The significance of Bluesky and decentralized social media
July 30, 2024social media
I'm delighted to share that we have introduced support for Bluesky in Buffer. This is an important moment for us as a company, and there are a number of reasons that adding Bluesky is personally meaningful for me. With Bluesky, we now support the three major social networks pushing forward a new era of decentralized social media: Mastodon, Threads and Bluesky. We have been intentional about moving fast to add these channels to our tool.
Supporting independence and ownership in social media
Buffer has now existed for almost 14 years, and throughout that time I've seen a lot change in social media, and in our space of tools to support people and businesses with social. We're an outlier as a product and company that has existed for that kind of timeframe with leadership and values left in tact.
We've had to work hard at times to maintain control over our destiny. In 2018, we made the decision to spend $3.3M to buy out the majority of our VC investors and be able to go our long-term path. We have continued to carry out buybacks each year since 2018, and at this stage we are majority founder and team owned.
One of the things I'm proudest of is that we still wholeheartedly serve individuals and creators, and have not gone up-market as many other long-running companies in our space have done. We've been fortunate to be able to scale to 56,000 paying customers and over $18M in annual revenue while taking our own unique path. Through intentional choices over the years, we have maintained a level of optionality over our future that most do not have.
This independence is something I don't take for granted. Keeping ownership of our company, and through that ownership having an ability to boldly go in the direction we believe is best for customers and the team, is very important to me.
This is why, as a business, we feel so philosophically aligned with rising new decentralized social media networks, such as Bluesky and Mastodon. These networks have been started with a belief that individuals should maintain ownership over their content and the connection to their audience. They have data portability baked in from the beginning. When you use these networks, you are much more likely to be able to maintain control over your content and audience than if you use social networks owned by large corporations with complex ownership structures of their own, and often with public markets to answer to.
The larger social networks provide a level of distribution that's worth tapping into, but I strongly encourage investing a portion of your energy into networks where you will be able to maintain ownership long-term.
At Buffer, we will be doing everything we can to support the growth of new decentralized social media options, because we believe that individuals and small businesses should maintain control over their content and the connection to their audience.
The resurgence of the open web with social media protocols
I have been eagerly observing the emergence and growth of social media protocols, in particular with ActivityPub (and Mastodon as the prominent implementation), and AT Protocol from Bluesky.
Open standards in social media could be as powerful as open standards have been for direct and private communication (email). What I find exciting about the development of these open standards, and more importantly the adoption of them and traction of social networks which support them, is that they can bring forth a new era of open standards for the web.
The Internet was built upon open standards — HTTP, URL, TCP/IP, DNS, HTML. A vast many valuable internet businesses have built on these "shoulders of giants." ActivityPub and AT Protocol are built with open standards philosophies, and could similarly enable a new playground of innovation, with openness, ownership and interoperability at their core.
I personally miss the earlier days of social media where the APIs had much greater parity with what could be done natively on the platforms. When I started Buffer, the Twitter and Facebook APIs were close to feature-complete, and brought about a lot of innovation in third-party development on top of those APIs. This is how Buffer was born, along with many other products in our space.
Over time, we saw an era of closed APIs with reduced transparency and ownership of content and audiences. Mastodon and Bluesky bring the opportunity for a new era of innovation in our space, which I am welcoming with open arms. More innovation in the social media management space will be better for customers, and frankly makes for more exciting work to do.
Bluesky is bringing innovation back to social media
If you haven't had a chance to take a look at some of Bluesky's recent product and platform announcements, I highly recommend that you go and read them. In particular, what they've done with introducing custom feeds as well as starter packs gets me very excited about some real innovation from a social network.
When I saw starter packs introduced, it immediately felt like a no-brainer feature for a social network, and such a powerful thing, especially for an emerging social network, to offer. Starter packs allow anyone to create a "getting started pack" for a new Bluesky user. This can include a set of recommended follows, and up to three recommended custom feeds (more on those below). This enables their passionate users to be able to personalize an introduction for people not yet on Bluesky. It's a smart way to activate users to play a meaningful role in onboarding new people to the network and grounding them with an existing community to interact with. Of course, Bluesky benefits by likely getting more people onto their new network than they would otherwise.
Custom feeds are an incredible innovation that put the choice of algorithm for the social network in the hands of the wide range of users and different niche communities that exist on the network. The way that the Bluesky team have built custom feeds enables a ton of flexibility for the types of content alogrithms can serve up, and creates a marketplace for browsing and enabling different custom feeds you can choose to view. Something I've observed from the Bluesky team is their commitment to, and intentionality around, building tools for the governance of the network itself.
It's very meaningful that on Bluesky you can choose your own algorithm and you can adopt an algorithm that someone else has written, or create your own algorithm for what content shows up in your feed. And I think it's very smart that Bluesky has done this — because it's both innovation and it's strong strategy because it's a highly defensible move which many of the other networks would not be able offer. It would be very unlikely for the commercial social networks to move away from the company, the network themselves, holding on to ownership of the algorithm and what is served up to you.
I had a wonderful conversation with Rose Wang from the Bluesky team a couple of weeks ago and one of the topics we got into was around the values that are embedded in the Bluesky team and the work they're trying to do. It was clear to me how thoughtful and intentional they are being around the governance of the network and the flexibility they're building in to allow users to really shape the community and what is important to them.
Something I appreciate about Bluesky is that their goal is to create a social network not controlled by a single company, while also ensuring that it comes together as a cohesive and easy-to-use experience. Decentralized social media can be daunting and feel complex and inaccessible to people initially, and so I think intentional work going into the simplicity of the experience is paramount.
With great innovation from the Bluesky team such as starter packs and custom feeds, along with their focus on simplicity, I strongly encourage you to go and take a look at this new social network. This is a platform and community that's worth taking a deeper look at, participating in and investing time into.
Join us in participating in a new era of decentralized social media
By supporting Bluesky, along with Mastodon and Threads, we are playing our part in moving forward this promising new era of social media. Many of us in the team have been personally drawn to these networks for their special and supportive communities. We're here to see decentralized social media grow and become more meaningful for more people across the world. That's why we've put our scale, brand and resources into building awareness and providing tools to make participating on these new social networks more streamlined.
I encourage you to add Bluesky to your channels in Buffer, and start participating in the social network today. Learn more and get started by visiting our Bluesky page.
Photo by Kumiko SHIMIZU on Unsplash.