Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang
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Hi, it's Bob Safian. You've been hearing me as the host of Rapid Response in this feed for a few years now. Well, I'm excited to share that Rapid Response has expanded into its own feed. We're releasing shows twice a week, focusing on the urgent issues that business leaders are dealing with in real time.

While some rapid response episodes appear on Masters of Scale, many of our best are only available every week in the rapid response feed. To make sure you catch it all, search for rapid response wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe. See you on the other side. When South Korea called martial law, right?

Where was that breaking news unfolding? It was happening on Blue Sky. It was really hard to follow on threads. It was really hard to follow on X. We don't have the budget to go and win over every celebrity and every big brand. But our belief is if we focus on what the end user wants and needs, then everyone else will come. We're not building the infrastructure for a specific political viewpoint or a specific group of people.

There is a, maybe like a wrong belief that communities create echo chambers. I think that communities actually help us learn about new ideas in a safer environment.

That's Rose Wang, COO of super hot social media platform, Blue Sky. In recent weeks, millions of users have been switching to Blue Sky from Elon Musk's X platform. That's created both new opportunities and new challenges for Blue Sky's small 20-person team.

I wanted to talk to Rose because Blue Sky represents a major shift underway in social media as dissatisfaction with the big platforms grows. Rose talks about why Blue Sky isn't just an alternative to X or a liberal refuge, but part of a new social web that prioritizes closer personal connections, data privacy and democratization.

For anyone eager to understand where the online world is headed, Rose offers terrific insights. So let's get to it. I'm Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response. I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with Rose Wang, the COO of Blue Sky. Rose, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me, Bob.

So in the wake of the presidential election, we've witnessed a so-called exodus, right? Millions of users leaving Elon Musk's X platform and finding their way to blue sky. You guys have added millions of new users up to 24 million active users in total. Huge growth for a company with only around 20 full-time employees. What have the last three weeks been like for you?

It has been a hyper growth phase that a lot of companies dream about in some ways. And so I think the personal experience is that sleep has been a fifth priority in my life when maybe it's been in the top three in the past. But also I would like to say that, you know, this isn't the first time we've experienced growth. We experienced a lot of growth in February of this year when we launched our

Blue Sky to the public. And we had over a million Japanese users join in a week. And then sometime between April and August, we also had millions of Brazilians join Blue Sky. And so we've been experiencing growth across the world. It's really awesome to experience it in your own backyard because, you know, we have our server down the street who's like, oh my gosh, I've seen you on the news. And so that's really cool to have people from all walks of life

kind of come out and know what we're working on and join Blue Sky. And that's really fun. But it's important for us to note that, you know, I think there's a general need for a new social media platform, not only in the U.S., but truly all over the world. And we're really excited to fill that hole.

Yeah, the Brazil burst was in part because Twitter X was having some disruptions there, right? They were having some issues. The surge that you've had most recently after the election, was it something you were sort of prepared for? Did it come as a surprise?

Well, I think being prepared and being surprised are actually two different things. You can be both. And we were prepared in the sense that we had built our protocol for –

Twitter, initially. And so we were ready for a large number of users to come on all at once. But then in the like, could we have predicted the way that was going to happen and when it was going to happen? Absolutely not. Because I think we would have probably more staff members. But we have managed quite well with the team that we have. And our priority is let's keep the app online. Was there a moment when you realized like,

oh, something different is happening here? I think the thing that felt really different about this surge was that momentum continued much longer than it did in a lot of other countries. And there was no clear end date. For Brazil, for example, like you mentioned, it was because X was banned in Brazil. We had also assumed that X would get unbanned in Brazil. So we knew that there was

certain time limit that we were able to win over a lot of Brazilians and tell them about what blue sky was.

But here, I think that people are coming to Blue Sky for very different reasons. I think, you know, people will attribute it to a certain event. But I oftentimes say that, like, people don't leave their homes after one thing that goes wrong. It's generally, like, after so much disappointment, the trust has been lost. And it's some sort of event that just tips you over the edge. We started to see this growth when X...

made another announcement about their difference in block, that it was going to be more of a strong mute. But that was not the first time they announced it and they hadn't even enacted it. But already that night, 500,000 users came onto Blue Sky. And so we were seeing already that users were very unhappy with the experience they were having on other social platforms like X. And I think that the reason they're coming here is actually something a lot deeper, which is

There's dark patterns happening. They're not feeling good. They're not making friends. They don't feel safe. It's these like very fundamental human needs that are driving people away. So for listeners who may not be as familiar, can you describe what blue sky is and sort of what makes it different than X?

Absolutely. I do love this question, so thank you for asking, because a lot of people assume that we're just an X alternative, but we're very different. We are an open social media platform that puts users first and gives users choice first.

What does that look like? Well, we're used to being trapped in one algorithm where it's controlled by a small group of people. And with Blue Sky, that's no longer the case. Users have built over 50,000 different feeds, including, I think, like five cat feeds, more than 200 feeds about Taylor Swift. There's like wrestling feeds, F1 feeds. And the possibilities are endless. What we're seeing is that people really like the chronological feed.

And so we're seeing that people want a lot more control over their experience and know who they're talking to. And these feeds just, they provide a cozier corner to connect with other people with either similar interests or, you know, have similar dispositions because there's just no longer a single dominant algorithm that only promotes either the most polarizing post and or the biggest brands. And so you actually get to interact with real people and have fun conversations again. Yeah.

Even if the size of that group that you're interacting may not yet be as big, or maybe that's an advantage that, you know, it's a more intimate group that you're interacting with. Yeah, that's a question that keeps coming up, right? I think there's a lot of people who are worried. Have we completely lost the town square? Has the internet unbundled and broken up into all these smaller communities where people are tired of a global stage situation?

And, you know, I think that it's hard to point to a point in time and say that all of time will look like that point in time. We've seen that history is cyclical and we've seen that there's generally an unbundling and a rebundling that people tend to go through when they go through periods of, hey, you know what? The experience I had on the town square or in the town square wasn't serving me. And so that's what's driven them to unbundle and find these smaller communities and

We believe that there will be a time again when people want to know what's happening and be in a larger conversation and there will be a rebundling. And so rather than just build one app, what we've built is the plumbing, the infrastructure for many apps to be built. That's the whole point of Blue Sky is people say, you know, what does decentralization mean? And what I say is it just means that it's more democratic. It means that we can build Blue Sky and you can build Green Sky and Yellow Sky and

And users or voters can go and choose where they want to live based on the experience that's provided rather than locking them in and forcing them to stay in a home that they don't like.

I've noticed that recently Blue Sky has become kind of a liberal refuge from the right-wing tilt of X. I know Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, AOC, became your first user to hit a million followers. How much do you talk about that on the team? Like, is that that kind of focus community a feature or is it a bug? Like, how do you think about that?

Well, first of all, we're not building the infrastructure for a specific political viewpoint or a specific group of people. The goal is, hey, here's open infrastructure for global conversation, and here are the tools that give you the ability to create your own experience upon that infrastructure. And so, hey, go create your own space. Go figure out what your community needs to feel safe, and we won't disrupt what you want unless...

You're building it in our society and it goes against our terms of service and community guidelines, in which case you can start another server and just leave our society and build your own. We actually take a lot of inspiration from just how are humans not online? How do they interact at parties? How do they interact in communities? I think there is maybe like a wrong belief that communities create echo chambers. I think that communities actually help us

learn about new ideas in a safer environment. And so what we've learned is putting people in a town hall and having other people scream their extreme opposite viewpoints at you probably won't change your mind. But if you're in a community with people with adjacent viewpoints, and then you have other things that are similar to them, you're actually more likely to take on that adjacent viewpoint.

And so we actually think that Blue Sky provides both of those experiences where, you know, you have all these custom feeds that are these smaller communities and smaller worlds where you can go and have fun and feel safe and connected. And then when you're feeling more abundant and ready to go and discover new and maybe not so familiar experiences, you can go to the Discover feed, which is the global algorithm with just one swipe.

and then go and see what's happening across the world. And so we're saying you don't have to choose. Depending on how you feel that moment, that afternoon, you can choose, do you want a smaller community experience or do you want the larger community experience? It's interesting because the assumption, what you're saying is the assumption that social media sort of has to feed an echo chamber. It doesn't necessarily have to work that way. It's the way the algorithms work.

And the experience is constructed that's sort of distancing me from people who are different from me? It's really interesting what the algorithms have been doing because it's been done in a black box. We don't know what's happening.

For the first time ever, Blue Sky is kind of opening that box because we've provided something different, which is chronological feeds as a completely different platform. That's the true A-B test that's happening. And what publishers have discovered, for example, is I believe The Guardian came onto Blue Sky recently. And in their first week, they had 300,000 followers on Blue Sky. And they had more engagement now.

And that first week on Blue Sky, then they did all of 2024 on X, even though they have 10.8 million followers on X. I think that tells you that the algorithm has some sort of manipulation. The whole point of other centralized social platforms like Meta and like X is that they're incentivized to lock you in and not show you what they're doing. That's the whole point of the centralized authorities. They can go do whatever they want.

My analogy is it's like moving to a city where if you wanted to change the color of your door, you have to go and petition the city government. And we're like, how is that possible that that's how the online world works? Right.

when we don't want that. And so I think ultimately what we're trying to provide is a toolbox for you to go and paint your door yellow or green or blue or whatever you want, because that's your prerogative. And that's the way that social should work online. Back in 2007, when I first started Running Fast Company, we put Mark Zuckerberg on his first magazine cover. And Facebook at that time had 19 million users, smaller than you are. How big do you want to be?

It's a really hard question to answer because that's assuming that Blue Sky is just an app and that we're just the next Twitter alternative. And so we can, you know, look at those numbers and say, you know, we'll probably get a certain percentage of that. But that's not what Blue Sky is. We're building the whole new social web. We see Blue Sky, the app, as the lobby to now explore so many other experiences. Social has been closed off for the last 10 to 20 years where APIs have been closed and developers haven't been able to build apps.

For those of us who've been around since the 2000s, we probably remember Zynga and all these other experiences that were built alongside Facebook and all the other social platforms because developers were building really awesome experiences that the parent companies weren't able to go build because they were focused on something else. And it was the entire ecosystem of those games, other experiences that made it really fun for users.

But as soon as Facebook then wanted to go into that industry, they would then shut down that API and close down those dev companies that helped the ecosystem grow overnight. And so we haven't seen innovation in social in so many years. One of the ways that we saw this was with Hinge. When Hinge first started the dating app, they used Facebook's API to see who your friends are friends with, because that's a really good proxy for maybe who you'd like to date.

As soon as Facebook tried to come out with their own Facebook dating app, they closed down that API and Hinge no longer had access to the Friends of Friends API. Also, the Facebook dating app never really took off. And so that entire service was just cut off from the world. But imagine if that was open. That's how Blue Sky is built, where anyone can go and build a Friends of Friends dating app or take your Blue Sky post, run an AI over and tell you of anyone in Blue Sky, who's your best match?

How cool would that be? And so for us, it's, hey, there are so many other experiences that can be built on top of the protocol that we built at Proto. And in our atmosphere, we can serve anybody who's online. So our market is as big as the internet. That's the way we see it.

It's fascinating to hear Rose talk about the impact that a small group can have in our big tech dominated world and how Blue Sky sees itself as a facilitator of new habits and new ideas rather than just the next social media app.

After the break, we'll dig into how Blue Sky is responding to Australia's new rules banning those under 16 from social apps, plus its approach to content moderation, AI data scraping, and more. Stay with us.

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Before the break, we heard Blue Sky's Rose Wang talk about how her small team is coping with a huge influx of new users. Now, Rose talks about why Blue Sky's CEO says they won't, quote, inshittify the platform with ads. Plus, Blue Sky's response to Australia's ban on social apps for those under 16, how the company is dealing with content moderation, its approach to AI data scraping and more. Let's jump back in.

Many Blue Sky users have noted the positive vibe of the app. I know when I signed up, the trending topic of the day was public library appreciation, which was not something I was getting on my other feeds. Is positivity something you're trying to encourage?

That's a really cool, first of all, awesome trending topic. The thing that I think is important to point out is just that the first users of the Blue Sky app was the Blue Sky team. It was very much an extension of who we are. We're a team that's led by two women who have been on the internet for decades and experienced the internet as women. And so I think prioritizing safety ahead of growth in some ways is

has been one of the reasons why we're seeing a more positive environment on Blue Sky. I think a lot of people know Blue Sky before this big wave this month as the app last year that had invite codes and wouldn't let people in.

And we didn't do that to be hot. We did it because we weren't ready on a moderation front. We weren't ready on a federation front for people can have choice in feeds. And so it was a decision of, do we open up invites so when everyone comes in, they get the same feedback?

experience they had on web two, which just locks them in, doesn't give them choice and then makes them feel unsafe? Or do we stick to our principles and build a strong moderation team and then also give users choice not only in feeds, but also moderation services? And so we chose the latter. We didn't know that that was the right decision because for many months, threads came out of the woodwork and they started with 100 million users. And that's really hard for a tiny startup to look at and say, hey, I think we can beat that. And

And so I think in hindsight, we're really very appreciative of the choice to stick to our principles. And that's partly why we have a more positive and safe environment. But also, it could have gone any way. And this is how startups work is, you know, you write history as you build the plane. And I think if you can stick to your principles, then hopefully it works out. And so far it has for us.

Content moderation has been a flashpoint for many social apps. I mean, you recently expanded your pool of content moderators from 25 contractors to 100. What is your content moderation philosophy? Like how much is about weeding out bots versus enforcing certain kinds of community standards?

How do you think about it? Well, moderation is governance. I think we think about it as like a checkbox to just get rid of bad actors. And that's, I think it's never gonna create a safe environment if you don't come at it proactively and think about moderation as a reactive behavior. So for us, the way that we've thought about governance

is we've taken a note from kind of like how court systems work, which is you can't just have one court system take in requests from hundreds of millions of people, which is basically how most other social media platforms work. And so the way that Blue Sky has envisioned moderation is what we call stackable moderation, where we've given a lot of the tools that have previously only been available to the moderation team to users.

What does that look like? There are a lot of behaviors in between intolerance, hate speech, misinformation, and users having a bad time. And on most other social media platforms, there's really nothing you can do about it except to petition the moderation team. Here on Blue Sky, we've given people moderation labelers where they can go and label rude posts.

movie spoilers, political content, deep fakes. There's so many different other types of unpleasant accounts that we want users to be able to go and adjudicate for themselves. Those are basically like lower courts and you can go and petition the

users who run those labelers. And then we would go and resolve essentially like larger problems, like this labeler violates our terms of service, and then we'll take this service down or disconnect it from Blue Sky. And so it's kind of taking a page out of Reddit's playbook of, hey, let's give those tools to community members to go and govern their own spaces and

But on top of Reddit's manual tools, we've given more programmatic tools that are much more powerful. I have to ask you where Blue Sky stands on the recent ruling in Australia banning people under 16 from using social media. Your CEO and partner Jay Graber recently misspoke on UK radio saying your minimum sign-up age is 18 when in fact it's 13. Where are you on this?

We understand that social has been harmful for a lot of teens. And...

There definitely needs to be solutions to make sure that bullying, harassment, the type of content that's shown to them when they're extremely vulnerable and still trying to figure out who they are. And so is social media serving teens today? No. And we recognize that. That said, there are many teens like myself. When I grew up, I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee. There were very few Asian-Americans there.

in my community. And where I would go and find others to connect with would be online. And I think that there is a positive to what social does serve. Social should still be available for them to go and connect.

And so what we hope to do is there's actually a lot of innovation that hasn't been done. Like, can you create an app that's mostly targeted towards younger folks on blue sky? We have a fire hose of data and then the positive certain types of data gets fed to maybe the

the more positive teen app. There's just like so many ways in which we're excited to see experimentation in this area. That said, we very much plan to comply with Australian law and we understand the reasoning behind what they're doing. I think Blue Sky as a solution, we're saying, hey, rather than having different regulations in every city or every state or every country, which becomes a lot more state-controlled media,

Is there a way in which we can provide a marketplace where there's lots of different experiments happening and users are voting with their feet? And that's a more democratic process in which we can evolve social. Your CEO, Jay, also said this week that the company wouldn't inshutify its platform with ads. So the business model will be based on subscriptions? So our first business model is subscriptions, where we won't put features like ads

speech, very core features behind a paywall. There'll be more features that help with self-expression like custom avatar frames, higher resolution image uploads and views. But another business model we're thinking about and what we like to see is what are users doing on the app where they're finding a lot of value and how do we then amplify that behavior rather than force a new behavior?

And so one of the things we're excited about is the Blue Sky app is created by not just us. It's created by lots of users, right? 50,000 different feeds that are created by users. And these users are paying each other on Patreon or Ko-fi. They're supporting...

their livelihoods. And so we want to be able to build a payments network where we can help more transactions happen in more volumes. And so we'll take a percentage of that transaction. And so we did not lock ourselves into an advertising business model, which is why Jay said that we can't enchitify your experience with ads because you can just leave. We've open sourced the Blue Sky app so anyone can copy and paste the code and create green sky overnight.

And so for us, our incentives are aligned with the user, which is why I think most people are having a better experience on Blue Sky because we're ensuring that they are or else we know they'll leave. You've also sort of differentiated yourselves by saying that your user data won't be mine to train AI. You're not going to sell that data. Now, user content is still in the open domain of the Internet, though, right? Like it's out there to be scraped.

but you won't intentionally sell it. Am I understanding that the right way? Yeah, it's a very difficult problem. And so with data, we had to choose when we came out, are we going to make our data private or public? Private is what Meta, ThreadsX has done is they own your data and they're training their own proprietary AI models that they're profiting off of from your data and your posts.

We've chosen a completely different path that's much more like Reddit, which is we're open, we're public. And that does mean that any open source model, any AI person out there can go and take that data and train. However, we're taking a page out of...

the web. Every web page can be scraped by developers. What we've done on the web though is that we have allowed different websites to express consent.

We want our data to be scraped or we don't want our data to be scraped. It's still up to the developer to respect that expression, but at least the ability to express consent has been given. And so we're going to follow that on Blue Skies. We're going to implement a feature where you can express whether you want your data to be trained on or not.

It's up to the developers and AI companies to follow that. There are lots of interesting open source models that academics are training on to help better moderation systems be built, to help safety across the web. And so Blue Sky's data in that way is actually quite helpful for those academics. And so...

We always ask, please look at this with nuance. It's a very complicated issue. Blue Sky has promised as a company, we're not going to be profiting off of your data for generative AI models, because that's not the business we're in. We're trying to build a new layer of the internet for social. And so that's our directive. That's our promise. But we still want to go and make partnerships with AI companies to set a precedent to show, hey,

you don't have to do this. People have expressed consent. There's tons of data out there. It's got to be hard handling the current growth and the interest from people like me, and at the same time, the opportunity for the future, which is suddenly way different. How do you balance all this? How do you prioritize? That's the key word, Bob, prioritize. I think that in the midst of

a million opportunities and so many people to talk to, we have to be very clear on who we're serving and why. I think what's been very clear for our team the last few weeks is

that Blue Sky is a home for independent creators, journalists, publishers, entrepreneurs who want to build a presence online. There has been probably dark patterns happening for the last 10 to 20 years that we haven't understood. And most platforms are incentivized to lock people in and not link out, right? If you post a link online,

You're probably going to get depromoted in the algorithm. And Hank Green actually posted a YouTube video about this where he did an experiment of posting on threads, X, and blue sky, the same posts. And then some posts with certain words, some posts with certain links and no links. And it was kind of wild what he saw. Like on threads, when he posted a link, he'd maybe get 60 likes or

And on blue sky, he gets a thousand likes, right? That's, that's actually kind of wild how different that engagement metric is. Something's happening.

And so we do know that people want to build a livelihood online. They want to build their own brand that they can control. They want to own the relationship with their community. And Blue Sky is trying to make that easier for everyone new who's trying to do that today. And your growth from here, I mean, we've talked about this. The big bursts have come from, in some ways, these external events like COVID.

To what extent do you expect that sort of news and events will conspire in your favor going forward versus like active steps, aside from just talking to me, that you're preparing to sort of expand the brand, the awareness? Yeah, we want discussions that are happening now to happen on blue sky. And when South Korea called martial law, right?

Where was that breaking news unfolding? It was happening on Blue Sky. It was really hard to follow on threads. It was really hard to follow on X. And many people we were hearing from, reporters, academics, they were following the story on Blue Sky. We don't have the budget to go and win over every celebrity and every big brand. But our belief is if we could just focus on what the end user wants and needs...

then everyone else will come. We're in a really interesting time in history where democracy is being questioned in general. Like, is this a process by which governance should work? And Blue Sky is.

As an online solution for society is a more democratic way to build online communities. And so that is the fight that we're in. And that's what we believe is at stake, which is why sleep is a fifth priority, because we all very much believe that democracy needs to continue to uphold and we can only show we can't tell. Yeah.

Well, Rose, this has been great. And thank you for giving up some of your sleep to be in with us today. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me, Bob.

Blue Sky really is in the center of a swirl, a hoped for moment for a startup and at the same time, a gut check moment. Blue Sky was conceived by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey when he was CEO at Twitter. And so Blue Sky has the technical capacity to handle user demand growth. But it's the social and cultural elements internally and externally that really define a buzzy business's impact over time.

Listening to Rose's very clear, principle-based explanations, it's a great reminder that even in our tech-obsessed, AI-fueled world, it's the human choices and priorities that determine if we succeed, how we succeed, and how we respond to that success. I'm Bob Safian. Thanks for listening. ♪

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Rapid Response is a Wait What original. I'm Bob Safian. Our executive producer is Eve Troh. Our producer is Alex Morris. Assistant producer is Masha Makutonina. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastinelli. Theme music by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcast is Lital Malad. For more, visit rapidresponcesshow.com.