When Bluesky CEO Jay Graber walked the stage at SXSW 2025 for her keynote address, she wore a big black t-shirt with her hair pulled back into the pan. At first glance, it may seem like she is following the same playbook that many women in tech leadership played before.
The truth is much more interesting than that. What might look like your average black t-shirt is a subtle yet clear swipe of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO, who represents everything BlueSky is trying to tackle as an open source social network.
Meta’s founder and CEO compared himself directly to Roman Emperor Julius Caesar. His own shirt declared the play “Aut Zuck Aut Nihil” in the play “Caesar or Nothing” in the Latin phrase “Aut Caesar Aut Nihil.”
Graber’s shirts are directly copying the style of the shirt Zuckerberg had recently worn on stage, and they say “Mundus Sine Caesaribus.” Or “The World Without Caesar”
With the BlueSky design method, Graber certainly puts her money where her mouth (or shirt) is. As a decentralized social network built on top of an open source framework, BlueSky differs from legacy platforms like Facebook, where users have a direct, transparent window in how they build their platform.
“If a billionaire comes in and buys a blue ski, or takes over it, or if tomorrow they decide to change things in a way that people really didn’t like, they can fork and go to another application,” Graber explained on SXSW. “Network already has applications that provide another way to view the network. Or you can build a new network, so openness ensures you have the ability to always move to new alternatives.”
Meanwhile, Meta alienates users by changing how people experience the platform, and Bluesky has benefited directly from it. After Meta trained public users’ posts on AI and pushed controversial updates such as culling third-party fact-checking programs, BlueSky experienced a burst of user growth.
Still, Bruski has a long way to go if he wants to defeat the Roman Empire of Meta. Although Graber’s platform is closed to a total of 33 million users, Meta has 335 billion active users every day on all products, including Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook. For Meta, that is about 40% of the world’s population.
But for the fledgling social network, Bluesky has created enough of the cultural footprint it is supposed to stick to. Rome could not be built in one day – it was not even fallen.
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