At one of my first Bluesky team retreats, a colleague offhandedly commented, “These are the good ol' days.” In early 2023, Bluesky had only a handful of users and a team of under 10 people, and I already knew he was right.
The same week I started working at Bluesky, AOC and Dril joined the app as users. With such a start, I thought my experience could only go downhill from there. Instead, the years that followed proved to be a nonstop firehose that have taught me everything from the inner workings of the Brazilian Supreme Court to how furries are actually the backbone of the internet. I realized that everything is customer support and incentives rule everything around us. I'm still trying to figure out if the truth prevails in the marketplace of ideas, and I have complicated feelings around the ongoing experiment of social media. But through it all, I was in the trenches with a mission-aligned team of genuinely kind people. Even when I was trying to accomplish the Sisyphean task of reaching inbox zero, I still knew that I'd remember these moments as the good ol' days.
Today, there are more than 36 million people on Bluesky. A startup employee can only hope for rocketship moments of growth, and on this team, I was lucky to experience that over and over again.1 Recently, I read some posts discussing what that 36M number meant for Bluesky's future, with some users going so far as to analyze the per-second account creation rate. But data points can be used to back any narrative — to some, 36M is larger than the population of their country; to others, it's a speck on the World Wide Web. The better question, cloaked in marketing speak, is: Does culture happen there?
A year or so into the app's existence, we learned that a couple that had met on Bluesky had now gotten married. After someone posted in surprise and excitement when they became a Jeopardy clue, host Ken Jennings appeared in the thread with a congratulations... and then Bluesky itself became a Jeopardy clue. On this platform, artists secure commissions, literary agents sign writers, and shitposters post their way to gainful employment. That says more to me about the future of this app than any raw number could, and it leaves me feeling optimistic.2 I also believe that the arc of the social internet bends towards open networks, whether it's in the next few years or the next few decades.
The best part about an open network is that you never really have to leave. I'm rooting for Bluesky's success and the mainstream adoption of the AT Protocol. It's been an adventure — and Bluesky's good ol' days are just getting started.
What's next for me?
I'm taking a few months to log off. I might learn how to read again.
In August, I'm headed a few miles south to pursue a J.D. at Stanford Law School. I'm particularly interested in tech and media law, AI policy, and the First Amendment, motivated in large part by the work I've done over the last few years at Bluesky and The Washington Post.
If you find yourself in the Bay Area and you've made it to the end of this blog post, let me know — I'd love to grab coffee with you.
Footnotes
April 2023 when everyone was clamoring for an invite code, September 2024 when X was banned in Brazil, and November 2024 after the U.S. election when it felt like the entire English-speaking population was clobbering our servers and signing up for accounts. ↩
When we're able to talk about AI in a nuanced way on this app, I'll know we've really made it... ↩
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