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WhenBlueskyCEOJay Graberwalked onstage atSXSW 2025 for her keynote discussion , she have on a large calamitous T - shirt with her hair pull back into a bun . At first glance , it might appear as though she ’s stick with the same playbook that so many char in technical school leadership have play before : downplaying her femininity to be accept seriously .
The truth is way more interesting than that . What might seem like your median black tonne - shirt is a subtle , yet clearswipe at Mark Zuckerberg , a CEO who represents everything that Bluesky is trying to work against as an open source social net .
The Meta founder and CEO has directly compared himself to the Roman emperor Julius Caesar . His own shirt declare “ Aut Zuck aut nihil , ” which is a play on the Romance phrase “ Aut Caesar aut nihil ” : “ Either Caesar or nothing . ”
Graber ’s shirt — which directly copy the fashion of a shirt that Zuckerberg wore onstage lately — says “ Mundus sine caesaribus . ” Or , “ a cosmos without Caesars . ”
With the way Bluesky is design , Graber is certainly frame her money where her mouth ( or shirt ) is . As a decentralized social internet build upon an open beginning model , Bluesky disagree from bequest platform like Facebook in that users have a direct , pellucid window into how the political program is being built .
“ If a billionaire came in and bought Bluesky , or drive it over , or if I decide tomorrow to change things in a way that people really did n’t like , then they could pitchfork off and go on to another app , ” Graber explained at SXSW . “ There ’s already coating in the internet that give you another path to view the internet , or you could build a new one as well . And so that openness warrant that there ’s always the ability to move to a new alternative . ”
Meanwhile , Meta has alienated users by altering how people have its platforms , and Bluesky has directly benefited from that . After Meta pushed controversial updates like training its AI on public user posts and cull its third - party fact - agree programme , Bluesky experienced salvo of user increase .
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Still , Bluesky has a long elbow room to go if it wants to topple the Roman Empire of Meta . While Graber ’s platform is closing in on33 million entire users , Meta has3.35 billion daily fighting usersacross all of its products : Instagram , WhatsApp , and Facebook . For Meta , that ’s around 40 % of the populace ’s population .
But for a unfledged social internet , Bluesky has create enough of a ethnical footprint that it ’s bind to stick around . Rome was not built — nor was it tumble — in a twenty-four hour period .
