don't find the one you want, you can build it. You can control your scroll. So of those 36 million people who are using Blue Sky today, how many are using those straight, like what I am, straight out of the box, just the Twitter replacement version and how many of them are modifying the experience or building on top of that?

A good number of them play around with it. I think it's something that is getting increasingly integrated into people's everyday experience through various feeds. Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? Yeah, there's about 50,000 feeds. And I would say a few thousand are relatively popular. And a few dozen or a few hundred are quite popular in thriving communities. So there's ones like the Science Feed or Black Sky. And there's various feeds for...

people who have a different way of using social, one called like the gram, which is just pictures, one called quiet posters, which is just your friends who don't post that often. Those are essentially different algorithms that give you a different experience of the network. We'll be right back with Jay Graber, but first a word from a sponsor.

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So you're making your own, basically sort of roll your own app, right, with your own kind of feed. On the one hand, that sounds great. On the other hand, you're putting together this sort of party for you and all your friends, but it's probably you and a few people because no one else knows about it. How do you solve that cold start problem that you were talking about with your first company? Well, we've really seen them succeed when someone gets really involved in

doing community building essentially it's like a subreddit or a facebook group it takes people who want to make it a thing and then they actively maintain it they pull people in the science feed is interesting because it has a list of scientists from all these different fields who

curate it and moderate it. So it's kind of collectively run and there was a few folks who pulled it together and then it became this community that is driven by scientists and science communicators. So you describe it as sort of a decentralized Reddit, right? Reddit is its own company, kind of half owned by Conde Nast. You're saying basically we're building a version of that mashed up with Twitter, except it's

kind of owned by everyone? That's the best analogy. Like, it still works like Twitter. There's, like, microblogging. You know, it's like public, sort of short-form posts that can live anywhere. But the subreddit analogy is the closest to user-controlled spaces in a public social network that we have out there because you can run your own moderation as a subreddit admin. You can set your own rules, set your own customizations. And so it's similar in that regard. But it's bigger than that because you can also go off and build...

a completely different app. So, you know, there's an app called Pink Sky and like the interface is pink and like it works differently, you know, but it's part of the same network. What's your favorite version?

Where do you spend most of your time? Well, Skylight is fun recently because it's short form video. And that was a company that got started. They're based in Seattle, too. That's fun. They're backed by Mark Cuban. So it's building sort of a TikTok on top of Blue Sky?

all your followers will come over with you. You'll be able to still see the same stuff and cross post basically seamlessly. And so once you start to see these experiences emerge, you understand what the protocol enables, which is this seamless interoperability. So I'm over here, I can post, you'll see it over on Skylight. On Skylight, if I get a new follower, I also can have that follower interact with me over on Blue Sky. So we've been talking for 17 minutes. You've been patiently explaining the whole premise behind Blue Sky to me. I think

think I get it now, but it took me some work, right? And you and I have talked previously and I've done my own research. Do you guys need to explain this to all 36 million and then presumably more Blue Sky users? Are you happy if the majority of them just use Blue Sky out of the box and never touch anything else and they're happy with that experience? Well, we try to explain it, which is why I do stuff like this. Thank you.

Part of my philosophy is it's best to show, not tell, because I could sit here and tell you all day about what you can do with decentralization. What we did with custom feeds, which I was just telling you about, is this idea called algorithmic choice. There were academic research papers on this in 2019, and

part of the Blue Sky Project had some of these in the literature review and we read them and thought we could build this and we actually built it out and now that it's something real people can experience it in a very tangible way like it's not just what is an algorithm what do you mean algorithmic choice it's like no you can choose to install the science feed as your home timeline and then your app

That's Blue Sky. It can be a science app. That's a choice. The analogy I think a lot about is, because I'm old, is what computers used to look like before sort of the Macintosh when it was all sealed and you couldn't get into it. And the expectation was if you used a personal computer, you were a nerd slash hobbyist, and you probably were fairly comfortable taking the case off the thing and putting in your own chips and monkeying around with it. And lots of people did that.

But that also meant PCs were not sort of a big mainstream experience until we moved away from that model. Can Blue Sky be a giant mainstream experience and still be decentralized and still...

encourage, not just a lab, but encourage tinkering and playing around with different ideas? That's our bet. I mean, we're now the biggest open source social app, and we've gotten 36 million users on this open source app that opens up into all these different experiences. People are still building on it, growing the ecosystem, and there are

Social apps that have gotten a lot of users and there are decentralized social apps and other protocols, but to do both is that tricky balancing act that we've been doing.

So a lot of people who create content that goes on social sites, there's a whole argument. I just interviewed Adam Mosseri from Instagram and throughout. He's saying people are not posting private. They're not posting personal content anymore. They'll share that. And the people who are posting are sort of professional posters at this point. So what they want out of apps usually are a lot of reach and or the way...

to make money. So do you want those people on Blue Sky? Do you want someone who's professionally making TikTok content, professionally tweeting or whatever else to come to Blue Sky and make a living there? Eventually we do. And I think we have some of those now. It's not as

flourishing of an ecosystem as you have on other apps. And I think it's getting there step by step because I think over the long run, this model of doing things, open source versions of doing things can grow and overtake the centralized incumbents, but it happens more

sort of diffusing through many different apps, through many different aspects. And then you start to get this full vision come to life, which is the social web, having users be at the center of the web again and having a social data layer that spans all sorts of different social apps as well as non-social apps. So you could have

Blue Sky comments show up in the comments section of a news site, and it would respect your moderation settings and import some of your preferences. And some news sites have done that and integrated that already. All of this sounds like stuff that if I'm a certain kind of person, maybe the person who comes to Web Summit or listens to this podcast, are interesting ideas that you may want to play with. But I cannot imagine a large audience.

large number of people wanting to monkey with any of this, right? You know, whenever there's a data leak, right? We see what people's passwords are. It's usually one, two, three, four, right? So the people who are putting one, two, three, four in their password is blue sky going to be something that they can take advantage of or do, or is the expectation they're just going to show up and use it? Other people who have done the work for them.

Yeah, I think a lot of it is letting the people who want to build, build and letting the people who want to just show up and use it, use it like that. So our philosophy is sensible defaults with user choice. And so create the sensible defaults. If someone wants to just come on and, you know, have the full package, not touch anything and have it work.

You want it to work like that for them. But then if somebody wants to come in and tweak it and customize it, let them do that. If they want to do it all for themselves, they can do it for themselves. But also a lot of these people are community builders and developers. They want to build things for other people. And Blue Sky and the app protocol, the broader ecosystem, is a place where they can do that. They can build the experience for their friends, their communities, people who want to use social the way that they do. We'll be right back. But first, a word from a sponsor. Support for this show comes from Pure Leaf Iced Tea.

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And we're back. Jack Dorsey, who sort of went through a transformation the last few years at Twitter and now is out, I think kind of angry about his time there.

Did an interview last about a year ago and said I had to leave blue sky as well because they were making all the same mistakes as Twitter and those mistakes were raising money, having a board, I think thinking about making money. Um, what do you make of that critique?

I mean, I think I resonate with Jack's perspective. It's a very decentralization maximalist perspective. I shared some of this in my cryptocurrency days where I was like, let's just make everything purely flat protocol. It's like a theological idea almost.

It can be. I mean, it's sort of, you know, like I said, I think centralization and decentralization both have pros and cons in terms of what they get you in the system you're building. And when you're trying to fully maximize decentralization, well, it's very hard. And actually, every system that's tried to do it ends up with concentrations.

with people all accumulating around one relay or one thing because it's easy and convenience ultimately wins at the end of the day. And so how do you provide something that gives people that convenience, assumes that a lot of people are just going to use those defaults, but also creates the off-roads so that if they want to go build or if they get dissatisfied with your service, they have an off-ramp. And so we tried to focus in on what are the most important aspects of decentralization, which is

User exit, so if I don't like this thing, I can leave. Developer freedom, because who's building the places for me to leave to? It's developers, usually. And creator control. So if I want to keep my audience wherever I go, that's a very powerful idea. I really want that as a creator. A lot of creators fall back to email lists.

Because they build their following on YouTube or any other site. And then ultimately they want an email list because they can own that relationship. You can't rely on YouTube to distribute what you want. Exactly. And email is what they fall back to because it's a protocol. And at the end of the day, that's what preserves this relationship. And so we wanted to build something that's like an updated email protocol for the future so creators can have an identity that stays with them.

But the people who are most fervently, you know, the jacks of the world who are most fervently attached to the idea of decentralization say, that's all great, but you have built a company. And no matter what happens, you're a company. And just because Jay Graber says she's not going to and shitify the service today, you might change your mind in a year. You might get hit by a bus. Things can change. This can't really be what it's supposed to be unless there's really literally no one running it. It's just one giant collective.

Well, we made choices early on to lock things open. So open sourcing the app is one, right? Like there can, if Blue Sky like died tomorrow, everything is open source, everything it takes to run Blue Sky, you could pick up and run somewhere else. So that's a big one. Like we're, anyone who comes after us or alongside us can build off the work we've done. Another is giving people a choice over their feed. So I use example of, you know, advertising and feeds a lot. Like if we stuffed, you know, the home feed, we give you full of ads, you know,

you don't even have to go use another app. You could just use a different feed. And so our own incentives are constrained up front in terms of what we're going to do. Because if we did these things that and shitified or drove it into the ground, users have that

ability to leave. And so if you give users the right to leave, then... Lock it open. That's a great term. Yeah, like you lock it open. And also as a company, you remain committed to caring about users. And not just because, you know, me as a person personally cares, but because the company is set up in such a way that if you don't care about users, you lose your users. There are no ads on Blue Sky right now. A lot of people say, oh, ads are the reason the internet sucks.

You haven't ruled out ads, though, right? I think ads work their way into every attention economy, but we are very wary of going down the ad-driven path because we know that's the history of Twitter and a lot of other sites, particularly when you lock users in around your timeline. You do a lot of things to start actually making the timeline more engaging, but in some ways worse, in order to keep users on there. And so I think there's probably a new relationship that needs to be found with advertising. You see ads on the web, but

But you also have ways to get out of it. So you have ad blockers. If you stuff the search engine completely full of ads, like let's say every other search result on Google was an ad, then you would just use a different search engine because anyone can build one. It's hard, but you can build one, right? So you have DuckDuckGo. You have other search engines. So keeping things open means that you just can't do that. So you're not excited about ads. You're not ruling them out. How do you think you guys will generate revenue from that?

For years. Well, the first step is subscriptions, which we've been working on for a while and will be coming soon. And the other step long term is... A subscription will give me what? Features in the app, you know, a better tier of service.

And long term, we want to work on having an open marketplace. So there's a lot of stuff that people are building right now they're tinkering around with. It's not really a full service marketplace of feeds yet. It's sort of a marketplace in terms of all these options existing, but you can't really subscribe to one or anything. We would like to create those options in the future. And as to how that all plugs together, it's sort of a...

piecemeal thing that we're putting on. And that's why you raise money, so you have time to figure this out, presumably. Yeah. And we want to keep our incentives aligned long-term with

our users and the developer ecosystem. And so looking at, you know, ad-driven paths, we want to choose paths that make sure that our monetization options align with what's going to keep us locked open long-term. You were in crypto. One of your investors is related to crypto. This sounds a lot like what I was hearing during Web3 when people were extolling the virtues of crypto, but really the blockchain and the idea that you could build these services that no one could shut down.

This is not a blockchain play, though. You guys are building things on computers with software, right? That's sort of centralized. Why does this not make sense as a blockchain play?

Well, I was actually a blockchain engineer. So it's a very interesting question because I was working on low-level cryptocurrency systems and really understanding their limitations. There's limitations around scalability. It's quite expensive. And it gets you certain things. You get this permanent, immutable ledger. But why do you need your picture of what you posted for lunch being immutable?

maintained forever in this digital archive that everyone's keeping online. You don't. I actually want to delete my picture of lunch tomorrow. It comes and goes. And I don't need the world to see it. I need five people to see it. And so when you do something like that, you don't want to put it on a blockchain. And so we actually wanted to make choices that were just user-friendly, focused on convenience and scalability. We wanted to build something that could scale

fairly traditionally to hundreds of millions of users. Do you believe in blockchain for consumer apps? Does it make sense? I mean, I spent a bunch of time trying to... There were so many smart people interested in Web3. I thought there had to be something there, and I kept asking them questions

Basically, I got down to why does this need to get built on a blockchain instead of a computer? And it seems like you're a great counterpoint to what we've been hearing. We heard about a couple of years ago from people who really believe this stuff. Is there something they're not getting right or is there a particular use for the blockchain you think makes sense?

I mean, I always said I think blockchains have the most utility around payments and identity. We haven't integrated those things because also there's still better alternatives that are more user-friendly for those things. And even in those cases, it only makes sense in some cases. So I think it's still being figured out. There was a period where everyone was treating blockchain like, you know, it was this hammer and we were just going to try everything for blockchain on everything. This is the hype cycle of technology. And I think long run, you know, it'll probably find its place

somewhere in the world of technology, but Blue Sky is not on a blockchain because we're just making the best choices for our users. Two quick questions. Someone from the FBI or local police or whoever has a question and wants to know about what's happening on Blue Sky requests records. Who do they send that to? Are you the person fielding those requests? There's a legal request portal, much like every other social site.

And how will that work as you guys get bigger and grow around the world and inevitably find yourself in some country where they say you cannot post this or you must take this down, right? Every internet service encounters this eventually. I assume you probably already have encountered that.

Yeah, I mean, a lot of how Blue Sky works is hybrid. It's both traditional and there's parts of it that aren't. But the traditional part works like every other social site. So you just build what you need for those jurisdictions. And the part that's not traditional, the open part where other people can build things, well, that's not us because it's other people. And so then other people, once they meet those user thresholds, have to comply themselves. Last question. I don't speak Latin, so you'll have to translate for me, but you wore a T-shirt.

With Latin on it at an event a couple months ago. What did that say and why did you wear it? It said, A World Without Caesars. And I wore it because I saw this article where Mark Zuckerberg had worn this shirt that said, A Zuck or Nothing, which is like a Caesar or Nothing reference. And I posted it in Slack. That would be

funny to have a t-shirt that said a world without Caesars. And then two folks from the team just went and built it because they built a shirt for you. I mean, yeah, they, they, they built it. They found somebody to do it. They shipped it. They got the shirts made and then we had shirts. I was like, okay, well I'll wear them on stage at South by South. Is there a blue sky store where I can buy that shirt? We had a store up briefly, but we shut it down because we're not in the t-shirt business. Okay. Well, if you, if you reconsider, let me know.

We didn't trademark this or anything. I could roll my own. I think the idea of a world without Caesars, everyone can take up and get behind. So there's tons of them out there on various other sites now. All right, let's go talk about Peril backstage. Jay Graber, thank you for your time. Awesome, thank you. Thanks again to Jay Graber. Thanks again to the folks at Web Summit Vancouver for putting that on. Thanks to Canada while I'm at it. Yay, Canada. Thanks to Charlotte Silver and Travis Largic for producing and editing this show. Thanks to our advertisers for bringing it to you for free.

And thanks to you guys for listening. See you soon. Thanks to Smartsheet for their support.

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