Rapid Response: Bluesky’s bold plan beyond the ‘X-odus’, with COO Rose Wang

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

Belief that communities create echo chambers. I think that Communities actually help us. Learn about new ideas in a safer environment.

That's Rose Wang, COO of super hot social media platform Blue Sky In recent weeks, millions of users have been switching to Blue Sky from Elon Musk's X platform. That's created both new opportunities and new challenges for Blue Sky's small 20 person team. I wanted to talk to Rose because Blue Sky represents a major shift underway in social media as dissatisfaction with the big platforms grows. Rose talks about why Blue Sky isn't just an alternative to X or a liberal refuge, but part of a new social web that prioritizes closer personal connections, data privacy, and democratization. For anyone eager to understand where the online world is headed, Rose offers terrific insights. Let's get to it.

I'm Bob Safien. En this is rapid response I'm Bob Safi and I'm here with Rose Wang, the COO of Blue Sky. Rose, thanks for being here.

Thanks for having me, Bob. So In the wake of the presidential election, we've witnessed a a so-called exodus, right? Millions of users leaving Elon Musk's. X platform and finding their way to Blue Sky. You guys have added millions of new users, up to twenty four million active users in total. Huge growth for a company with Only around twenty full time employees.

What have the last three weeks been like for you? It has been Uh hyper growth phase that A lot of companies uh dream about in some ways. Um, and so I think the personal experience is that sleep has been a fifth priority in my life, when it maybe it's been in the top three in the past. But also I would like to say that

You know, this isn't the first time we've experienced growth. We experienced a lot of growth in February of this year when we launched Blue Sky to the public, and we had over a million Japanese users join in a week. And then sometime between April and August. We also had millions of Brazilians join.

Blue sky. We've been experiencing growth across the world. It's really awesome to experience it in your own backyard because You know, we have our a server down the street who's like, Oh my gosh, I've seen you on the news. And so that's really cool to have people um from all walks of life. kind of come out and and um know what we're working on enjoying blue sky and that's really fun. But

It's important for us to note that, you know, I think there's a general need for a new social media platform, not only in the US, but truly all over the world. And we're really excited to fill that that hole. Yeah, the the Brazil uh burst was in part because Twitter X was having some Disruptions there, right? They were having some issues. The surge that you've had most recently after the election was it something you were sort of prepared for? Did it come as a surprise?

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

Twitter initially. And so we were ready for a large number of users to come on all at once. But then in the like, could we have predicted the wave that was gonna happen and when it was gonna happen? Absolutely not, because I think we would have probably more staff members. But We have managed quite well with the team that we have and our priority is let's keep the app online. Mm. Was there a a moment? When you realize like Oh, something different is happening here.

I think the thing that felt really different about this surge was that Momentum w continued much longer than it did. In a lot of other countries. And there was no clear end date. For Brazil, for example, you know, like you mentioned, it was because X was banned in Brazil. We had also assumed that X would get unbanned in Brazil. So we knew that there was a certain time uh limit that We were able to win over a lot of Brazilians and tell them about what Blue Sky was. But here, I think that people are coming to Blue Sky for very different reasons. I think, you know, people will attribute it to a certain event, but I oftentimes say that like people don't leave their homes after one thing that

goes wrong. After so much disappointment, the trust has been lost and it's some sort of event that just Tips you over the edge. Um we started to see this growth when X made another announcement about their difference in block, that it was gonna be more of a strong mute, but that was not the first time they announced it and they hadn't even enacted it. But already that night, 500,000 users came onto Blue Sky. And so we were seeing already that users were very unhappy with the experience they were having on other social platforms like X. And

I think that the reason they're coming here is actually something a lot deeper, which is There's dark patterns happening. They're not feeling good. They're not making friends. They don't feel safe. It's these like very fundamental human needs that are driving people away. Mm. So for listeners who who may not be as familiar, can you describe what Blue sky is and sort of what makes it different than X. Absolutely.

Uh I do love this question, so thank you for asking because a lot of people assume that we're just an X alternative, um, but we're very different. We are an open social media platform that puts users first and gives users choice. What does that look like? Well, we're used to being trapped in one algorithm where it's controlled by a small group of people, and with Blue Sky, that's no longer the case. Users have built over 50,000 different feeds, including I think like five cat feeds, more than 200 feeds about Taylor Swift. There's like wrestling feeds, F1 feeds. And the possibilities are endless. Um, all we're seeing is that people really like the chronological feed. And so we we're seeing that people want a lot more control over their experience and know who they're talking to. And these feeds just they provide a cosier corner to connect with other people with either similar interest or You know, have similar dispositions because there's just no longer a single dominant algorithm that only promotes either the most polarizing post and/or the biggest brands. And so

You actually get to interact with real people and have fun conversations again. Even if the the size of that group that you're interacting may not an advantage that y you know, it's a more intimate group that you're interacting with. Yeah, that's a question that keeps coming up, right? I I think there's a lot of people who are worried, have we completely lost the town square?

Internet. unbundled and broken up into all these smaller communities where people are tired of a global stage. And you know, I think that It's hard to point To a point in time and say that

All of time will look like that point in time. We've seen that history is cyclical and we've seen that there's generally a unbundling and a rebundling that people tend to go through when they go through periods of Hey. You know what, the the experience I had on the town square or in the town square wasn't serving me. And so that's what's driven them to unbundle and find these smaller communities. We believe that there will be a time again when people want

To know what's happening and be in a larger conversation, and there will be a rebundling. And so rather than just build one app, what we've built is. The plumbing, the infrastructure for many apps to be built. That's the whole point of blue sky is people say, you know, what does decentralization mean? And What I say is it just means that it's more democratic. It means it we can build blue sky and you can build green sky and yellow sky. And users or voters can go and choose where they want to live based on

the experience that's provided, rather than l locking them in and forcing them to stay in a home that they don't like. I've noticed that Recently blue sky's become kind of a a liberal refuge from the right wing tilt of X. I know Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez AOC became your first user to hit a million followers. How much do you talk about that on the team? Like is that

that kind of focus community feature or or is it a bug? Like how do you think about that? Well, first of all, we're not building the infrastructure for a specific political viewpoint. Or a specific group of people. The goal is, hey, here's open infrastructure for global conversation and here are the tools That give you the ability to create your own experience upon that infrastructure. And so, hey, go create your own space.

Go figure out what your community needs to feel safe and we won't disrupt What you want unless You're building it in our society, and it goes against our terms of service and community guidelines. In which case you can start another server and just leave our society and build your own. We actually take a lot of inspiration from just how are humans not online? How do they interact at parties? How do they interact in communities? I think there is a maybe like a wrong

belief that communities create echo chambers. I think that Communities actually help Us. learn about new ideas in a safer environment. And so

What we've learned is putting people in a town hall. And having other people screen their extreme opposite viewpoints. at you probably won't change your mind. But if you're in a community with people with adjacent viewpoints and then you have other things that are similar to them, you're actually more likely to take on that adjacent viewpoint. And so we actually think that Blue Sky provides both of those experiences where, you know, you have all these custom feeds that are these smaller communities and smaller worlds where

Go and have fun and feel safe and connected. And then when you're feeling more abundant and ready to go and discover new and maybe not so familiar experiences, you can go to the discover feed, which is the global algorithm with just one swipe, and then go and see what's happening across the world. And so we're saying you don't have to choose, depending on how you feel, That moment that afternoon You can choose do you want a smaller community experience or do you want the larger community experience?

It's interesting'cause the the assumption what you're saying is the assumption that social media sort of has to feed an echo chamber. It doesn't necessarily have to work that way. It's the way the algorithms And the experience is constructed that's sort of distancing me from people who are different from me? It's Really interesting what the algorithms have been doing because it's been done in a black box. We don't know what's happening.

For the first time ever, Blue Sky's kind of opening that box because we've provided something different, which is chronological feeds as a completely different platform. That's the true A B test that's happening. And what publishers have discovered, for example, is I believe The Guardian um came onto Blue Sky recently, and then their first week. They had three hundred thousand followers on Blue Sky. And They had more engagement and And that first week on Blue Sky, then they did all of twenty twenty four.

on X, even though they have ten point eight million followers on X. I think that tells you that the algorithm has some sort of manipulation. The whole point of other Centralized social platforms like Meta

and like X is that they're incentivized to lock you in and not show you what they're doing. That's the whole point of the centralized authorities. They can go do whatever they want. My analogy is it's like moving to a city where If you wanted to change the color of your door, you have to go and petition the city government. And we're like, how is that possible that that's how the online world works when we don't want that? And so I think ultimately what we're trying to provide is a toolbox for you to go and paint your door yellow or green or blue or whatever you want, because that's your prerogative. And that's the way that social should work online. Back in two thousand seven when I first started running Fast Company, we put Mark Zuckerberg on his first magazine cover, and Facebook at that time had 19 million users, you know, smaller than you are. How

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

For those of us who've been around uh since the uh two thousands, we probably r remember Zinga and all these other experiences that were built alongside Facebook and all the other social platforms because developers were building really awesome experiences at the parent companies weren't able to go build because they were focused on something else. And it was the entire ecosystem of those games, other experiences that made it really fun for users. But as soon as Facebook then wanted to go into that industry, they would then shut down that API and close down those dev. Companies that helped the ecosystem grow overnight. And so we haven't seen innovation in social in so many years. One of the ways that we saw this was with Hinge. When Hinge first started the dating app, they used Facebook's API to see who you're friends of friends with, because that's a really good proxy for maybe who you'd like to date. As soon as Facebook tried to come out with their own Facebook dating app, they closed down that API and Hinge no longer had access to

The Friends of Friends API. Also, the Facebook dating app never really took off. And so that entire service was just cut off from the world. But imagine if that was open. That's how so a blue sky is built, where anyone can go and build a Friends of Friends dating app, or take your Blue Sky post, run an AI over and tell you of anyone in Blue Sky, who's your best match. How cool would that be? And so For us, it's hey, there are so many other experiences that can be built on top of the protocol that we built at Proto. And in our atmosphere, we can serve anybody who's online. So our market is as big as the internet.

That's the way we see it. It's fascinating to hear Rose talk about the impact that a small group can have in our big tech dominated world, and how Blue Sky sees itself as a facilitator of new habits and new ideas, rather than just the next social media app. After the break, we'll dig into how Blue Sky is responding to Australia's new rules banning those under 16 from social apps, plus its approach to content moderation, AI data scraping, and more. Stay with us. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI.

There can be two types of companies. Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future? That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone.

Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives. Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely for From Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there.

Before the break, we heard Blue Skies Rose Wang talk about how her small team is coping with a huge influx of new users. Now Rose talks about why Blue Sky CEO says they won't, quote, insidify the platform with ads. Plus, Blue Sky's response to Australia's ban on social apps for those under 16, how the company is dealing with content moderation, its approach to AI data scraping, and more. Let's jump back in. Many blue sky users have noted the the positive vibe of of the app. I know when I signed up, the trending topic of the day was

Public library appreciation, which was not something I was getting on my other feeds. Is positivity something you're trying to encourage? That's a really Cool, first of all, awesome turning topic. The

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

One of the reasons why we're seeing a more positive environment on Blue Sky. I think a lot of people know Blue Sky before this big wave this uh month as the app last year that had invite codes and wouldn't let people in. And uh We didn't do that to be hot. We did it because we weren't ready on a moderation front. We weren't ready on a federation front for people can have choice in feeds. And so it was a decision of do we open up invites so when everyone comes in, they get the same experience on web two, which just locks them in, doesn't give them choice, and then makes them feel unsafe. Or do we stick to our principles and build a strong moderation team, and then also give users choice not only in feeds, but also moderation services.

And so we chose the latter. We didn't know that that was the right decision'cause for many months Threads came out of the woodwork and s you know, they started with a hundred million users, and that's really hard for a tiny startup to look at and say, I think we can beat that. And so I think in hindsight, um, we're really very appreciative of The choice to stick to our principles.

And that's partly why we have a more positive and safe environment, but also it could have gone any way. And This is w how startups work is you know, you write history as you build the plane. And I think if you can stick to your principles then Hopefully it works out. And so far it has for us. Content moderation has been a flashpoint for m many s social apps. I mean, you recently expanded your pool of content moderators from

twenty five contractors to a a hundred. What is your content moderation philosophy? Like how much is about weeding out bots versus enforcing certain kinds of community standards? How do you think about it? Moderation is governance. I think we think about it as like a checkbox to just get rid of bad actors, and that's I think. It's never gonna create a safe environment if you don't come at it proactively and think about moderation as a reactive behavior. So for us, the way that we've thought about governance is we we've taken a note from kind of like how court systems work, which is you can't just have one court system. taken uh requests from hundreds of millions of people, which is basically how most other social media platforms work. And so the way that Blue Sky has envisioned moderation is what we call stackable moderation, where we've given a lot of the tools that

have previously only been available to the moderation team to users. What does that look like? There are a lot of behaviors in between intolerance, hate speech, misinformation, and users having a bad time. And and on most other social media platforms, there's really nothing you can do about it except to petition the moderation team. Here on Blue Sky, we've given people moderation labelers where they can go and label Rude Post. Movie spoilers, political content, deep fakes, just there's so many different other types of unpleasant

Accounts that we want users to be able to go and adjudicate for themselves. Those are basically like lower courts and you can go and petition the users who run those labelers. And then we would go and resolve essentially like larger problems like this labeler violates our terms of service, and then we'll take this service down or disconnect it from Blue Sky. And so it's kind of taking a page out of Reddit's playbook of hey, let's give those tools to community. Members to go and govern their own spaces, but on top of Reddit's manual tools, we've given more programmatic tools that are much more powerful. I have to ask you where Blue Sky stands on the recent ruling in Australia banning people under 16 from using social media. Your your CEO uh and partner, Jay Graber, recently misspoke on UK radio saying your minimum sign up age is 18, when in fact it's 13. Where are you on this?

We understand that social has been harmful for a lot of teens and There definitely needs to be solutions to make sure that bullying, harassment, the the type of content that's shown to them when they're extremely vulnerable and still trying to figure out who they are. And so Is social media serving teens today? No. And We recognize that.

That said, there are many teens. Like myself, when I grew up I grew up in Nashville, Tennessee, there were very few Asian Americans. in my community. And where I would go and find others.

to connect with would be online. And I think that there is a positive to what social does serve. Social should still be available for them to go and connect. And so what we hope to do is there's actually a lot of innovation that hasn't been done. Like, can you create an app that's Mostly targeted towards younger folks on Blue Sky. We have a fire hose of data, and then the positive certain types of data gets fed to maybe the

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

Is there a way in which we can provide a marketplace where there's lots of different experiments happening and users are voting with their feet? And that's a more democratic process in which we can evolve social. Your C O J Also said this week that the company wouldn't have been a little bit. And shidify its platform with ads. So the business model will be based on subscriptions?

So our first business model is subscriptions, where we won't put features like Speech. very core features behind a A paywall. There'll be more features that help with self expression, like custom avatar frames.

you know, higher resolution image uploads and views. But You know, another business model we're thinking about, and what we like to see is what are users doing on the app where they're finding a lot of value, and how do we then amplify that behavior rather than force a new behavior? And so one of the things we're excited about is The Blue Sky app is created by not just us. It's created by lots of users, right? 50,000 different feeds that are created by users. And these users are paying each other on Patreon or Kofi. They're supporting

their livelihoods. And so we want to be able to build the payments network where we can help more transactions happen in more volumes. And so we'll take a percentage of that transaction. And so We did not lock ourselves into an advertising business model, which is why Jay said that we we can't insitify your experience with ads, because you can just leave. We've open sourced the Blue Sky app. So anyone can copy and paste the code and create Green Sky overnight. And so for us, our incentives are aligned with the user. Which is why I think most people are having a better experience on Blue Sky, because we're ensuring that they are, or else we know they'll leave. You've also sort of differentiated yourselves by saying that

Your user data won't be mine to train AI. You're not gonna sell that data. Now user content. Is still in the open domain of the internet, though, right? Like it's out there to be scraped. But you won't intentionally sell it. Am I understanding that? The right way. Yeah. It's a very difficult problem, and so

With data. We had to choose when we came out are we going to make our data private or public? Private is what Meta Threads X has done is

They own your data and they're training their own proprietary AI models that they're profiting off of. from your data and your post. We've chosen a completely different path that's much more like Reddit, which is where open More public. And

That does mean that any open source model, any AI person out there can go and take that data and train. However, we're taking a page out of Uh The web. Uh

Every web page can be scraped by developers. What we've done on the web, though, is that we have allowed uh different websites to express consent. We want our data to be scraped, or we don't want our data to be scraped. It's still up to the developer to respect that expression, but at least the ability to express consent has been given. And so we're gonna follow that on blue skies. We're going to implement a feature where you can express whether you want your data to be trained on or not. It's up to the developers and AI companies. To follow that. There are lots of interesting open source models that academics are training on to you know help.

Better moderation systems. be built to help Safety. across the web. And so Blue Skies data in that way is actually quite helpful for those academics. And so We always ask.

Please look at this with nuance. It's a very complicated issue. Blue sky. has promised as a company we're not gonna be profiting off of your data for generative AI models. Because that's not the business we're in. We're trying to build a new layer of the internet for social. And so that's our directive, that's our promise. But we still want to go and make partnerships with AI companies to set a precedent to show hey. You don't have to do this. People have expressed consent. There's tons of data out there.

It's gotta be hard handling the current growth. And the interest from people like me, and at the same time, the opportunity for the future, which is suddenly way different. How do you balance all this? How do you prioritize? That's the key word, Bob, prioritize. I think that in the midst of A million opportunities and so many people to talk to. We have to be very clear on who we're serving.

And why? I think what's been very clear for our team the last few weeks is That blue sky is a home for independent creators, journalists, Publishers, entrepreneurs who want to build a presence online. There has been probably dark patterns happening for the last ten to twenty years that we haven't understood. And most

Platforms are incentivized to lock people in and not link out, right? If you post a link You're probably gonna get depromoted in the algorithm. And Hank Green actually posted a YouTube video about this where he did an experiment of posting on. Threads, X and Blue Sky, the same posts. And then some posts with certain words, some posts with certain links and no links. And it was kind of wild what he saw. Like on threads, when he posted a link, he'd maybe get 60 likes. And On blue sky

He gets a thousand likes. That's That's actually kind of wild, how different That engagement metric is something's happening. And so we do know that

People want to build a livelihood online. They want to build their own brand that they can control. They want to own the relationship with their community. And Blue Sky's trying to make that easier for all everyone new who's trying to do that today. And your your growth from here, I mean, we we've talked about this, the big bursts have come from in some ways these external events. Like To what extent do you expect that sort of

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

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

then everyone else will come. We're in a really interesting time in history where democracy is being questioned in general. Like is this a process by which Governance should work. And Blue Sky as an online solution for society is a more democratic way to build online communities. And so that is the fight that we're in. And that's what we believe is at stake, which is why sleep is a fifth priority, because we all very much believe that Democracy. needs to continue to uphold and we can only show.

We can't tell. Mm. Well, Rose, this has been great, and thank you for uh for giving up some of your sleep to be in with us today. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having me, Bob. Blue sky really is in the center of a swirl.

А хоптформом фрата, а те сами там а гачек момент. Blue Sky was conceived by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey when he was CEO at Twitter. And so Blue Sky has the technical capacity to handle user demand growth. But it's the social and cultural elements, internally and externally. That really define a buzzy business's impact over time.

Listening to Rose's very clear principle-based explanations, it's a great reminder that even in our tech-obsessed AI-fueled world, It's the human choices and priorities. Та детерне і суд, how we succeed. And how we respond to that success. Ам Боб Сафін.

Thanks for listening. Rapid response is a wait what original. I'm Bob Safian. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our producer is Alex Morris. Assistant producer is Masha Maku Tonina. Mixing and mastering by Aaron Bastanelli.

Theme music by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcasts is Letal Malad. For more, visit rapidresponsshow.com.

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