Jay Graber (CEO of Bluesky)
Episode publishedPodcast: The Slow HunchThe Slow Hunch
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We sat down and thought through what is the end goal of decentralization, as in what purpose does it serve for the user? Because everything should be delivering value. And I think sometimes technologists get a bit hung up on technology for technology's sake. But then when you when it meets the real world, you have problems scaling. You users have problems using it, and it's hard to get the real world to bend to fit this perfect idea of a system. Instead, you know, we tried to start from human centered design, which is what do people want? What are why are they dissatisfied with social? What is
Welcome back to the Slow Hunch podcast. This week is a special treat. We're joined by Jay Graber, who is the founder of the Blue Sky social network and the app protocol, which is the protocol underlying the network. Jay and I get into her story of how she first started thinking about systems, decentralized and otherwise, and media and the importance of the shape of them, how they're perceived and used and why they might matter to us in different ways. Amazing conversation. I hope you enjoy. Well, Jay Graber, welcome to the Slow Hunch podcast. It's real pleasure to see you. Blue Sky has gotten
Yeah. Let's see. So I'm CEO of Blue Sky now. I started off with the Blue Sky project as an external contributor. So as a decentralized social expert working on systems in and around decentralized social media, doing research and writing and programming. And I started off my career as a digital rights activist.
You and I actually got to know each other, in the context of your work on decentralized protocols that when you're at Zcash. I actually think it makes a ton of sense that, you have a background in digital rights activism. There's a lot of politics embedded in our technology. Maybe going back to the to the early days, like, what got you interested in this gnarly basket of concepts?
Yeah. Well, it started pretty early because in college, I studied science, technology, and society. So this is a pretty small major that I didn't know existed at first. But as soon as I found it, I gravitated towards it because my dad was a math and science teacher growing up, middle school, high school. But he had me read a lot of these history of science, history of math books. And so I got interested at how science is a social process, and it happens in the context of a society, in the context of the people who do it, and technology as well. Like, everything kind of evolves together with th
The last ten years have been a really interesting kind of time where there's been the the mainstreaming of a a new like, a highly controlled type of social media system, Facebook and Twitter and and others, while at the same time, there's been all of this innovation in decentralized systems, largely starting with Bitcoin, or, let's say, inspired by things like Bitcoin, but other kinds of federated systems. And, I can't think of a better time in history to be someone, like, systems minded working in technology because, like, so many of the things are happening at once, and there's so much surfa
I mean, every system has trade offs, and every action has a reaction. So I think when we started getting Internet systems, like, you know, websites that started to be increasingly centralized, it starts to produce discontent at the edges because one system can't serve everybody's needs. And then that builds up over time, and then people start to invent new kinds of systems that redistribute power and maybe try to go away from complete centralization to complete peer to peer horizontal decentralization
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