Bluesky's Big Ambitions: What's Next for the Social Media Challenger?

I'm here with Tony Schneider, CEO and Rose Wang, COO of Blue Sky Social. Thank you so much for being here today. Really appreciate it. Tell us a little bit for people. I think most people know about Blue Sky in general, but tell us what you want people to know about the biggest differentiating factor as we move forward in this kind of new world of social media. I think that everybody thinks of Blue Sky as just an app. And we're now in a world where apps come and go. Not saying that Blue Sky app is going anywhere. What Blue Sky really is, is we're a whole app ecosystem where there are over a thousand apps that have daily active users now that other people have built off of the data, public data that people are sharing on Blue Sky. And what's so cool about that is now with so many more builders, there aren't as many to use or discover where those apps are happening. And so I would really think about Blue Sky as more of an ecosystem with our protocol where it's almost an alternative app store. You can find out all the cool things that are happening with gaming or dating apps. Yeah, and when you think about Blue Sky and this kind of different kind of ecosystem, talk to us a little bit about the community that you're seeing on there then, because again, different ecosystem, different type of community than other apps and other social media that people might be more familiar with. Yeah, we're seeing a lot of builders interested in building out in the open, building social experiences and building together. And it is very thriving. It's growing really nicely. As Rose mentioned, it's over a thousand apps. We just went over a thousand. That's growing about 20% month over month. So we're just seeing an influx of people who want it. Explore what you can do with social media and not just be stuck on the five apps that everybody else is using, but build anything you can think of for your friends, for your community. Yeah, and thinking about that and how it really is so different than all of these other apps that we all just sit there and go back to the same ones all the time, what do you think is the way that Blue Sky moving forward is going to truly continue to look different? Does it even feel like it's... competing against these other apps or is it really like you feel like you're in such a different kind of ecosystem as you're saying that it's not actually really a competition? Yeah I think when we just talked about the app layer it's a little hard to conceptualize and I like to compare it to like real-world examples and if you think about each of these apps as like a different party it's like imagine going to the X party where everybody asks you what do you do for work as the first question that you get into that party. Not the best vibe. If you go to the threads or Instagram party, it's like, how many followers do you have? It's also not the greatest party. And I think what we've developed at Blue Sky is we've collected all these really interesting researchers, academics, sci-fi writers, just people with really cool niche interests. And so it's almost like this is the party you go to where people are asking. What are you into? And so I think when you have that group of people, millions of people like that we've collected, as a jumping off point of where this can go, I think you're just going to see very different experiences that kind of bring back the old internet where we used to rabbit hole and you'd get to learn about narwhals and now you rabbit hole and you get radicalized and we don't want that. Yeah, that's a good point, that we don't want that. And it's interesting to look at how these other apps really do have their own personalities in this way that does kind of pigeonhole you. And it's a very different situation with Blue Sky. Thinking about moving forward, what does monetization look like for the app and for users as we kind of go into this next phase? Yeah, we already see a lot of commercial activity organically on the network. Our users are very generous in supporting other users and supporting independent gaming and art, fundraising. There's a real patronage model on the network. Our users believe in collective action and supporting each other and spreading the wealth instead of one company or one platform hoarding it all for themselves. So that's what we want to see more of and what we want to make easy. So user-to-user commerce. patronage, support, that's what we're going to enable. And thinking about enabling that especially, what do you do when it comes to privacy, right? Because such a big concern for everyone, especially with all this new AI, with all the new apps coming out. When it comes to privacy, especially when it comes to more monetization and people doing more transactions through the website, on the platform, what do you say to the people who are concerned about privacy? Well, we have great news for you, which is that Blue Sky built a new privacy or a new private protocol. So it's not just public data, but if you want private accounts, you want private groups, that now exists. Yeah, exciting for people moving forward. Thinking about some of these new features and what's going to be coming up, what can we expect from Blue Sky moving into maybe next year, down the line a little bit? What are we going to be seeing? The thing that's most exciting to me is the number of new types of experiences that anyone can make. And it's not just software builders. It's any sort of builder. And so what you're going to see is us moving in more of the direction of looking more like... Like, uh... As I'm saying, an alternative app store where we're showing all these other really cool experiences not happening on the Blue Sky platform, but whether that's Steam or Substack or some of these other cool experiences or apps that other people are building. And we're going to have that discoverability within the app to have people. Yeah, it's exciting to think about where this is all headed and what's next. When you kind of zoom out a little bit and think about the broader social media landscape, where do we think we're going to be with that in the next maybe year, couple years, five years? What do you think? I think social media as a whole, traditional social media, is becoming exhausting and tiresome and I think more and more people are leaving or just kind of very passively consuming. It's not really social media anymore, it's just media and I think what we're going to see is just an emergence of new things that people want to do with each other somewhere else and I feel like the I think the game of traditional social media is... It's getting exhausting for everyone. It's time for a break. Yeah, it really is exhausting. But we appreciate you being here and talking about it. Rose Wang, Tony Schneider, thank you so much for being here today.