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AS I WAITED to meet with Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky, on the 25th floor of an office building in downtown Seattle, I stared out at the city’s waterfront and thought: God fucking damn it. Stretching in every direction was a wall of dense, gray, tragically boring fog. And here I was about to interview the head of a social platform named after good weather. On camera, no less.
Then something miraculous happened. Moments before Graber showed up, the haze lifted. Elliott Bay glittered in the sun. I could see past Bainbridge Island’s rolling hills all the way to a snow-capped peak, and the skies were, yup, completely and totally blue.
Graber’s tenure at Bluesky has had this felicitous quality, starting with her given name, Lantian, which—in a triumph for the nominative determinism crowd—means “blue sky” in Mandarin. (That the name she’s gone by for years, Jay, can also mean a winged creature that takes to the skies adds to the serendipity.) When Graber joined Bluesky in 2019, it was an experiment within Twitter. The idea was to spin off a social platform that would give users more control. That happened when Bluesky launched as an invite-only service in 2023, and by the time it opened up to the general public a year later, Twitter had become the right-wing echo chamber known as X. Bluesky swiftly became a refuge for a coalition of leftists, liberals, and never-Trumpers.
