Up-and-coming social media startup Bluesky names Seattle as its headquarters on its official LinkedIn account. Chunks of its workforce, including much of its C-suite, call Seattle home. And locals functioned as experimental users and community-makers during its nascent stages. But Bluesky is not a Seattle company.
The hot new social media venture, which has welcomed millions of new users since the November election, establishing itself as a competitor to giants like Twitter/X and Meta-owned Threads, is incorporated in Delaware, according to COO Rose Wang. She said Bluesky listed Seattle as its headquarters on LinkedIn because it was forced to list a location. But Bluesky bills itself as fully remote and not really “located” anywhere in particular.
“To say that we’re a Seattle-based company is totally wrong,” Wang said.
Seattle can’t claim Bluesky as its own, this thinking goes, because no singular place — except, perhaps, Delaware — can claim the company. Wherever a Bluesky employee goes, there it is. This locational vagueness isn’t unique to Bluesky. A cohort of startups that see the internet’s future as rooted in decentralized technologies and power structures, rather than controlled by a small set of big tech companies, have frequently identified as “remote-based” in press releases or cheekily claimed “earth” as their location on social media channels.
The rise of remote work has enabled employers to hire people across geographies with fewer hiccups than before. But leaning into a remote-first identity also lets some companies overstate their global spread or relevance, obfuscate their origins, structure, workforce and funding — or even confuse regulators.
“Bluesky is a remote and decentralized company, just like the network itself,” wrote Bluesky CEO Jay Graber in an emailed statement. (Graber is a Seattle resident and her Bluesky profile picture was taken along the city’s waterfront.) In other words, Bluesky’s purported locationlessness mirrors the distributed nature of its products.
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. (Courtesy of Bluesky)
But pinning down what Bluesky is is almost as hard as pinning down where it is. Most prominently, Bluesky is used as a microblogging platform similar to Twitter/X: More than 10 million people have signed up for Bluesky since early November, moving away from Twitter/X as its owner, Elon Musk, strengthens his ties to President-elect Donald Trump and shapes a social media fiefdom in his image. Bluesky now boasts more than 25 million users — nearly triple its September tally. Twitter/X still has about 10 times the users, but another new microblogging site, Threads, is catching up to Twitter/X, claiming about 200 million users. Although user growth has slowed somewhat, Bluesky is still adding hundreds of thousands of new accounts every week.
Ownership is part of the equation. Another core driver from Twitter/X toward Bluesky is the latter’s lack of an algorithm curating the posts, ads and videos that cross your screen in the name of maximizing your time on the site to increase advertising revenue. Instead, posts are listed chronologically, and you can subscribe to a hodgepodge of feeds centered around specific communities or topics, making it as easy to exclusively follow local political activists as it is to saturate your feed with pictures of moss. You can also opt into a slew of third-party content-moderation and account-verification services, helping avoid the unsavory or threatening characters or themes encountered elsewhere on the internet. (Egregious violations, such as instances of child sexual abuse, are handled by the Bluesky team.)
This wraparound hyper-personalization lets people approach Bluesky as a “cozy corner,” Wang said, and expand outward from there through curatorial paths of their own choosing. In contrast, algorithm-driven platforms often show accounts a user doesn’t follow to keep them scrolling.
“Historically, it was all about creating this sort of ‘Twitter-for-you’ type of environment that would draw you further into this netherverse that catered entirely to your preconceptions,” said Katherine Cross, a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington Information School and the author of Log Off: Why Posting and Politics (Almost) Never Mix.
On Bluesky, Cross said, users are “still in the driver’s seat” and are not as drawn into the “oubliette” of an algorithm. In a twist, some content creators and publications have reported higher engagement rates on the new platform despite the lack of an algorithm, as Bluesky doesn’t downgrade posts that have external links or other content that might end a user’s session on the app (and thereby reduce the platform’s ad revenue).
This focus on user agency traces its origins to Bluesky’s original function as a protocol — open-source code and tooling that lets anyone operate their own miniature version of the social network. Founded in 2020 by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey as an offshoot of the microblogging giant, Bluesky’s initial mission was to design a social media infrastructure that could create a less singular Twitter-verse. Thanks to Bluesky’s protocol, which was launched in October 2022, users can now toggle between the main version of Bluesky (the one with millions of people) and the more proprietary, niche versions of Bluesky run by specific people or groups.
“There’s a false dichotomy … ‘Oh, you can only have small communities or big town squares,’” Wang said, adding that social media giants’ prior use of the “town square” metaphor to describe the civic function of their products didn’t reflect reality. “I think if anything, Bluesky is trying to mirror the offline world, which is [that] people exist in communities of varying sizes.”
Bluesky COO Rose Wang. (Courtesy of Bluesky/Stephanie Cowan)
Bluesky’s neighborhood-focused feel may therefore be familiar to Seattleites, Wang continued. “I think the culture of Bluesky in some ways looks like the culture of Seattle,” she said. “Place does affect the way we think about building an online community … choosing where we spend our time, where we’re learning from, how these local municipalities work, I do think absolutely affect the way we think about Bluesky.”
As local historian Roger Sale noted in his book Seattle, Past to Present, if cities are like trees, then Seattle is like a rhododendron, not a towering maple or oak; such sprawl and alterity may apply to Bluesky, too. Its 20 employees borrow heavily from municipal structures to understand their own function. For example, they’ve modeled decentralized content-moderation structures after the tiered system of lower and upper courts seen in the real world. Users are both consumers of Bluesky as well as its stewards, deputized through the moderation systems they develop or opt into.
Regardless of this rhetoric or intent, most people experience Bluesky as any other form of social media: a platform (an account, an app, a website), not a protocol (infrastructure for servers or many mini-Blueskies). And they’re more interested in the former than the latter, complicating efforts to shunt content-moderating responsibilities onto users. They may even be put off by the notion that content moderation should be largely self-administered, which basically puts them to work — and quite conveniently reduces moderation costs for Bluesky.
“You’re seeing a lot of that anxiety right now with how to moderate known transphobes and things like that,” Cross said. “Bluesky has had to take a more active approach to some of these questions, simply because people were coming in with expectations of Bluesky effectively being a centralized platform, which is at odds with the decentralized and protocol-y vision.”
Bluesky also has to adjust to the expectations of its venture investors, who come with their own host of user growth and revenue-generating demands. Bluesky is looking at new ways to monetize its platform, including paid subscriptions and advertisements — risking a return to many of the experiential shortcomings that turned users away from incumbents like Twitter/X in the first place. CEO Jay Graber also recently promoted Netflix’s activity on Bluesky: arguably a glitch in the “people over brands” rhetoric the company has previously espoused. Tellingly, Jack Dorsey resigned from the Bluesky board in 2024, saying the company was “risking all the mistakes [Twitter] made as a company” and could turn into just “another app.”
But being just “another app” may be part of its growth strategy. “I think that in the short term the only way for the user base for Bluesky to substantially expand is for it to seem like a traditional platform-based social media experience,” said Dr. Casey Fiesler, associate professor of information science at University of Colorado Boulder and a scholar of online communities, over email. “However, I do think that as time goes on more people will be able to wrap their heads around the concept of decentralized social media, and so the protocol will be more important in the future.”
Fiesler also said the fragmentation of social media risks affecting crisis communication strategies. That could include emergencies like a storm or a plane crash. “Even at Twitter’s height, not everyone was there, and so I think it’s important that we’re thinking beyond social media for important communication,” she added.
Cross questions what social media sites accomplish over all. “I am increasingly of the belief that social media is a net negative for politics of any meaningful sort, and is particularly dangerous for liberal democracies,” she said. Social media convinces users that the content they encounter online is representative of reality writ large, she said, which either “enforces horrid conformism” or “is about catering to individualistic wants.”
“The degree to which Bluesky addresses this, I think, is debatable, but I would also say it does a little better than some of its rival platforms,” Cross added.
At least publicly, Bluesky’s leadership says people are smart enough to recognize the inherent benefits of decentralized social media. “The belief in users comes from the belief in democracy,” Wang said. “We believe in the wisdom of the crowd.” It remains to be seen if that belief stays the course as millions of new users join the platform — along with the risks, costs, expectations and drivel accompanying them. Bluesky thinks there’s a protocol for that.
Topics: Seattle, Social media, Washington State