Bluesky’s new CEO wants a big tent, not a bubble

Summary

Bluesky’s New CEO Wants a Big Tent, Not a Bubble

Decoder with Nilay Patel
Guest: Tony Schneider, CEO of Bluesky
Date: August 3, 2026

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Overview

In this episode of Decoder, host Nilay Patel sits down with Tony Schneider, the newly minted CEO of Bluesky, to dive deep into the company’s evolving vision for open, interoperable social networking. They discuss the unique structure of Bluesky as both a consumer app and the steward of a foundational social protocol (AT Protocol), the future of moderation, private communities, the tension between product and protocol, and how openness can coexist with the need for sustainable revenue. Schneider, who brings WordPress and distributed web experience to the table, sketches a decade-long roadmap for Bluesky as it strives to escape its left-leaning bubble and truly become the “big tent” of social platforms.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

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1. Bluesky: Product and Protocol

[04:48]

• Bluesky is both a social app (what the public mostly sees) and the creator of the open AT Protocol.
• The app demonstrates what’s possible, but now there are over a thousand other apps built atop the protocol.
• Quote:

  “We think it’s a better social network, it’s more human-focused, doesn’t have ads, it doesn’t have algorithms. But more importantly, underneath Bluesky is an open protocol... and the whole point of Bluesky was to demonstrate that this open protocol could scale and attract other builders.”
  — Tony Schneider, 04:48

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2. Leadership Change: From Founder to Operator

[06:28]

• Jay Graber (founder & ex-CEO) shifted to Chief Innovation Officer to focus on vision & AI, and Schneider stepped up from interim to permanent CEO after deep involvement as an investor and operator.
• External perceptions of leadership stability matter greatly to the developer and user community.
• Quote:

  “The move to drop the ‘interim’ is more important on the outside... Just to say like, no, I’m here for the duration.”
  — Tony Schneider, 08:50

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3. Decision Making and Timeframes

[10:12]

• Schneider uses a distinction between reversible and irreversible decisions: move quickly on the former, be deliberate with the latter (e.g., core protocol design).
• Bluesky is thinking in decade-long timelines at the protocol level.
• Quote:

  “There are decisions made at this protocol level that we’re going to have to live with for a long time... So those decisions you really need to be careful about, and then it goes all the way to things we try in the product.”
  — Tony Schneider, 10:12

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4. The Balance: Product vs. Protocol

[13:16]

• The Bluesky app serves as “an onramp or lobby” to the broader “atmosphere”—the emerging ecosystem of interoperable apps.
• Example: A new publishing format (“standard site”) emerged collaboratively, now supports integration across multiple apps including WordPress.
• Quote:

  “I see the Bluesky app as enabling the atmosphere... where it’s just a great way to get lots of people in... and then realize as you use the product, ‘oh, there are other things here.’”
  — Tony Schneider, 13:16

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5. Company Scale, Team Structure & Challenges

[16:05]

• Bluesky remains small: ~50 people, fully remote, structured in small, cross-functional teams.
• Three core product teams: the Bluesky app, the “atmosphere” (developer-facing work), and an exploration team (focused on new, especially AI-driven products).
• Prioritizing culture: “low ego, high agency... a lot of get shit done energy.”
• Quote:

  “Our biggest challenge is clearly trying to do everything you’ve described with a small team.... But we’re seeing good momentum, especially on the atmosphere side.”
  — Tony Schneider, 16:05

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6. Moderation & Distributed Responsibility

[19:24]

• Moderation isn’t solely handled by Bluesky—labeling is composable: any app or user can add moderation labels.
• Example: Blacksky, a third-party app for Black users, operates its own moderation scheme yet remains interoperable.
• Bluesky aims for “distributed moderation”—each community defines its own standards.
• Private data and private communities are imminent, enabling "100x" more use cases.
• Quote:

  “Frankly there should be lots of different teams and lots of different systems because each network, each community has its own idea of what moderation should look like.”
  — Tony Schneider, 19:24

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7. Product Strategy: Avoiding the TikTok Trap

[38:37]

• Bluesky intentionally resists the urge to copy-paste video-centric, algorithmic approaches (ex: TikTok/Facebook).
• Text-first microblogging is a deliberate choice.
• The network remains open—unlike others, Bluesky wants people to find content and leave if desired.
• Quote:

  “This is the beauty of an open protocol: Let somebody else build the TikTok of AT Protocol. We’re perfectly happy with a text-first microblogging network. We love it.”
  — Tony Schneider, 38:37

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8. Standardization, Openness & Decentralization

[45:59], [53:36]

• Bluesky is actively divesting control over the protocol:
  • Moving key infrastructure to a Swiss nonprofit.
  • AT Protocol spec moving to IETF for open standardization.
• All Bluesky code is open-source; bootstrapping is becoming less technical as the ecosystem matures.
• The goal: “one app of many,” not the gatekeeper.

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9. Revenue: Monetization Without Selling Out

[53:36]

• Bluesky will monetize in 2026, aiming for ecosystem-aligned models rather than traditional ads.
• “Affiliate-style” monetization: Bluesky (and others) get a cut only when they drive monetizable actions (like newsletter signups).
• No intention to go the crypto/token route.
• Quote:

  “We make money when everybody else makes money... The whole idea is for the pie to get huge and for us to be a small slice of a big pie.”
  — Tony Schneider, 54:41

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10. Interoperability with Other Standards (e.g. Mastodon/ActivityPub)

[66:16]

• Bluesky is in active conversation with the Mastodon/ActivityPub ecosystem, but not Threads (Meta) or X (Twitter).
• Emphasizes complementary roles, not protocol “wars.”
• Quote:

  “We’re all on Team Open together... There’s something called bridgyfed that connects these two worlds together. And the end user doesn’t even have to know.”
  — Tony Schneider, 66:16

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11. Expanding Beyond the “Leftist Bubble”

[72:08]

• Bluesky is seen as a progressive bubble, especially in contrast with the hard-right orientation of X.
• Schneider wants to change this: “We definitely want that to change. It is already changing.”
• Sports communities cited as an example of broader appeal.
• The vision is for a “civil, positive” public square, not a monoculture.
• Quote:

  “We’re an open network for anyone... We don’t want to serve just one type of user base... It just needs to be civil and positive.”
  — Tony Schneider, 74:43

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• Recruiting for a Big Vision ([04:48]):

  “The future of social media should be open, interoperable, and should serve the public good. And that is what motivates us.”

• On Building for the Long Haul ([10:12]):

  “There’s a part of the company in this community that thinks very, very, very long term, like this is a protocol that’s going to be around for decades.”

• On Decentralization ([45:59]):

  “We 100% do not want to control the standard... The end state is that we are one app of many, one company of many running in this protocol.”

• On Monetization ([54:41]):

  “We’re only interested if that economic model works for the entire atmosphere.”

• On Breaking the Political Bubble ([72:08]):

  “It certainly wasn’t designed to attract one specific group of people. It works for anyone.”

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Key Timestamps

• [04:48] – Tony Schneider describes Bluesky’s dual identity (app and protocol).
• [06:28] – The CEO transition and what motivated Schneider.
• [10:12] – Approach to decision-making (reversible vs. irreversible).
• [13:16] – Balancing product and protocol, “standard site” example.
• [16:05] – Company/team size and structure.
• [19:24] – The distributed moderation model.
• [38:37] – Avoiding the algorithmic/TikTok path.
• [45:59] – Plans to relinquish protocol control.
• [53:36] – Monetization and the “small slice of a big pie” vision.
• [66:16] – Interoperability and protocol coexistence (Bluesky/ActivityPub).
• [72:08] – Addressing Bluesky’s “leftist bubble” reputation.

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Final Thoughts

Tony Schneider’s Bluesky is reaching for an Internet where social media is a cooperative, interoperable ecosystem—not a fractured collection of proprietary, algorithmic silos. The platform aims to solve moderation, inclusion, and business realities the “open” way: with protocols as public goods, decentralized moderation, and fair revenue models that benefit creators, networks, and users alike. As the company steps into the challenges of monetization and governance, possibly expanding beyond its bubble, it seeks to be the “big tent” of social networking, leaving the door open for both competition and diverse communities.

Transcript

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[Nilay Patel]

Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil I. Patel, Editor in Chief of the Verge and Decoder is my show about big ideas and novel problems. Today I'm talking with Tony Schneider, the brand new CEO of the social platform Bluesky. Tony just took over after a short stint as the interim CEO. This is one of my favorite kinds of interviews to do here on Decoder. A couple years ago we had bluesky's founding CEO Jake Graber on the show and she's now the company's chief Innovation officer. All that kind of shuffle is pure decoder bait. And a new CEO often brings with them new priorities, which is perhaps the most decoder thing of all. And bluesky in particular is a company pulling in a lot of different directions. There's the Twitter like social media app, which is what most people are familiar with. And then there's the underlying technology behind that app called @Protocol, which allows anyone to build social networking products that interoperate with BlueSky and one another as you'll hear Tony say, that ecosystem is vibrant and growing. It's now called the atmosphere, which is frankly adorable. But the users of bluesky the app are not the same as the people building on that protocol. And the goals of a company founded to push forward the ideas of open and interoperable social standards are not necessarily aligned with all the things the users of the app might need or want. This is a fight that bursts into view on bluesky itself all the time. And I wanted to know how Tony thinks about balancing all of that with what remains a fairly small team. Tony's an interesting guy to talk about all this with because he was formerly the CEO of Automattiq, which makes the huge WordPress web content management platform. And you'll hear him make the case that this period in social networking feels a lot like the early days of the web, and that success looks like a vibrant ecosystem with lots of other big players. But that might all take a decade to fully develop. That's quite a vision. But here and now, the open web is falling apart, and the social products of today are fragmenting and in many cases either getting smaller or getting full of AI slop. So we talked about all of that and about bluesky's reputation as a bastion of leftists, insulated in their own little bubble, sitting next to the increasingly hard right bubble of X. And of course, we talked about how bluesky might start to generate revenue. Interestingly enough, it's not just ads. This is a fun one. I think Tony and I hit on every single decoder theme there is. I think you're going to like it. Okay, Blue Sky CEO Tony Schneider. Here we go. Tony Schneider, you are a venture partner at True Ventures, and more importantly, the now permanent CEO of BlueSky. Welcome to Decoder.

[Tony Schneider]

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

[Nilay Patel]

I am very excited to talk to you. I think what is happening with the OpenSocial web is maybe the most important thing happening for media. It does not get as much attention as AI, but there's something very big happening on these interoperable social networks. And I know that you are a believer in it in the same way that you believed in the web when you were the CEO of Automattic, which is something that makes WordPress. So let's just start at the very start. Describe what you think bluesky is today and what you think the opportunity with these new kind of networks are.

[Tony Schneider]

So blue sky today is really two Things. There's the BlueSky app, which is what a lot of people are familiar with. It's A social network. We think it's a better social network. It's more human, focused, doesn't have hats, it doesn't have algorithms. But more importantly, underneath bluesky is an open protocol called App Proto. And bluesky is only one of now over a thousand apps built on that protocol. And the whole point of bluesky was to demonstrate that this open protocol could scale and attract other builders building lots of apps, lots of social experiences that all interoperate and connect with each other, which is what we believe the future of social media should look like. And what actually is going to make social media something that we believe in, which is that the future of social media should serve the public good. And that is what motivates us. And that's why we built the protocol first and then the app.

[Nilay Patel]

There's a lot in there already that is just pure decoder bait, including the notion that Blue sky, the product and the atmosphere and app protocol, the standard, are all intermixed in one company that you now run. And then right next to that is maybe the purest decoder bait of all, which is the fact that Jay Graeber, who was the CEO of Blue sky, she was on the show about two years ago, stepped down into the role of Chief Innovation Officer, you were the interim CEO and now after four months, you are the full time CEO. Fundamentally, that is just the story decoder loves to tell the most. Talk me through that. What made you step in as the interim CEO and why did you decide to become the full time CEO?

[Tony Schneider]

I think it's actually really cool and inspiring that a founder after she worked on this for six years, got it off the ground, started inside Twitter, got it out of there, made it an independent thing. I mean, there are a lot of reasons why, you know, really Blue sky is facing long odds and she, she got into this place and then felt like, you know, it's at a scale now where her sweet spot, the things that she loves working on, which is vision, innovation, new ideas, she felt pulled towards, back towards building, especially also because of the advent of AI and how AI and AppProduct can interoperate. So she felt like that's what she wants to go work on and it's time to find somebody else for the CEO job. I was already involved with this project because I met the team a little bit over two years ago, probably around the same time Jay was on your podcast and we became investors, True Ventures. So I've been following it, you know, as an investor supporting it. And you know, the team approached me and said you know that my, my background with WordPress and open source was really a really good fit. And so I agreed to be interim CEO really initially because I was still a general partner at tru and you know, it's a firm I helped build. It's an amazing firm that he didn't want to leave behind. But also at tru, we've had this model where we've moved back and forth between operator and investor. I did that while I was running automatic. So I stepped into it and then really after working on it, hands on for a few months, it just got more and more fun, more and more energizing. You could just feel the momentum. And also true just switched to a new fund. So it was actually the timing was good where I could say, okay, I will switch my true role to part time become a venture partner, which is what I used to be when I ran automatic. And I'll go all in at Blue Sky.

[Nilay Patel]

Tell me about the difference between being the interim CEO and the full time CEO. When you're the interim CEO, it feels like there are probably some boundaries on what you can do and then the full time CEO can obviously do everything that a full time CEO can do. What did you feel like the boundaries

[Tony Schneider]

were as interim CEO on the inside, it hasn't felt very different. I actually think the move to drop the interim is more important on the outside, especially for the atmosphere and the app proto community and people building on this platform and in this ecosystem. Just to say like, no, I'm here for the duration. This isn't just some interim gig and then somebody else is going to show up. So I felt like to the outside that makes a big difference. On the inside, the job really hasn't changed much.

[Nilay Patel]

So many of my conversations here on Decoder are really about the timescale of decisions. Right. I'll make the comparison to my newsroom because it's easy and it's easy to understand. Our reporters make decisions in like 30 minute increments, right? They they, a story comes up, they write it, they publish it, they move on to the next thing. I make decisions maybe in like week or month long increments. What are we going to cover? Where are the resources going to go? It seems like the interim CEO role, the timescale of those decisions is necessarily short or it has the appearance of being short. And then I'm reading your note that you published when you became the full time CEO. In the very beginning of it, you say we're at the very beginning of the story. With a decade of Exciting work ahead. And I'm wondering if the timescale, the decisions you're making now are a decade.

[Tony Schneider]

Yeah. It touches on something really fascinating with this project which in general with decision making. One of the frameworks I really like is of the reversible and irreversible decisions. I feel like a lot of decisions we make are decisions we make are actually reversible. And I like to optimize to just make those decisions quickly and then make sure you can undo the decisions if you need to change them. And then there's a few decisions that really do have very long term implications. They're much harder to reverse. And with this project in particular, it, there are decisions made at this protocol level that we're going to have to live with for a long time. And so there's a part of the company in this community that thinks very, very, very long term, like this is a protocol that it's going to be around for decades already, it's in enough use that it's going to be around for a long time. So those decisions you really need to be careful about and then it goes all the way to things we try in the product that work or don't work. I wasn't in the interim mindset as much also because I am also an investor in the company. So I care very much in the long term picture. And what attracts me to this whole endeavor is that it can have a really important long term impact. So I always think about, okay, how will this play out? Is this truly serve the core mission and it's okay to make some of these harder decisions now that, you know, won't pay off for a long time because this is going to take a while and, and it's not just one company. It's really, again, it's, it's already thousands of others that are building together and that's just a different time frame and decision making process than your typical just go fast scale as quickly as possible. And I, I like it, I'm comfortable with it.

[Nilay Patel]

I just want to stick with bluesky, the company that is both responsible for the standard and the protocol and the product that a lot of end users love and sometimes hate. That is the core tension of the company. Right. The user base of BlueSky is or is not interested in the development of AD protocol, is or is not interested in the wider atmosphere. I think under Jay's tenure, the company was very focused on building out the protocol because the product literally could not exist unless the protocol was robust enough to stand up the product and you could see that back and forth. And I have always felt that the company is far more interested in the protocol than the product, that the product was merely there to show what people could do. But now the product is big, it might be waxing or waning. It will come to whether you need to turn it into TikTok or not. Tell me where you, as a CEO with a decade long vision for all of this, how do you see the balance inside of BlueSky between the product, the thing that looks like a Twitter app, and the protocol, the thing that should enable thousands upon thousands of other social experiences?

[Tony Schneider]

Yeah, I see the bluesky app and the product as enabling the atmosphere. It's an on ramp or maybe a lobby to the atmosphere, where it's just a great way to get lots of people in, get people exposed to the idea and then realize as you use the product, oh, there's, there are other things here. This isn't just a microblogging app. An example from the last couple of months that's gone super well is this format called Standard site that emerged. So basically the history of that is that bluesky is a microblogging app. People are asking for longer form posting. A bunch of other apps started popping up that were for newsletters and blogging. In particular three apps called Leaflet, Pocket and Off Print. And they got together and said, hey, why don't we define a format for all of us to work together on the atmosphere for all of our publish the posts that we publish. And then we looked at and said, great, we can now take that and surface it in our app. So now if, you know, if you're posting a blog post on Leaflet, it just shows up in the bluesky app and we can make that a seamless experience. And this went over really well to the point where now, you know, WordPress is supporting standard site, lots of other publishing platforms. They're realizing the benefit of, oh, if I just publish to this new format now, it's just going to show up and work across all these other platforms without me having to do anything. And it's caused this really nice ripple effect throughout the ecosystem where people can work together just by using this format. Nobody has to do deals with each other, nobody has to get permissions or no money has to change hands and it's just taken off. I'm hoping more and more bluesky users will see those kinds of integrations go, oh cool, I'm not just getting bluesky content here. I'm getting content from all these other apps, all these Other networks and it just works. I don't have to do anything. I don't have to go sign up for 10 different apps. It's just one sign up, one account and it just works.

[Nilay Patel]

You're describing two different kinds of things, right? There's a lot of work to be done at the protocol level. There's a lot of work to be done to support new kinds of experiences like standard site. And then there's BlueSky. A product which is 45 million people probably needs to be substantially bigger if it wants to be the aggregator for a massive network that can displace some of the other social products out there. And that needs to be a lot of things to a lot of people. It needs to find different kinds of product market fit. How big is bluesky, the company now and how is it structured to point in two different directions?

[Tony Schneider]

We're now at 50 people, still very small and biggest challenge is clearly trying to do all of everything you've described with a small team. We do have a guided ecosystem of hundreds and thousands of others working on it, so that helps and we do our best to coordinate everyone. But I would say we're making good progress, we're seeing good momentum, especially on the atmosphere side. The things we look at are number of daily active apps on the network that has doubled since the beginning of the year. It's about to hit 1000. We look at SDK downloads for our tools that has tripled. It's going to hit a million downloads a month by later this year. So those are the numbers that show like, oh, this, not only is it scaling, but we're able to scale it with the team that we have.

[Nilay Patel]

How is that team structured?

[Tony Schneider]

About 50 people, all remote, structured into small teams. Big believer in I believe six to eight person teams, highly aligned, highly incentivized and motivated are the way to get things done. Probably maybe the only way to get things done. So there's three core product teams. There's the app team that deals with the bluesky app, there's the atmosphere team that does all the developer facing stuff. And then there's a third product team called the exploration team and that's a new team that Jay has stood up and is running and that we actually just launched a new version of the product they're working on, Addie, which is an think of it as AI layered on top of the atmosphere and what you can do with that. So those are our three core product teams and they're each customer facing, so consumer facing, developer facing and then sort of probably we'll find out on the AI product, the market fit is there and then we have a bunch of just support teams that support those three core teams that are pretty, pretty typical. You know, we've got a legal team, et cetera, et cetera. And yeah, very, I would say it's a team that's very low ego. High agency is kind of the ethos, so kind of low drama. Just a lot of get shit done energy, really collaborative.

[Nilay Patel]

Whenever I think about new social products and how they might scale, especially with explosive user growth. Up until recently, the conventional wisdom is you've got to scale trust and safety and moderation linearly with the size of your user base. And maybe we're going to add AI to this and that linear relationship will break, or maybe it'll actually get even more costly because token spend will get more costly than having human moderators or there'll be more false positives and even angrier. So you got to have more humans in the loop. It's really unclear to me how that's going to work. You've obviously been scaling Blue sky is a consumer social product. Then you have the complexity of we're hooking on to lots and lots of other products that are putting content in front of people. How does the moderation layer work? And have you seen it be a linear increase in cost with the size of the network and the user base?

[Tony Schneider]

Moderation is huge in any social product. And we do, in addition to our 50 person team, we do have contractors that help us with moderation. What's, what we've done differently is that our whole moderation system is composable or pluggable. And so it's not just us that can label content and moderate it. Anybody can do it and add labels onto the, it's part of the protocol. And then anybody else who builds products can decide if they want to use those labels or not. So if somebody on our moderation team labels something as say AI sloth, everybody else who's, who's building in this ecosystem can take advantage of that piece of data. They don't have to, but they can. So what we're seeing and what we've seen is we have our moderation team, but then there are other teams that have decided to moderate label content the way they want. So for example, maybe the first non Blue sky project on the protocol was Black sky and it's now become a thriving company on its own. It's a team building all kinds of interesting things. And they started out by saying, hey, we want to build a version of this network that is optimized for black users and their needs. And we want to have our own moderation policies and they are able to do that and plug that in. But all of everything they're doing is still part of the larger network. And now there's again hundreds, soon thousands of these kinds of systems. So this has really helped where the moderation burden isn't all on one team that has to scale and look at everything. And frankly there should be lots of different teams and lots of different systems because each network, each community has its own idea of what moderation should look like. And so we feel like this kind of distributed moderation approach is more powerful. That said, yes, we're continuing to scale up ours, but it's manageable. I mean, it's a lot of work, but it's manageable. And again, it's worth it when the whole network can benefit from it. And the next part of that story that's going to be really interesting is that the biggest thing we're actually working on with AppProto, the next evolution of the protocol is private data. So we all know that the public square, public social networking has reached a certain scale and there's a lot of people who are, they want to retreat into more private spaces. We've seen explosive growth in group chats. We're all in a million group chats. And this has been the number one request from our community, from our developers, is let us build more private membership based, various versions of private spaces on this protocol. So we're in the middle of building that. It's a community effort, it's rolling out very soon and now moderation moves in, you know, gets broken up into even more smaller spaces and people can decide like if I don't, if I don't like a network or I don't like the way it's moderated, go start your own, go start your own community. And so that's I think the most interesting thing ahead of us as, because right now everything on AppProto is public. It can only be used for a completely public product. And once we enable private data, I think that it's like 10 or 100x the number of use cases we can serve.

[Nilay Patel]

Not to be reductive, but I think it's useful to talk about this. In comparison to other social products, people might be more familiar with app protocol right now in the atmosphere, everything is very public. The models in my head are Twitter and RSS and massive broad based publishing platforms. Right. One to many. I think what you're describing is much more like a Reddit style approach, right, where you have smaller closed communities. Some of them can be totally private unless you're invited in. And yet they're still on the atmosphere in some way. Is that, is that right?

[Tony Schneider]

That's right. So you have, so the trade off traditionally has been, well, if you want to be on a large network, you have to be on a public network, or if you want to control, have your own, you've been really have ownership over your own community, you have to set up your own thing, you have to run your own server, you have to run your own form. And there's clearly a need for that because there's lots of those out there. But the challenge is each one of those is now a little island. And you have to convince people what we think we can pull off is the best of both worlds. It's when you build a community or private space on that proto. It's absolutely 100% owned by you. It's not owned by Blue sky or by any company. It's just like everything else on the protocol, it's owned by the users, not by the platform. So it's really truly yours. You can move it around, you can make all the decisions, but because it's on the shared protocol, all of these communities plug together. You can go to a place like Blue sky and get all your notifications in one place. You can see what's going on across everything. You just need one login, one place to check. But you still have the independence and the identity of these individual communities. So that is something that no other platform can do. Right now you sort of have to, you know, you either on, you know, the large sort of platform owned and controlled place, or you run your own and you're a little silo. We think we can solve that. And again we see just the energy behind this idea and the number of things people are already prototyping is very palpable.

[Nilay Patel]

We have to pause here for a short break. We'll be back in just a minute.

[Tony Schneider]

Foreign.

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[Nilay Patel]

Welcome back. I'm talking with Blue Sky CEO Tony Schneider about how he makes decisions. I got to ask you the other decoder question because I'm very curious where this idea came from and how you decided to bet on it. How do you make decisions? What's your framework for making decisions?

[Tony Schneider]

Yeah, I mean, you talked a little bit earlier about the so reversible and irreversible decisions. The hardest thing about running any project is just, especially if it's successful. It's just an endless flow of things you have to prioritize and decide on. So. But I find you could make that a lot less daunting and exhausting if you move a lot of decisions into this category of just they're not that big a deal. Let's make it easy to, to experiment and reverse things and really only focus on the truly long term impactful things that we have to get right. And then so you sort of have this lightness or almost playfulness about some of these things or it's like it's just not that big a deal. Let's just try something like let's be creative and improvisational about it. This is a lot of how Automatic runs and I actually credit a lot of that to Matt Mullenweck's approach to first running an open source project and then inside Automatic. There are a lot of jazz analogies because Matt started out as a, as a jazz musician and just this sort of improvisational like don't take it so seriously if you don't have to. But then there are very serious decisions we have to make as well. And those we. I like spending just a lot of one on one time with the leaders and then just gathering and going through the list and talking through the trade offs and just making sure that at least, you know, in a good cadence, monthly or maybe quarterly, we go through and make those hard trade off decisions and don't leave the room until we're like, no, we're only doing these two things like this on the important list. Right? It's like we can't do everything and let's, yeah, let's voice all the ideas but you know, get to agreement on what we're really, the few things we're trying to get done. If we get those done, then we're actually in good shape and we keep making forward progress. And that's kind of the ongoing sort of flow that we go through and it's, it seems to be working.

[Nilay Patel]

I have to call out an email I got from a listener x Amazon who said everyone always comes on your show and talks about reversible decisions and irreversible decisions. And I just want to point out if you have enough money and time, every decision is reversible. And I was like, that's right. Especially at Amazon scale. That's certainly right. What's the line for you? What makes a decision irreversible? How much money and how much time does it take to reverse it?

[Tony Schneider]

To me it's less the money, it's more the time. I mean some things just take years to unwind. So I think anything that's like you'd say, let's call it like a five year time horizon where it just be really painful to change course. Or maybe on the positive framing it's more like, hey, if we get this right, we don't have to think about it again for five years. And it's just then that's kind of the category of things where, you know, people talk a lot about like for example, with startups, it's your investors, right? If you, especially early on, the first investors you work with, they're going to be with you for five or 10 years and that's a pretty big decision. Like you shouldn't just take the first check that comes along. Like you should really think that through. Because I've lived that at true, invested in 500 startups for the last 20 years and we've seen every possible way that that plays out and that's a good thing to really, really pay attention to. Early on, not just rush. Early in my career I was like, I just, I just need money. Just give me a check and I'll keep building. I just want to build things like so that's, that's kind of an example of the time frame where I feel like, yeah, you don't. It's really nice when, when it just works for several years. You have to go back and invest more time, more money to reverse something.

[Nilay Patel]

So I want to put two decisions in practice here and your framing here is perfect for this question. You decided to be the CEO of BlueSky to become the permanent CEO of Blue Sky. You're calling that a 10 year decision in your note? We've talked about it here. How did you make that decision? Did they come to you and say, you're going to be the CEO now? Sorry, we're stripping the title away. Did you have to write a memo? How did that all happen?

[Tony Schneider]

I was a gradual process. The job is great, the team is great, the mission is what I want to work on for the next 10 years. So that was not a hard decision. It was really that I already had a job and just figuring out a way to make those two pieces work together and to make a transition work. And the, the bluesky team and board from early on said, hey, we think this is working really well. Can we make this permanent? And then it was probably a couple months of just working through how a transition would work.

[Nilay Patel]

So you were the interim CEO for two months, and you spent two months figuring out how the transition work and then you became the permanent CEO.

[Tony Schneider]

Yeah, yeah, that sounds about right.

[Nilay Patel]

It's quite a timeline. And then the second one, maybe much more importantly, is, okay, we're going to make this big bet on private communities. We're going to extend the protocol. Logically, you're going to have to extend the bluesky app itself. You're going to have to make a big bet on both the standard itself and how the consumer app will work, I would say. And maybe this is too reductive. The community on the Blue sky app does not like change, so you're going to have to endure some change with them. This is a bet. This is a big decision. This has to be the future of the protocol, the future of the atmosphere. How did you make that decision and what made you convicted that it was the right one?

[Tony Schneider]

The decision to extend the protocol has been underway. I think that I don't know if that's a year, two years ago, or maybe even from the very beginnings of the protocol, people are like, hey, what are we going to do about private data? And so that's been building and it's kind of natural. I mean, once people start building on your protocol, it's the first question, right? It's like, oh, this is great. But I do have some private data. Even inside the BlueSky app, we have DMs. Those aren't on the protocol. You don't want those out in the public. Right? So we have features inside the app that we had to build off protocol because it couldn't support private data. So we have our own use cases, we got lots of them. So that's kind of an obvious, like, we just have to do it, how it affects the community. That's what our app team is working through right now. So one of the things that I feel like we've gotten better at in the last few months is to do that out in the open. So Alex Benzer, who's our head of product product, who makes those decisions around what goes in the app and what doesn't, has been posting about it and just inviting feedback and saying, look, this is coming. What do you think? What kind of communities do you want? Do you want them? You know, how similar should they be to the current app? How different? I think we've got 500 people who've signed up to want to give us feedback. So we're going through user interviews and people are ready building communities on bluesky actually, because we have this functionality where people can make custom feeds. It's a whole, you know, one of the huge differences in Blue skies, right? No algorithms. You get to make your own, you can plug in your own. People have made over 100,000 feeds and some of those are really communities themselves. There are things like Booksky and Astro sky and where it's just communities of people talking about a certain topic within custom feed. So people sort of taken what we have to kind of bend it into a community shape. So it's already happening in the network. So that makes it a lot less scary. It's not like, oh, we're going to stop one thing and pivot somewhere else. It's like, no, we're just doing more of a thing that somebody is already doing. And I think we can do it in a way that doesn't disrupt. Like if you never want to join a private community, you don't have to like, you can still use like bluesky. The app as it stands today isn't going to change. Like the, the public part of it is, you know, it's popular, it's growing. So we're not going to mess with that.

[Nilay Patel]

Well, let me ask you about Blue Sky. The app isn't going to change because I think that's the thing that I'm poking at. It feels like every other social network is sort of, you know, everything evolves into a crab. Everything is evolving into TikTok. We can just see it happening every single day at Meta. Today announced a test in which the big blue Facebook app will, will open for some set of users into just full screen video. They're screwed. We're just going to turn Facebook into TikTok. Everything heads in that direction. X has added in that direction. That's the competition and maybe that's the thing the market wants. You're saying, okay, we're going to build private data, we'll have a more Reddit like experience. Bluesky may be the last really text first social platform of its kind that exists. Do you feel that pull into different directions, into different formats because that's a thing that your user base also pushes against.

[Tony Schneider]

This is the beauty of an open protocol like let somebody else build the TikTok of AppProto. Let somebody else go push into new formats where that we're, we're perfectly happy with text first microblogging network. We love it. We think honestly, I'm glad if others are chasing off in other directions because we like, we like what we have we talked earlier about traffic. So a lot of these other networks, as you know, you've coined the term Google Zero right there, all these walled gardens, all these other platforms are getting more and more walled, right? They're like, okay, once, you know, we're open enough to attract an audience and then once you're here, we're not going to let you go and we're just going to keep trying to find ways to keep you in there. Bluesky is the opposite. Because of the protocol, it's locked open by default. We couldn't keep you in even if we wanted to. We want people to build other apps and experiment with other things. We want people to find great content on bluesky and leave like we're still a place that we don't down rank links. We love sending traffic to people. We send, I think it's 2 million clicks a day to publishers and you know, we're the number one referrer to a bunch of, a bunch of publishers and we want, we want to do more of that. I think we love that way that the open web works and just people come to bluesky to connect, to learn, to have fun and then to find interesting things to go to. And that's. Yeah, there's no way we're going to change that.

[Nilay Patel]

I think. I'm, I'm curious if someone wants to build the TikTok of the atmosphere, is there a bunch of protocol level work that needs to be done to support it? I know there are attempts to do this. Skylight I Think is a TikTok like app on the atmosphere. There are others. But all of your technical innovation on the standard itself is kind of pointed at text. And I'm wondering if there's something you need to do to be better at video to compete with what all of the closed platforms are chasing at much larger scale.

[Tony Schneider]

No, at the protocol level it's easy to do. You can define your own records on the protocol. I mean, yes, ours are text focused or posts, they're follows, they're likes, things like that. But there's already people publishing all kinds of different things on the protocol. I was just, I saw yesterday that somebody's publishing a bunch of patent, like a patent database onto iProdo. So everybody else can just tap into that patent information. There's somebody who's like publishing the health data off of their Apple Watch onto their PDF. So they're just like live streaming their health data onto the protocol. People are putting all kinds of things so the protocol can be used for anything. And what's Harder is that you need people there, right? So when you build the next, you know, the TikTok on app, Proto that when you launch that app, it launches into, you know, millions and millions of people who are already there. And that's what we're working on, to just keep getting more and more people onto the atmosphere so that you don't have that cold start problem as a, as a new developer, right? Where you have to, you want enough people. We don't need, you know, eventually we, you know, our 10 year goal is a billion people on apprato. You don't need a billion to, you know, have success with a new product, but you need a critical mass so that when people show up, they're like, oh, where are my friends?

[Nilay Patel]

So, but this is the dynamic that I'm really interested in with the, the Blue sky app and then the protocol itself. So it's no secret that I've been talking about federating the verge for like 100 years and we're going to do it one of these days. And one of the issues here is like we publish in a lot of formats and a lot of different places and if I just immediately federate the Verge tomorrow we have a lot of video. Where's the video going to go? And it's just going to go out in the on, it's going to go out in the network and maybe I can convince a lot of people to download a Verge app and they'll see a bunch of stuff in it and that would be great. But if what you're describing is Blue sky, the app will be the entrance point for a lot of different people. And Blue sky, the app has not prioritized video right, as part of the core part of the user experience for any number of reasons why you might not prioritize video, then that part of the network won't get the, that effect, right? It won't get what feels like a network effect, which is, oh, there's lots of people here. The way that if I federate the Verge, I'm like, look at all these great posts from other tech writers. I could do that tomorrow, right? Like that. It's almost like easy to do. At least it's easy to vibe code that prototype, I will tell you, it's hard to like get it all the way to the finish line. That's the dynamic, right? If you want the Blue sky, the consumer app, to be the entry point to the diversity of the network, the app itself has to be diverse in a way that might dilute the app and make it lose its product market fit. How do you think about that? Back and forth?

[Tony Schneider]

Yeah, I think what we're seeing works well. And I'll go back to the standard side example is if the other piece of content that's not text is something that can show up inside a post. So a. We call them link cards. But. And that could be a video, it could be a game. It could be like something where somebody can post about it and say, hey, check out this new game. And somebody can see it and then go there. That's a perfect fit. Because then it fits our mode of how people discover things. But then when they want to engage with it, we sent them off to. To that place. So same with video, right? As long as somebody can sort of embed it and promote it on our end, we're not going to try and become a video network where we then say, oh, all video has to be watched on Blue Sky. It's like, no, no, go off to the Verge, go somewhere else, go explore. It's just, I think bluesky as an app is a great place to surface things and notify people of new things. But it does have to somehow fit inside the post. You can give people a preview essentially and say, okay, now go play this game. Go subscribe to this publication. Go donate to this cause. Go. You know, that's the kind of action we're trying to surface for everybody else in the atmosphere and then just send people off on their way.

[Nilay Patel]

I want to ask you to compare your role at BlueSky to your role at Automattic. When you're the CEO of Automattic, right? These are big companies, or we want them to be big companies that operate on standards and protocols in the open web in different ways. At BlueSky, you control the standard itself. This is a very important piece of the puzzle, that the standard is in development and you're making products on top of it and you want other people to build on top of the standard. A lot of people can say a lot of things about Automattic's relationship to the web, but technically you don't control the standard. And maybe it has enough scale so that the way Automattic does it becomes the way everyone else does it. But at Automattic, you didn't make the browsers. You weren't on the steering committees of the big standards in a way that allowed you to actually dictate what they were. You were making a web server product that interacted with an ecosystem of other open products. Do you want bluesky to get there where it's just one player among many, or do you want to retain control of the standard, too? And how do you think that's different from how Automatic exists on the Web ecosystem?

[Tony Schneider]

We 100% do not want to control the standard. At BlueSky, we are actually very actively doing everything in our power to divest control of it. First was to design the network in a way that if Blue sky goes down or goes away, the rest of the network is fine. So that's a big test case for us, actually, a couple of months ago, got tested not the way we had hoped, but we got a DDoS attack on the BlueSky network. Very, very massive one, and it did take us down for several hours. Other parts of the network, like I mentioned, Blacksky earlier, they operated just fine, totally independently. So that's a big part. Just the practicality of it is, can other nodes in this network operate independently? Are there things left that bluesky runs that everybody else is dependent on, and if so, what can we do to fix that? A big part of that, too, is when people look at this. You know, this gets a little nerdy into the whole, like, stack and the protocol. But people look at the design of this network and they, you know, like to find out, like, is it truly decentralized or not? And there is one thing at the heart of it that is absolutely, like, no company should control, and that's the identity directory, like the lookup. So the actual, you know, when you log in your identity in the atmosphere, like, where does that lookup happen? And it's kind of like DNS on the web when somebody looks up a URL. And so we have been running that core directory, and we're actually in the process, we've set up a Swiss nonprofit with a separate board, completely separate entity, and we've handed over that directory and in the process of handing over the domain to it. So. So that's one example. We also, the protocol spec itself, we're handing to the ITF. There was last week the ITF met in Vienna, and AppProto is now a work stream, an official work stream to make. Take that out of Blue sky and hand it to the itf, and it's going to become a blessed Internet standard with, you know, run by a completely separate entity. So we're constantly sort of taking all the pieces that we had to bootstrap and handing them off to other, other entities. And we're super serious about that. So the end state is that we, yes, we are one app of many, one company of many running in this protocol. And we won't control the protocol. The parallel to Automattic is that WordPress, the core software that Automattic is hosting, is open source and it's gpl. So anybody can use it, but anybody who uses it and changes it has to give back to open source. So that in our case, it's a protocol where anybody can build on the protocol and you can. You know, the beauty of building on AppProto is as a developer is all the data is owned by users and it's accessible to any other app. But as an app, then your data also goes into those user repositories, so it makes it better for everybody else on the network. So there's a. Similar to the way open, Open source gets better through collaboration, this network gets better through just everybody having their data shared and remixable and interoperable. And when you get that balance right, where you have a company that helps bootstrap the whole thing, but by definition keeps itself separate and makes sure it can't control the shared resource, then it can work. We did this successfully with Automattic and WordPress. Automattic became a big company. WordPress became a huge open source ecosystem. And then tons of other companies formed around it. And our test case was always okay, what if Automattic goes out of business or gets acquired by somebody evil? Is WordPress going to be okay? And that's why we put the WordPress trademark into a foundation, so the company couldn't mess with it. And those, it's complicated to set those things up. And this is one of those, like not even five years, like 20 years out decisions, like if this thing gets big, will it be truly independent or could somebody come in and change their mind and mess with it? And we think about that constantly at Bluesky and getting that balance right and again handing off pieces so that it's not going to work. If one company tries to control it, we're just right back at square one. And we're just another walled garden, which is completely the opposite of what we're trying to achieve.

[Nilay Patel]

We're going to take another quick break here. We'll be right back.

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[Nilay Patel]

Welcome back. I'm talking with bluesky CEO Tony Schneider about an existential question for the company. How is it going to make money? There's a lot of drama with WordPress and the open source community and other companies monetizing open source in different ways. There's drama with the foundation. I'll set that all aside. People can go listen to Matt's episodes. We did it in detail and certainly we'll have to and back. I like talking to Matt a lot, but that's all coming for you too, because at some point all of this has to make money. And a real theme on decoder is we've set up complicated structures so that capitalism can't ruin everything. We just had Proton in the show complicated Swiss foundation structure so that capitalism can't ruin everything and all the promises they make to their, to their customers. You don't have that problem yet. As far as I can tell, there's, there's no revenue flowing into this and probably thus no push to make that revenue number go up in bad ways. At some point there is going to have to be some revenue. You're an investor. I'm assuming you want to get paid out into your own fund. How is Blue sky going to make money on the app level and how is the protocol going to make any

[Tony Schneider]

money the way we're going to make money as a company? We're only interested if that model, if that economic model works for the entire atmosphere. So we, we make money when everybody else makes money. So that rules out a bunch of things that would be purely app based. I'm not ready to announce the specifics, but we will start monetizing this year. And the way I look at it is there's already money being made on this network. People are, again, we're, we're sending lots of traffic to people who then convert that traffic into subscriptions. And I think our job is to just help more of that happen so that, you know, we're right now, it's, it's just organic and we can, we can build things into our app and into the protocol that just make it easier for people to start making a livelihood on this protocol and start doing commerce with each other. So that's, that's the direction we're headed in. We're going to do it in a way again where the whole idea is for the pie to get huge and for us to be small slice of a big pie and for, for everybody to make money. And if we can, we can help you as a publisher make more money then we can, we can do business together.

[Nilay Patel]

I know you said you weren't going to do specifics, but I have to, I have to poke at this a little bit. Your options, if you want a small piece of a big pie, are we're going to let you run ads for your subscription newsletter and then that'll convert. And so that's Facebook's model, right? We're going to let you run ads at whatever CPM and that'll your return on ad spend will be high enough so that enough subscribers signed up based on how many ads you were on. And the other one is we're just going to take a percentage of every sign up fee. Which direction do you think you're headed in?

[Tony Schneider]

Would Definitely be the latter. And, but only we would only take a, a percentage of anything that we actually enable. So if we send extra traffic to you, then be a percentage of that.

[Nilay Patel]

So basically affiliate style monetization. So if I'm selling a newsletter for $10 a month and you send me a new subscriber, you're going to get

[Tony Schneider]

some of that back affiliate style and in a way that works for the entire network. So anybody on the network that sends you traffic can participate. So we want, we want everybody to have a part in it.

[Nilay Patel]

Can you decentralize the billing and financial layer of that?

[Tony Schneider]

We can make it work in a decentralized network. Billing does require some centralized trust and that's certainly something we're looking at.

[Nilay Patel]

I asked you that question because I was terrified of a crypto scheme basically. But it does not sound like you're going to do crypto schemes.

[Tony Schneider]

No, no, it's, I mean, you know that. Similar intentions, but definitely not a crypto approach.

[Nilay Patel]

One of the things that you've been describing is we have to build all these structures to withstand the bad incentives, right? If somebody shows up and buys Blue sky and they've got bad intentions or they just want to use it to do crypto schemes, we have to build the structure that will withstand it, adding monetization in whatever form. And I, I agree the network should be monetized in some way that creates a bunch of these incentives. At first blush, right? It will be your first contact with those incentives. You have some experience with this. Certainly you've been thinking about it. How do you expect that to go both with your team and with the user base of bluesky itself?

[Tony Schneider]

The team is eager to figure this out because we realize that there has to be an economic model for this network. Otherwise we're in the early bootstrap phases still. And lots of people are getting excited to build on this. But it's the number one question, you know, for, for my team, from the rest of, you know, from all the people, buildings like, so how. What's that model going to be? So everybody's eager to figure this out and to do it in a way that, yeah, we don't, we don't fall into the, the traps of trying to create the incentives that you, We've seen in other networks just cause all kinds of unintended consequences. Looping back on the WordPress example, it can work really nicely. I mean WordPress, it's a slightly different model because it's a hosting model, but there are thousands and thousands of WordPress hosts out there that are doing just fine, and it just works. You can host your site anywhere, you can move it anywhere. They compete to be the best host for your content. But it's a very, it's a very good model that hasn't, you know, as far as I can tell, it hasn't created any, you know, anybody to take all the market share or create these weird incentives where the product gets worse. There's a very nice dividing line there between, well, I'm your host, and then you go and do whatever you want. You can, you can build an ad network if you want. You can build a store, you can build something else.

[Nilay Patel]

We're not.

[Tony Schneider]

Our business model doesn't dictate what your business model should be. Which is kind of what happens in these other networks when it's only ads. Like, you know, like, oh, yeah, come here, build your following on here, and then we're going to put ads on it. And if you want to do anything else, like, no, no, no, it's going to be ads. So it's, you know, those are the kinds of things we think about. And yeah, talking about irreversible decisions, I mean, that's going to be a huge one. Right when we start to zero in on the right model to make sure that again, we can picture this scaling to billions of users and all kinds of businesses emerging on this network, not just one type that we happen to think about.

[Nilay Patel]

You've mentioned Black Sky a handful of times in this conversation. I've been lucky enough to be at a dinner with Rudy, who runs Black Sky. He's prolific in talking about what it's like to actually build on the atmosphere and what a lot of the challenges have been. Right, because it hasn't yet really, truly been decentralized. And I now, now it's my turn to say I won't go into the weeds of the protocol, but there are parts of the Blue sky stack and parts of the atmosphere that have been pretty heavily centralized up until fairly recently. Is it easy to stand up a competitor in the way that you're describing? People can stand up competitors to WordPress and operate on their own, in their own universe, using the same tools and same access to, you know, and customers, or is there still work to be done there? Because it hasn't been easy up until now, at least, using the example of Blacksky.

[Tony Schneider]

Rudy deserves a lot of credit for taking those early risks when it was much harder to build and being the first to prove that it can be done. But it's getting easier and easier we are seeing more and more Blue sky and Black sky style networks pop up pretty often and we're actually seeing a whole bunch of energy in Europe. We've got Eurosky, we've got W Social just launched. There's another one I think that's about to launch. So it's getting easier and we're investing a lot to make it as easy as possible. In addition to being an open protocol, all of bluesky is open source. So you can take the bluesky app and just fork it and go do your own Blue sky. And that's great. But we're really also interested in people building other things that aren't microblogging on the network and making that super easy. So we're seeing Tangled is an example that a lot of people like to use recently because it's a great project, they raised VC funding. It's a social coding platform like a social GitHub that's of kind growing really nicely using AppProto for the social layer of the social coding aspect. There's nothing to do with microblogging, but it's another thing that we can collaborate and integrate. So people use both Tangled and bluesky. It all just works together. But those are examples where that's, it's, it's getting really easy to, to just build a new app on AppProto and make it, you know, have it a, have social functionality. It doesn't have to be an entire Blue sky style network that you have to run. We put effort into making it easier. But yeah, it was, you know, when Black sky started two, three years ago, it was a big lift. You had to be very technical to do it. Now it's gotten easier and easier. And finally, we haven't talked about AI yet. AI makes it even easier. I mean, a lot of the growth we're seeing now is, you know, you can point one of the AI coding tools at Proto and say, hey, build me a social app, build me a community. And that just makes it that much easier. And those are some of the tools and integrations that we're working on on Jay's new team. But that really changes the game pretty substantially for just how easy all this stuff is getting.

[Nilay Patel]

I do have to ask you the AI question here, Software CEO again. How do software companies work in the age of AI? Have you rethought your teams? Do you have the traditional product manager, designer, engineer, trio, or is everybody doing everything? It's a small team and you're the new CEO, so you have lots of opportunity to rethink everything.

[Tony Schneider]

It is very empowering once you get it right. I mean, we have to use our exploration team as an example. I mean, that's a three, four person team that's launching at very high velocity, launching brand new products. It's really fun when you have an existing company with existing resources and, you know, very senior, talented people can then go after a new greenfield opportunity with these new tools. That's when you see a ton of velocity. If you have an existing product with all the complexity of how it's been built, it's, you know, AI helps, but you're still dealing with that same complexity for a while. But I see it accelerate everything just in terms of the development pace. But yeah, you still need great product managers, you need great designers, you need how to build. The building part is faster, but what to build and the ideas are just as hard as ever in a way harder because there's so much noise out there and so many things popping every day. So setting yourself apart, building something just really great that lasts is, you know, just because it's faster with AI doesn't make it any easier.

[Nilay Patel]

We've talked a lot about standards and making protocol and the atmosphere a more standardized project at the IETF and whatever Swiss foundation is going to do name lookups. It feels like we're going to recapitulate icann, but again, that's a totally different episode of decoder and we'll come to that drama when everything is successful. There is another standard that has already gone through all this. There's Activity Pub. Mastodon runs on Activity Pub. Famously, Threads runs an Activity Pub. To whatever extent Threads runs on Activity Pub, there's an argument that Meta did all of that just to satisfy European regulators, and that's all it's there for. Have you talked to the Threads team about integrating with Activity Pub or moving them to the atmosphere Once you become an official standard, I imagine that must be easier for them to continue throwing bones to European regulators. That would be the big unlock, right? That is the hundreds of millions of users on a nominally open network. Have they shown any interest?

[Tony Schneider]

We have not talked to Threads. We're definitely talking to Mastodon and Activity Pub. They definitely feel we're very aligned. I mean, our missions are very aligned. We're all on Team Open together. And these are two different standards that do slightly different things. And some use cases for Activity Pub are great and some are great for AppProto.

[Nilay Patel]

What are use cases that are good in Activity Pub? And what are. What are use cases that are better on that Protocol.

[Tony Schneider]

So Activity Pub is based around this notion of a server. At the heart of it is you set up your own server, you control it, you run it, that's your community. And then all the servers can federate if you want, you don't have to, you can just run it by yourself or you can have, you can plug into the federation, into the Fediverse and then that's how their system works. So it works really well. If you. I think they have a lot of successful governments who want to set up their own server infrastructure and run their own community infrastructure. AppProto has a different goal. We don't have a server. At the heart of it, we have the pds, the personal data server. That is your data. So the heart of AppProto is personal identity and portability and ownership of that. So that you, whatever you create and the social graph that you create, is owned by you and lives wherever you want to host it. So it's really a federation of millions and millions of these tiny little personal servers that can all talk to each other. And that works if your social product is focused on people, not on an entire server with a community on it. So slightly different shape and they interoperate too. There's something called bridgyfed that connects these two worlds together. So if you want to, you've built products on this yourself. So if you want to post or publish across all of it, you can. And the end user doesn't even have to know. And that's. And that's the beauty of an open protocol is you shouldn't have like consumers of this should never even hear about these two protocols, right? It's like it's one of these things where you have to get the protocol right and has to be open, but then people should just forget about it. It should just disappear. The examples we use a lot is email and websites. If I'm on Outlook and you're on Gmail, we can just email each other. You never think about the fact that those are two completely separate systems. It just works. But on social media it just doesn't work that way. Right? If you're on Instagram and I'm on TikTok, we can't talk to each other. You have to do everything five different times and five different apps. And it's crazy making. So if we get this right at the protocol level, that just goes away. Just all this stuff just works just like email does or just like websites do. Our job is to make all of that work under the hood, but nobody has to think about it. In the end, you just have to, oh, one account. You log in anywhere and it just works. And all your friends are there and all your data is there and you never have to be, you know, locked in again into somebody's system and you can't leave.

[Nilay Patel]

This is very nice, but it's rare that two standards that nominally seek to achieve the same thing coexist forever.

[Tony Schneider]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

There's not two Bluetooths, there's not two WIFIs, it's not even two webs. People can argue with me about how many webs there are, but there's not even two webs. Right. Do you expect ActivityPub and App Protocol to coexist? Do you expect, I don't know, bluesky, to be able to show content from Mastodon servers and then slowly eat activitypub as a protocol? That's one very common pattern that kind of happens in these situations. Or do you expect long term coexistence?

[Tony Schneider]

I expect long term coexistence because both of these protocols have enough users and use cases that want to continue on and they can talk to each other when you want, but it's not, that's not the main use of it. And I don't. There's a lot of people who run Activity Pub instances who, they don't even want to talk to other mastodons. They just want to run their own thing and they don't want to talk to AppProda, but they can if you want. I don't know what's a good example from other, you know, from other platforms. But yeah, they're both going to be around for a long time and they don't. There's just slightly different tools. They're both in the social space, but they're, they're different tools that you reach to for different types of use cases. I'll put it this way for I, in my mind, both can be wildly successful and they don't. It's not one or the other like I don't need to app proto, doesn't need to eat Activity Pub to be successful or vice versa. We're already seeing that.

[Nilay Patel]

I want to end by just talking about the consumer app a little bit more. We've talked a lot about the protocol, the atmosphere, the standards. We've gotten all the way to the Internet Engineering Task Force in this conversation. We've been in the weeds of how the technology works and how it's governed. And right next to that is, well, it's an election year here in the United States and a lot of people truly believe that Blue sky is the wild progressive social media network and it is a bubble of one kind of. And X is a very different kind of bubble. It's the hard right network that has vastly more AI generated anime porn on it. And there's not something that is actually the global town square, right? That thing has maybe gone away and all the social networks have fragmented. Do you want Blue sky to have the reputation it has? Do you want it to get bigger? Do you think that the right answer is someone starts a mega Blue sky and it interoperates the way that it needs to? This is the perception of the consumer production. Do you want that to change and how would you change it?

[Tony Schneider]

Yes, we definitely want that to change. It is already changing. I mean there is. It certainly wasn't designed to attract one specific group of people. It works for anyone. What we see is there is a lot of political discourse on bluesky. On any of these open networks, people really engaged. What we've seen in the lead up to the election so far we've hosted a lot of live election feeds and we see a lot of really good feedback from our users, a lot of engagement, a lot of like, oh, this is actual really interesting content about this topic. Whereas on other platforms I think these election topics just get completely overwhelmed by slop and spam and it's just noise and chaos. And so what we're focusing on is just deliver a. A live experience. We do it around elections, we do it around sports as well, very successfully where the people on the network that participate get a really good experience and get really good content. And once we have that, then hopefully we can just keep expanding to more and more types of users and use cases. We're an open network for anyone and we don't want to serve just one type of user base. I've seen it already in the last few months really trend in the right direction where we just have more and more people show up and build their own corners of the network and it sort of balances out over time where you don't just have, you know, a few topic you're super deep on, topics you're super deep on, but it just gets more and more diverse and we don't. My opinion, yes, it's a public square, but we don't need everybody talking at the same time. It's okay if you, you know, if you're. Politics is very loaded but you know, if you're super into sports, you're not going to be into all sports. You're going to Be, you know, I'm super into the San Francisco Giants, so that's what I want to follow. I don't need to follow all of sports, and that's fine. And I think with. It can be like that with all topics. It just needs to be civil and positive. And we need to have the tools that if it goes off the rails, people can regulate it and can have a good experience instead of it just devolving into a shouting match.

[Nilay Patel]

By people can regulate it, you mean people can moderate their own feeds? Not. Regulators can moderate speech 100%.

[Tony Schneider]

Yes.

[Nilay Patel]

Just checking. That's important.

[Tony Schneider]

Build their own feeds, pick their own feeds. We have very good tools for people to mute and block and. And we spend a lot of energy on making sure it stays positive because, again, we're interested in social media that actually serves the common or the public good. And that's not going to work if it's just people yelling.

[Nilay Patel]

You've talked a lot about the network, even in this answer. I said, bluesky, the app has this reputation, and you started talking about the network. And it's true. The network can serve everybody. Anybody can start whatever kind of app on the atmosphere they want, and they can go target the users they want. But I want to push you again on Blue sky, the app, the thing that has a brand that exists out in the world that is totally divorced from the technical specifications of the atmosphere. There's Blue sky, the app, and it. It does have a reputation. Do you want more users from X to leave X and join Blue sky and expand what that brand is for people?

[Tony Schneider]

Yes. I mean, it can stay on X too. You don't have to pick one or the other.

[Nilay Patel]

Have you talked to Elon about federating X? I suspect he's not interested.

[Tony Schneider]

No. Same answers with threats. I mean, you know, it would be full circle. Right. Blue sky started inside Twitter, and then Twitter went away and became X. And then if X adopted at Proto, then the whole original idea of the project would actually come to fruition.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, this is Jack Dorsey saying Twitter wants to be a protocol, not a product. And here we are, and that's Blue sky in. In big ways. But it is a product. Like, it is also a product. It people know what that logo means. Political pundits say the Blue sky crowd. And that has it. That signifies whatever they want it to signify. And I'm just wondering if you want to break that branding in any. In any meaningful way.

[Tony Schneider]

Yeah, we want to expand it up. Breaking is, I think, maybe the wrong word. But yes, we want to expand more and more so that Blue sky means not just one thing, not just liberal politics, for example. And again, I would point to sports as an example. From the last year. We've made a very concerted effort to bring on sports leagues and sports writers and it's worked really well. There's a ton of sports conversation now on the app and those people come here for the sports, not for the liberal politics. So it's possible to expand in politics. It's probably our hardest challenge because we have one type of user base there that's very active. That's good too. They are super active and they're very much at the forefront of politics and very engaged and very informed. But yeah, I think we can just keep adding more communities so that it balances out.

[Nilay Patel]

It feels like we're going to have to have you back, particularly as these private communities launch to talk about where things go from here. But this has been great. Thank you so much for being on Decoder.

[Tony Schneider]

Thank you very much for having me.

[Nilay Patel]

I'd like to thank Tony Schneider for taking the time to join me on Decoder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed it. Let us know what you thought about this episode or really anything else at all. Dropping us Align. You can email us atdecoder the verge.com we really do read every email or hit me up directly on Threads or Blue sky. We're also on YouTube. You can watch full episodes at Decoder Pod. It's the same handle on TikTok and Instagram. They're a lot of fun. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe over to your podcast. Decoder is a production of the Verge and part of the Boxing Podcast Network Shows. Produced by Kate Cox. Nick Statt. This episode was edited by Eileen Felix. Our Editorial Director is Kevin McShane. Decoder Music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. We'll see you next time.

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