I spoke to Rose Wang - the COO of BlueSky in California for @newstalkfm.bsky.social. We spoke about lots of things incl the risk of being an Echo chamber and how it makes money. But i began by asking whether the post election surge had surprised even them? The Transcript is below too
https://open.spotify.com/episode/6mg8zWxBM7TGCb5OotRFTB?si=Mo2iq_J-RxyoT0CrmrGUiw
JOE: Were you surprised at the surge in memberships since Nov 6th?
ROSE: I always say that it's impossible to see the future. And so I don't think we had any predictions of what was going to happen with user growth, but I think a couple of things were true.
One, we were prepared for. a scenario of growth if that happened, because we've actually seen growth surges the last year. So it's happened in Japan, in Brazil, in the UK. And only recently are we seeing a huge growth surge in the US and Canada. And so I think that's why we're getting so much news right now, but it's something internally in the team that we've seen, dealt with and are prepared for.
Okay. And in terms of moderation, what's the difference between BlueSky and other micro blogging sites?
We've taken a page out of reddit where reddit has given community moderator tools to users so they can go govern their own spaces better but many of those tools are manual and you have to use keywords they don't go from subreddit to subreddit and so we've taken that even a step further by giving programmatic abilities to users to label posts that either have movie spoilers, and so you can go and label all movie spoilers across the network and hide those.
Or, if you don't want to see politics in your feed, you can choose a state where you see politics or don't, and you have that choice as a user. And what we believe is that Centralized systems have a really hard time meeting the needs of diverse communities, especially if their needs don't violate the terms of service in community guidelines.
And so we want to give those tools to users to go and govern their own spaces.
and is that referred to as a federated platform, allowing users to host their own version of Blue Sky at some stage?
Our moderation is, we call it stackable moderation, but it's the decentralized nature of Blue Sky that allows folks to basically build whatever we build.
And so a core principle of Blue Sky is whatever is first party, aka the company is building, any third party or any independent person or company can also build, whether that's feed or moderation service.
JOE: Which brings on the question of how you make any money because there's no adverts in the feed that I've seen thus far
the way that we think about making money is that first we're going to launch subscriptions at the end of this year. And what's really important about subscriptions is that we will not put core features like speech behind a paywall, but we know that users want to have more ways to self express either through like custom aesthetics avatar frames, or higher resolution images.
And so Those are the subscriptions that we're going to come out with, but in the future, what a behavior that we've seen is that users are supporting each other on the app, and that's really exciting, where people who've created feeds or moderation labels and, They are getting paid through Patreon or Ko fi by other users.
And so in the future, we'll probably build a payments network where, and we'll help facilitate more payments across the network so that people can build a career and a living on the Blue Sky ecosystem. And then we'll just take a percentage of that transaction.
JOE: And will you move into video calling or audio calling?
Right now, I would say our engineers are doing our very best to keep Blue Sky app online, but where it goes the possibilities are endless, and, I just talked about third parties, first party, anyone can go build anything, and even if we don't build the audio or video App that people are looking for.
Anyone else can go build that on top of our protocol. And for example, we have a feature called starter packs where if you come into blue sky, you don't have to land into a completely chaotic global feed and you have users who've created the starter packs where there are followers they've curated for you and feeds curated.
So when you onboard onto blue sky, you land into a cozy corner with a bunch of followers. And. What's really cool about these starter packs is that a third a lot of users are asking, Hey, can I search for these starter packs? I can't find them in the search. And we haven't made them searchable yet, but an independent developer built a directory of starter packs and then actually put them in categories like news or for sports, and you can go and follow those.
And so that's the beauty of blue sky. That's built on an open system is even if we as a company are busy doing something else, somebody else can go and build the thing that they want. And so you don't have to wait on us.
JOE: I heard somewhere that Andrew Tate was banned from joining Blue Sky. How did that work?
And also, how do you prevent Blue Sky not becoming just an echo chamber of everybody politically on the same side of the spectrum?
Blue sky. I think there's a false narrative that we are somehow catering to one group of people over another, and that's never been the point of blue sky.
We've built the infrastructure for a global conversation with the openness and tools that allow people to create their own experiences upon that infrastructure. So we're really not building any tool for any particular viewpoints, but rather letting other People create their own spaces online and part of that is enabling them to feel free to safely communicate in their spaces.
So I believe the Andrew Tate account was an impersonation account. So I'm not sure, it has not, we did not ban based on the fact that it's some person.
JOE: Is there a chance then that far right wing voices or extreme left wing voices for whatever means might end up on the platform or is that difficult?
For us, we welcome anybody who is willing to have healthy Dialogue online. And so for us, it's about listening to our terms of service and community guidelines, which is governed by Aaron Roderick's, who used to be the head of election integrity at Twitter and now is the head of trust and safety at blue sky.
And in these terms of service, we had no tolerance for hate speech, no tolerance for misinformation. And so as long as users who are abiding by those rules. Transcribed are having healthy dialogue, they're welcome to stay, but if they violate our terms of service, then like most other social apps, we ask you to leave.
What's different about BlueSky or the ecosystem is we can ask you to leave BlueSky and you can build your own app on your own server and find your own community. So the difference here is we've kicked you out of our city, but you can go to a different city.
JOE: Finally, will you be adding an edit button?
I always say to users, what you guys want is usually what we want.
But for now an edit, but it is not on the roadmap
