内容来源：https://www.geekwire.com/2025/uncommon-thinkers-bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-is-planting-the-seeds-for-a-decentralized-digital-world/

内容总结：

【西雅图“非凡思想者”系列报道】在社交媒体巨头林立的当下，一家诞生于西雅图的新兴社交平台Bluesky正试图走出一条截然不同的道路。其首席执行官杰伊·格雷伯（Jay Graber）近日接受专访，阐述了其构建“去中心化”社交生态的愿景与思考。

“蓝天”之名，巧合与使命
格雷伯的中文名“蓝田”意为“蓝色的天空”，这与其母亲寄予的自由与无限可能的期望不谋而合，也巧合地预示了她未来的事业。Bluesky项目最初由推特创始人杰克·多西发起，旨在建立开放的社交媒体协议。2021年，格雷伯临危受命成为负责人，并坚持项目必须独立于推特运营。这一决策极具先见之明，在埃隆·马斯克收购推特并切断与Bluesky的联系后，项目得以自主发展。

协议优先，重构社交网络根基
与当前主流“围墙花园”式的社交平台不同，Bluesky的核心是其团队构建的“AT协议”。该协议是一个开放的社交媒体技术标准，允许用户在不同应用或服务器间迁移社交关系与内容，而无需受制于单一公司的规则与算法。“无论Bluesky公司自身发展如何，我们希望协议能长久存在，”格雷伯表示，“它不仅能支撑Bluesky，更能成为众多应用和用例的基础。”

“高自主、低 ego”的务实理想主义
格雷伯将自己定义为“务实的理想主义者”。她认为，纯粹的理想主义难以在现实世界落地，而纯粹的实用主义则无法带来有意义的变革。她以“高自主、低 ego”的理念管理着约30人的团队，鼓励成员发挥能动性，同时保持协作与对齐。早期投资者评价她“极其谦逊，但从不畏惧挑战”。

展望未来：开放协议与人工智能
格雷伯将当前人工智能的浪潮与印刷术带来的变革时期相类比，认为关键在于“由谁控制”。她担忧若AI仅由追求权力或利润最大化的单一公司控制，将导致糟糕的后果；而开源、广泛可用的AI工具则能激发广泛实验，催生真正服务于用户的技术。她设想未来用户甚至可以携带自己的AI“代理人”进入社交网络，就像在Bluesky上自主选择算法一样。

不止于一个应用
目前，Bluesky拥有超过4000万用户，虽与X、Threads等巨头规模相去甚远，但其增长稳健。对格雷伯而言，成功并非仅意味着Bluesky应用本身的壮大。“如果协议被广泛采用，那就是巨大的成功，”她说，“如果人们因此重新思考社交网络的运作方式，Bluesky成为社交媒体变革的起点，那就是成功。”

格雷伯与Bluesky的故事，映照出一种对技术生态的深层思考：在追求规模与垄断的行业常态下，能否培育一片让多样性与自主性蓬勃生长的“森林土壤”？其探索之路，仍在延伸。

中文翻译：

编者按： 本系列聚焦西雅图地区六位“非凡思想者”：他们是发明家、科学家、技术专家和企业家，正在变革行业并推动世界向积极方向转变。他们将于12月11日在GeekWire颁奖晚宴上获得表彰。“非凡思想者”系列由GeekWire与大西雅图合作伙伴联合呈现。

Bluesky社交网络的首席执行官杰伊·格雷伯（Jay Graber）在疫情期间搬到了西雅图。颇具讽刺意味的是，吸引她来到此地的一部分原因，正是这里标志性的灰蒙蒙天空。在细雨绵绵的冬日里待在室内阅读、写作或工作，她并不觉得有什么不好。

但她同样热爱户外。她在太平洋西北地区最引以为傲的时刻是：在一棵冷杉树下发现了一颗松茸——这是一种备受珍视的蘑菇品种，其生长地点常被视作商业机密般守护。

换句话说，格雷伯是一个珍视非凡事物及其赖以茁壮成长环境的人。这一点在她所主导的技术生态系统中得到了体现。

如今大多数社交网络都是“围墙花园”，由一家公司运营服务器、拥有数据并制定规则。而AT协议（格雷伯将其发音为“at”）是Bluesky团队为其网络构建的一个开放的社交媒体技术标准。Bluesky只是构建于其上的一个应用；理论上，你可以将你的帖子和关注者迁移到另一个具有不同内容审核规则或算法的应用或服务器，而不会丢失你的社交关系图谱。

“我们希望，无论Bluesky自身发生什么——无论它变得多大——这个协议本身都能长久存在，”格雷伯在最近的一次采访中表示，“因为它不仅会成为Bluesky的基础，也会成为许多应用和许多用例的基础。”

“无论它变得多大”——这句话在科技初创企业领袖们通常一心凭借意志力将其创造推向数十亿美元估值退出的世界里，显得格外突出。

相反，格雷伯将Bluesky视为一个“集体有机体”，由用户赋予其生命，并植根于去中心化协议，如同森林地面的土壤。“当我开始这个项目时，我并未预见到Bluesky会变成今天这样，这让我感觉它像是一个正在成长的事物，由我监督，但也有着自己的生命，”她说。

Bluesky的早期投资者、Avalanche基金创始人兼管理合伙人凯特琳·唐纳利（Katelyn Donnelly）于2022年在一个小型技术专家、投资者和学者聚会上首次见到格雷伯。令她印象深刻的是：格雷伯是房间里唯一一个专注于实际构建而不仅仅是空谈的人。当其他人讨论宏大构想时，格雷伯则在钻研如何将其实现的细节。

后来，在Bluesky推出后，唐纳利参加了西雅图国会山社区的一次聚会。格雷伯在那里停留了数小时，与早期用户会面、收集反馈并倾听意见。

唐纳利称格雷伯“在如此年轻和成功的情况下，有着令人难以置信的低姿态”。与此同时，她也不惧展现锋芒，例如在2025年的西南偏南大会上，她穿了一件印有“Mundus sine caesaribus”（意为“一个没有凯撒的世界”）的衬衫——其风格与马克·扎克伯格在Meta活动上所穿的印有“Aut Zuck aut nihil”（意为“要么扎克，要么虚无”）的衬衫如出一辙。

“你立刻就能感觉到，她永远不会放弃。即使Bluesky失败了，她很可能也会再次构建类似的东西。”唐纳利说，这就是“毕生事业”的定义：格雷伯迄今为止所做的一切，都引领她走到了这一步。

寻找自己的道路

格雷伯出生于俄克拉荷马州塔尔萨市，父亲是数学老师，母亲是从中国移民而来。格雷伯的中文名“蓝天”在普通话中意为“blue sky”。这纯属巧合，因为推特创始人杰克·多西（Jack Dorsey）后来选择“Bluesky”作为其社交网络内部一个项目的名称时，格雷伯还未参与其中。

她的母亲选择这个名字，象征着自由和无尽可能，也映射了她自己在中国成长时未曾拥有的机会。

这些主题很早就出现在格雷伯的生活中。大约五岁时，她抗拒母亲按部就班地教她识字，宁愿在后院跑来跑去。她的父亲采取了不同的方法：带她去图书馆，问她感兴趣什么。她发现了罗宾汉的故事，并读遍了图书馆里所有的版本，从儿童读物到晦涩的古英语版本。这个故事深深吸引了她：反抗者对抗中央权威。

随着阅读的深入，她被科学发现的故事所吸引，最终迷上了那些构想社会新运作方式的作家，比如厄休拉·K·勒古恩。

后来，在宾夕法尼亚大学就读期间，格雷伯主修了科学、技术与社会（STS）这个跨学科专业，这让她能够从人文视角探索技术，同时修读计算机科学课程。

2013年毕业后，她成为一名数字权利活动家，搬到旧金山，参加了编程训练营，并在一家区块链初创公司工作。后来，她辗转来到华盛顿州乡村一个前弹药厂里的加密货币挖矿业务点——她称之为自己的“茧居时期”——在那里，她长时间独自钻研代码。

随后，她在一家注重隐私的加密货币公司工作，创立了一家名为Happening的活动策划初创公司，并不断寻找适合自己抱负的环境。

Bluesky的起源

接着，在2019年12月，多西宣布推特将资助一个项目，为社交媒体开发一个开放、去中心化的协议。他称之为Bluesky。

格雷伯看到了这条推文，感受到了它的吸引力。

据2025年4月《纽约客》的一篇文章详述，多西的团队建立了一个群聊来探讨这个想法。格雷伯加入后，发现讨论很分散——人们会突然出现，提出建议，然后消失。没有形成更广泛的愿景。

格雷伯开始着手工作：收集研究资料，撰写现有去中心化协议的概述，试图在纷杂的讨论中提供一些清晰的思路。

到2021年初，多西和时任推特首席技术官的帕拉格·阿格拉瓦尔（Parag Agrawal）正在面试领导该项目的候选人。格雷伯脱颖而出，部分原因在于她并非只是说他们想听的话。她接受了邀请，但有一个条件：Bluesky必须在法律上独立于推特。

这是一个有先见之明的要求。那年11月，多西辞去了推特CEO的职务。次年春天，埃隆·马斯克开始大量收购推特股份。到2022年10月，他拥有了该公司，并迅速切断了与Bluesky的联系，取消了一项价值1300万美元的服务协议。

格雷伯只能靠自己了。但这正是关键所在。

“如果一个协议在很大程度上被现有参与者之一所拥有和控制，你就无法构建一个能让多方采纳的去中心化协议，”她在2023年告诉《福布斯》杂志。

“高能动性，低自我中心”

如今，Bluesky拥有超过4000万用户和约30名员工。公司没有正式总部——这很符合一个去中心化社交网络的定位——尽管格雷伯和几名员工在西雅图的一个联合办公空间工作。

该平台的规模仍远小于声称拥有超过5亿月活跃用户的X，以及拥有约3亿用户的Meta旗下Threads。另一个去中心化替代方案Mastodon约有1000万注册用户。但Bluesky一直在稳步增长，其开放协议赋予了它不同的雄心——不仅仅是一个目的地，更是供他人构建的基础设施。

格雷伯以她称之为“高能动性，低自我中心”的理念来运营公司。

“团队中的每个人在执行工作和判断正确方向时都行使着很大的能动性，”她说，“他们会主动承担需要完成的工作，无论是否在其职责范围内——这就是‘低自我中心’的部分。”

总的来说，她表示，这造就了一个非常高效的小团队，尽管她也承认其中的权衡：“有时人们会有强烈的个人见解，并朝着自己的方向偏离。”因此，她说，让团队重新达成一致是她工作的一个重要部分。

她将自己的领导风格描述为协作式而非自上而下式。“我努力培养团队中每个人的优势，并将其融合起来，”她说。

多西在早期曾担任Bluesky的董事会成员，现已不再参与。最终，他和格雷伯的看法出现了分歧：多西希望Bluesky在去中心化方面更加纯粹。格雷伯则希望“抓住时机”，让人们能够接触到易于上手的东西，即使初期在某种程度上是中心化的。

“当我们意见不合时，他最终选择了走自己的路，而不是试图强迫我做什么，”她说。根据她的经验，格雷伯表示，多西会坚持自己的立场并表达不同意见，但不会利用他的权力来强制规定特定方向。

TechDirt创始人兼作家迈克·马斯尼克（Mike Masnick）的文章《协议，而非平台》曾启发该项目，他现在接替了多西在董事会的席位。

格雷伯将自己描述为一个“务实的理想主义者”。她说，纯粹的理想主义者追求的是在现实世界中无法实现的愿景。纯粹的实用主义者则永远不会带来有意义的改变。关键在于两者兼顾：既要心怀事物可能如何的愿景，也要有实现它的实际步骤。

人工智能的影响

格雷伯认为同样的情况正在人工智能领域上演。她说，问题不在于人工智能是好是坏，而在于谁控制它。

“如果人工智能最终只由一家以权力或利润最大化为目标的公司控制，我认为我们可以预见，这将对许多人造成不良后果，”她说。另一方面，如果人工智能工具广泛可用且开源，“就会有更广泛的实验”——伴随着随之而来的所有混乱，但也蕴含着服务于用户而非平台的解决方案的潜力。

她设想了一个未来，人们或许可以带着自己的人工智能代理进入社交网络，就像Bluesky已经允许用户选择自己的算法和内容审核服务一样。

“也许你甚至可以在家里的壁橱里运行它，”她说，“那样你就有了保护自己隐私、为你做事的人工智能代理——这是一种赋能于人的技术，服务于你的利益，而不是服务于一个不关心你福祉的公司。”

她经常思考历史的轨迹。她指出，印刷机曾带来一段混乱时期——新技术颠覆社会——随后是建立利用广泛识字率的新机构，如大学、学术期刊和同行评审制度。

“我们正处于围绕新技术的另一个混乱时期，”她说，“我们必须建立新的机构，来利用人人都能访问互联网这一条件。”

在她看来，AT协议可能就是类似的东西。Bluesky这家公司可能会兴衰起伏，可能局限于小众市场，也可能在新一代用户中失去影响力。但如果这个协议被广泛采用，它将成为比任何单一应用或公司都更宏大的事物的基础。

“如果协议被广泛采用，那就是巨大的成功，”她说，“如果人们重新思考社交网络的运作方式，而Bluesky成为社交媒体变革的起点，那就是成功。”

无论它变得多大。

英文来源：

Editor’s note: This series profiles six of the Seattle region’s “Uncommon Thinkers”: inventors, scientists, technologists and entrepreneurs transforming industries and driving positive change in the world. They will be recognized Dec. 11 at the GeekWire Gala. Uncommon Thinkers is presented in partnership with Greater Seattle Partners.
Jay Graber, CEO of the Bluesky social network, moved to Seattle during the pandemic, attracted to the region in part by the trademark gray skies, ironically. She doesn’t feel bad about staying inside and reading, writing or working on drizzly winter days.
But she also loves the outdoors. Her proudest Pacific Northwest moment: finding a matsutake mushroom under a fir tree, a species so prized that locations are treated like trade secrets.
Graber, in other words, is someone who values extraordinary things and the environments that allow them to thrive. This comes through in the tech ecosystem she oversees.
Most social networks today are walled gardens, where one company runs the servers, owns the data, and sets the rules. The AT Protocol (which Graber pronounces “at”) is an open technical standard for social media that Bluesky’s team built as the foundation for its network. Bluesky is just one app on top of it, and in theory you could move your posts and followers to another app or server with different moderation or algorithms without losing your social graph.
“The hope is that whatever happens with Bluesky — however big it makes itself — the protocol is something we hope to endure a really long time,” Graber said in a recent interview, “because it becomes foundational to not just Bluesky but a lot of apps and a lot of use cases.”
However big it makes itself. The phrase stands out in a world of tech startup leaders intent on scaling their creations toward billion-dollar exits through force of will.
Graber instead sees Bluesky as “a collective organism,” brought to life by users, grounded in the decentralized protocol like soil on the forest floor. “I did not anticipate what Bluesky became when I started this, and so that very much makes it feel like it’s something that’s growing, that I’m overseeing, but also has a life of its own,” she said.
Katelyn Donnelly, founder and managing partner of Avalanche, an early investor in Bluesky, first met Graber in 2022 at a small gathering of technologists, investors, and academics. What struck her: Graber was the only one in the room focused on building, not just talking. While others discussed big ideas, Graber was working through the details of how to make them real.
Later, after Bluesky’s launch, Donnelly attended a meetup in Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood. Graber stayed for hours, meeting with early users, gathering feedback, and listening.
Donnelly calls Graber “incredibly low-ego for being so young and successful.” At the same time, she isn’t afraid to be provocative, like when she wore shift that read “Mundus sine caesaribus” (“a world without Caesars”) at SXSW in 2025 — styled exactly like Mark Zuckerberg’s “Aut Zuck aut nihil” (“Zuck or nothing”) shirt from a Meta event.
“You can just tell immediately that she’s never going to give up. If Bluesky failed, she’d probably build something similar again.” That’s the definition of “life’s work,” Donnelly said: everything Graber has done to date has led her to this point.
Finding her own way
Graber was born in Tulsa, Okla., to a math teacher father and a mother who had emigrated from China. Graber’s given first name, Lantian, means “blue sky” in Mandarin. It’s a pure coincidence, given that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey would later choose the name Bluesky as a project inside the social network long before Graber was involved.
Her mom chose the name to symbolize freedom and boundless possibility, reflecting opportunities that she didn’t have growing up in China.
Those themes emerged early for Graber. Around age five, she resisted her mother’s structured attempts to teach her to read, running around the backyard instead. Her dad took a different approach: he brought her to the library and asked what interested her. She discovered Robin Hood, and read every version the library had, from children’s books to arcane Old English editions. The story captivated her: renegades pushing back against centralized authority.
As she continued to read, she was drawn to stories of scientific discovery, and eventually to writers who imagined new ways society could work, such as Ursula K. Le Guin.
Later, as a student at the University of Pennsylvania, Graber studied Science, Technology, and Society, an interdisciplinary major that let her explore technology from a humanistic perspective while taking computer science classes.
After graduating in 2013, she worked as a digital rights activist, moved to San Francisco, enrolled in coding bootcamp, and worked at a blockchain startup. Later she found her way to a cryptocurrency mining operation in a former ammunition factory in rural Washington state — what she calls her “cocoon period” — where she spent long hours studying code in isolation.
She went on to work at a privacy-focused cryptocurrency company, founded an event planning startup called Happening, and kept searching for the right environment for her own ambitions.
Origins of Bluesky
Then, in December 2019, Dorsey announced that Twitter would fund a project to develop an open, decentralized protocol for social media. He called it Bluesky.
Graber saw the thread and felt the pull.
As detailed in an April 2025 New Yorker story, Dorsey’s team had set up a group chat to explore the idea. Graber joined and noticed the conversation was scattered — people would pop in, make suggestions, and disappear. No broader vision was coalescing.
Graber started doing the work: gathering research, writing an overview of existing decentralized protocols, trying to provide some signal amid the noise.
By early 2021, Dorsey and then-Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal were interviewing candidates to lead the project. Graber stood out in part because she didn’t just tell them what they wanted to hear. She accepted, on one condition: Bluesky would be legally independent from Twitter.
It was a prescient demand. That November, Dorsey resigned as Twitter’s CEO. The following spring, Elon Musk began buying up shares. By October 2022, he owned the company, and promptly cut ties with Bluesky, canceling a $13 million service agreement.
Graber was on her own. But that was the point.
“You can’t build a decentralized protocol that lots of parties are going to adopt if it’s very much owned and within one of the existing players,” she told Forbes in 2023.
‘High agency, low ego’
Today, Bluesky has more than 40 million users and a team of around 30 employees. The company has no official headquarters — fitting for a decentralized social network — though Graber and several employees work out of a co-working space in Seattle.
The platform is still far smaller than X, which reports more than 500 million monthly active users, and Meta’s Threads, which has around 300 million. Mastodon, another decentralized alternative, has about 10 million registered users. But Bluesky has grown steadily, and its open protocol gives it a different ambition — not just a destination, but the infrastructure on which others build.
Graber runs the company with what she calls a “high agency, low ego” philosophy.
“Everyone on the team exercises a lot of agency in how they do their job, and what they think the right direction is,” she said. “They try to pick up stuff that needs to be done whether or not it’s in their job description — that’s the low ego part.”
Overall, she said, this has made for a very effective small team, although she acknowledges the trade-off: “Sometimes people have strong opinions and wander off in their own directions.” So getting people back in alignment, she said, is a big part of her job.
She describes her leadership style as collaborative rather than top-down. “I try to cultivate people’s strengths on the team and bring together a synthesis of that,” she said.
Dorsey, who sat on Bluesky’s board in the early years, is no longer involved. Ultimately, he and Graber saw things differently: Dorsey wanted Bluesky to be more purist about decentralization. Graber wanted to “catch the moment” and bring people into something accessible, even if it was somewhat centralized at the start.
Embed from Getty Images“When we disagreed, he ended up just going his own way, as opposed to trying to force me to do a thing,” she said. Based on her experience, Graber said, Dorsey would hold his position and disagree, but not use his power to mandate a specific direction.
Mike Masnick, the TechDirt founder and writer whose essay “Protocols, Not Platforms” helped inspire the project, now holds Dorsey’s board seat.
Graber describes herself as a “pragmatic idealist.” Pure idealists, she said, pursue visions that can’t work in the real world. Pure pragmatists never produce meaningful change. The key is holding both: a vision of how things could be, and the practical steps to get there.
The implications of AI
Graber sees the same dynamics playing out with artificial intelligence. The question, she said, isn’t whether AI is good or bad — it’s who controls it.
“If AI ends up controlled by only one company whose goal is power or profit maximization, I think we can anticipate that will lead to bad outcomes for a lot of people,” she said. On the other hand, if AI tools are widely available and open source, “you have this broader experimentation” — with all the chaos that entails, but also the potential for solutions that serve users rather than platforms.
She imagines a future where people might bring their own AI agents to a social network, the way Bluesky already lets users choose their own algorithms and moderation services.
“Maybe you can even run this at home in your closet,” she said. “Then you have your own AI agent that protects your own privacy, doing things for you — that’s a human empowering technology that’s working in your interest, not in the interest of a company that does not have your welfare at heart.”
She thinks a lot about historical trajectories. The printing press, she noted, ushered in a period of chaos — new technology disrupting society — followed by the construction of new institutions that made use of widespread literacy, such as universities. academic journals, and peer review.
“We’re in another period of chaos around new technologies,” she said. “We have to build new institutions that make use of everyone having access to the internet.”
The AT Protocol, in her view, could be something like that. Bluesky the company might rise or fall, narrow into a niche, or lose relevance with a new generation. But if the protocol takes hold, it becomes the foundation for something larger than any single app or company.
“If the protocol becomes widely adopted, that’s a huge success,” she said. “If people rethink how social works, and Bluesky becomes the origin point for social media to change, that’s a success.”
However big it makes itself.