When the CEO of Bluesky, Jay Graber, walked on stage in Sxsw 2025 for her opening discussion, she wore a large black t-shirt with her hair pulled in a bun. At first glance, it might seem that she follows the same manual as so many women in technological leaders have already played: minimizing her femininity to take seriously.
The truth is much more interesting than that. What might look like your average black t-shirt is a subtle but clear shot on Mark Zuckerberg, a CEO that represents everything Bluesky tries to work as an open source social network.
The founder and CEO of Meta compared directly to the Roman emperor Julius Caesar. His own shirt declared “Aut Zucuck Aut Nihil”, which is a game on the Latin sentence “Aut Caesar Aut Nihil”: “either Caesar or nothing”.
Graber’s shirt – which directly copies the style of a shirt that Zuckerberg recently carried on stage – explains “Mundus sine Caesaribus”. Or “a world without Caesars”.
With the way Bluesky is designed, Graber certainly puts his money where his mouth (or shirt) is located. As a decentralized social network built on an open source framework, Bluesky differs from the platforms inherited as Facebook since users have a direct and transparent window on how the platform is under construction.
“If a billionaire came and bought Bluesky, or took it back, or if I decided tomorrow to change things in a way that people really did not like, then they could get rid of another application,” Graber told Sxsw. “There are already applications in the network that give you another way to view the network, or you can also create a new one. And so that the opening guarantees that there is always the ability to move to a new alternative. »»
Meanwhile, Meta alienated users by modifying the way people experience its platforms, and Bluesky benefited directly. After Meta pushed controversial updates such as the training of its AI on public user publications and eliminating its third -party fact verification programs, Bluesky has experienced user growth gusts.
However, Bluesky has a long way to go if he wants to overthrow the Roman Empire of Meta. While the Graber platform closes on 33 million users in totalMeta has 3.35 billion daily active users On all its products: Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook. For Meta, this represents around 40% of the world’s population.
But for an emerging social network, Bluesky has created a sufficient cultural imprint for him not to hold. Rome was not built – and it was not overthrown – in one day.
