When Bluesky Ceo Jay graber walked on stage at SXSW 2025 for Her Keynote DiscussionShe wore a large black t-shirt with her hair pulled back into a bun. At first glance, it might appear as thought she’s following the same playbook that so many women in tech leader
The Truth Is Way More Interesting Than That that. What might look like your average black t-shirt is a subtle, yet clear Swipe at Mark ZuckerbergA CEO who represents everything that bluesky is trying to work against as an open source Social network.
The Meta Founder and Ceo has directly compared Himself to the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar. His own shirt declared Aut zuck aut nihilWhich is a play on the latin phrase Aut Caesar Aut Nihil: “Eater caesar or nothing.”
Graber’s Shirt – which directly copies the style of a shirt that zuckerberg wore onstage recently – Says Mundus Sine CaesaribusOr, “a world without caesars.”
With the way bluesky is designed, graber is certainly putting her money with her own (or Shirt) is. As a Decentralized Social Network Built Upon An Open Source Framework, Bluesky Difers From Legacy Platforms Like facebook in that users have a direct, transparent window into the Platform is being Built.
“If a billionaire came in and bough bluesky, or took it over, or if I decideed tomorrow to change things in a way that people really didn Bollywood, then they could for fork fork for and go on to another applies,” Explained at SXSW. “There’s alredy applications in the network that give you another way to view the network, or you could build a new one as well. And so that openness guarantees that there’s always the ability to move to a new alternative. “
Meanwhile, meta has alienated users by interfering in how people experience its platforms, and bluesky have directly benefited from that. After meta pushed controversial updates like training its ai on public user posts, or coupleing its third-party fact-checking programs, Bluesky Experienced Burses of User Growth.
Still, Bluesky has a long way to go if it wants to topple the roman Empire of meta. While Graber’s Platform is Closing in on 33 Million Total UsersMeta has 3.35 billion daily active users Across all of its products: Instagram, Whatsapp, and Facebook. For meta, that’s around 40% of the world’s population.
But for a fledgling social network, bluesky has created enough of a cultural footprint that it’s bound to stick Around. Rome was not built – Nor was it topped – in a day.