Jay Graber Remarks Video, ATmosphereConf Seattle 2025

Jay Graber @jay.bsky.team, CEO of Bluesky, gave a short talk at ATmosphereConf 2025.

Thank you all for being here today. To see all these amazing organizers pull together this conference without us even being the ones to take the lead. To see so many people working towards building an open-source future for social. This is a dream come true for me.

When I devoted years of my life to getting Bluesky started, chasing down Twitter to make this happen. I don't know if I ever really believed that we would get this big or that we would be able to open up this opportunity for the AT Protocol to run like this, but I believed it was possible. So, I bet on that chance because it was an important bet to make and I'm really glad that I did. So, thank you for believing in us. I believe in you.

I want to tell you a story about the power of the belief and the role it plays in shaping technology. In 1996, John Perry Barlow gave this famous speech called the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace. He expressed a wide widespread belief at the time which was that the internet was surely going to change the world for the better. It was going to topple established power structures, spread democracy, create a world where information and people would be free.

The declaration ended with this line:

We will create a civilization of the mind in cyberspace. May it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.

So I was born a few years before that speech and I remember growing up with this optimism of the early web and then I remember the growing pessimism of seeing a consolidating web. I think I got pessimistic a few years before a lot of people. It was about 15 years ago. I had this realization that the internet is reshaping society and society's come to reflect the structure of their dominant form of communication.

So this means that what happens in our digital spaces is eventually going to be reflected in the real world as those distinctions erode. So if the platforms where we communicate consolidate into the hands of just a few people, what's going to happen to everything else? If you get pessimistic early enough, you sometimes realize you might have a chance to alter the course of history if you work hard enough at it. So this is the realization that led me to become a digital rights activist.

And in 2015, through my activism, I got to meet and talk with John Perry Barlow. At that point, he had co-founded the EFF. He was on the board. And this is an organization that fought a lot of abuses of power online. So, as we chatted, I started to have this burning question that might be slightly rude, but I felt I had to ask it. So, I did.

I asked, "Back when you made that declaration, had you been naive to the dangers that you'd end up spending the rest of your life fighting? Had you not seen that the internet could also be used to surveil and control as much as it could be used to liberate and create?" He said, "No, I knew that was a possibility". "So why didn't you warn people?" I asked. He said, "Our job was to inspire, to get people to believe in the positive, creative vision of what the internet could be. Because if they did not believe in it, they wouldn't build it."

I learned an important lesson that day. Even if you see bad possibilities, there's power in staying focused on the positive, on putting your time, attention, and energy towards the good things that can be built.

The internet didn't turn out the way that Barlow fully envisioned. We have built a civilization of the mind in cyberspace. But we've ended up giving over our lives to large centralized platforms whose CEOs have styled themselves as self-made monarchs of the kingdoms that we've built for them with our data and our time.

But we have to remember where the power really lies because we gave them that power and we can take it back. My bet on building Bluesky was that this could open up a door to giving people control over their social lives online. Get people into an open ecosystem onto an open protocol and then let developers run with it. The AT Protocol's goal is to lay the foundation for a freer, more democratic digital society and let developers like you build it.

Most people are resigned at this point to an internet dominated by just a few companies. They've succumbed to a kind of learned helplessness. They no longer believe that a better world is possible. I see this in the way they feel about me, about Bluesky. It's either Jay, you're the one that's going to save us, or Jay, you're just the same as every other tech CEO, and Bluesky is going to follow the same trajectory as every other social company.

But the AT Protocol here is what's fundamentally different. And because you're here today, you're different. You came out to this conference because you've seen something in the AT Protocol. You believe that things can be better, that things can be different, and you're willing to invest your time and your energy to make that happen.

So, it's people like you that turn belief into reality. There's a huge amount of power in being able to build. When others only see the options on the table, you see code that could be written differently. When you take your what-if ideas and you make them real, you create the new options for everyone else. So, don't underestimate the power of a small project.

Have you heard of the butterfly effect? It's the principle that in complex systems, small changes can have big effects over time. Bluesky started out as a small project and now it has 33 million users. And this is a network now that you can tap into for anything that you build on atproto. And the things you build can help grow the network.

I'm leading Bluesky, but I don't have all the answers for how to make social better. I don't think that's a reasonable expectation. What I do have is the belief that this is the most important work I could be doing right now. I'm here to open up a door so that people can see that another world is possible and so that developers like you can go build it. So bring your insights, your talents, put them to the task of solving this problem before us.

If we do this, we do it together by putting all of our shoulders to the wheel.

If we don't want to fall under the spectre of digital tyranny, we need an world where no single company can hold the public conversation hostage. Where the distributed nature of the network means that individual companies can rise and fall, but the social fabric stays intact.

We need a democratic foundation for a digital society. So for those of us that want to live in a freer world, a more humane world, a world without Caesars, this is our chance. And we might not get another for a long time.

So, keep believing in a better future. Keep building open source social and the future's going to be yours to create.