Bluesky CEO Jay Graber Pokes Fun At Mark Zuckerberg With Latin Phrase T-Shirt (techcrunch.com) 36
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: When Bluesky CEO Jay Graber walked on stage at SXSW 2025 for her keynote discussion, she wore a large black T-shirt with her hair pulled back into a bun. At first glance, it might appear as though she's following the same playbook that so many women in tech leadership have played before: downplaying her femininity to be taken seriously. The truth is way more interesting than that. What might look like your average black T-shirt is a subtle, yet clear swipe at Mark Zuckerberg, a CEO who represents everything that Bluesky is trying to work against as an open source social network.
The Meta founder and CEO has directly compared himself to the Roman emperor Julius Caesar. His own shirt declared Aut Zuck aut nihil, which is a play on the Latin phrase aut Caesar aut nihil: "Either Caesar or nothing." Graber's shirt -- which directly copies the style of a shirt that Zuckerberg wore onstage recently -- says Mundus sine caesaribus. Or, "a world without Caesars." With the way Bluesky is designed, Graber is certainly putting her money where her mouth (or shirt) is. As a decentralized social network built upon an open source framework, Bluesky differs from legacy platforms like Facebook in that users have a direct, transparent window into how the platform is being built. "If a billionaire came in and bought Bluesky, or took it over, or if I decided tomorrow to change things in a way that people really didn't like, then they could fork off and go on to another application," Graber explained at SXSW. "There's already applications in the network that give you another way to view the network, or you could build a new one as well. And so that openness guarantees that there's always the ability to move to a new alternative."
The Meta founder and CEO has directly compared himself to the Roman emperor Julius Caesar. His own shirt declared Aut Zuck aut nihil, which is a play on the Latin phrase aut Caesar aut nihil: "Either Caesar or nothing." Graber's shirt -- which directly copies the style of a shirt that Zuckerberg wore onstage recently -- says Mundus sine caesaribus. Or, "a world without Caesars." With the way Bluesky is designed, Graber is certainly putting her money where her mouth (or shirt) is. As a decentralized social network built upon an open source framework, Bluesky differs from legacy platforms like Facebook in that users have a direct, transparent window into how the platform is being built. "If a billionaire came in and bought Bluesky, or took it over, or if I decided tomorrow to change things in a way that people really didn't like, then they could fork off and go on to another application," Graber explained at SXSW. "There's already applications in the network that give you another way to view the network, or you could build a new one as well. And so that openness guarantees that there's always the ability to move to a new alternative."
Move Fast and Break Democracy (Score:5, Insightful)
More power to her. It's nice to see a clash of values in this space. Giving people the option to use a more open network is a good thing.
Re:Move Fast and Break Democracy (Score:5, Interesting)
The sad part is - Facebook could have remained huge, and sustainable. Part of the reason it got so big is that it did things that neither Twitter or MySpace did, namely the "seeing things in good timing" and the event- and calendar-driven coordination for parties and gatherings and public events. But instead, it's enshittified incredibly fast. [wired.com]
Sure, its origins were weird. Basically, an incredibly mediocre, unattractive guy born with a silver spoon up his ass wanted to get laid, so he four of his douchebro friends made a social media site about "rating faces" of women on college campuses - a copy of "Hot or Not" called "Facemash" that Harvard wound up shutting down for good reason.
But then they turned it into what people wanted; a feed of people's actual friends and interests. Local performing events, live music, festivals, etc. You could post up on a Thursday, ask what was going on for the weekend or if anyone wanted to go to this thing you knew about, and have your friends check in by Friday afternoon to make plans.
And then came the 2016 election, right around the time it started to enshittify. And our feeds filled with a whole lot of dumb jackassery, propaganda pages, push-pages for bullshit like "conservative treehouse" or Bernie Bros shit or "leftist laundry" or whatever the fuck else was supposed to start making people angry, because Zuck and his shitty employees decided to tune the algorithm for 'engagement' and it turns out that especially for the 60+-year-old crowd, "shit that makes them angry at the world" keeps them glued to Fox Noise and talk radio, and so that resulted in Facebook turning into the Boomer Network.
And by now, in 2025: check your feed. How many bullshit ad-posts and "suggested" posts do you have to scroll past to even FIND a post from one of your friends? Even the people you're pretty sure on the network?
Sure, you can still post up on a Thursday, to ask about plans for the weekend... but you'll get a bunch of posts the following Tuesday or Wednesday from people saying they wished they'd seen it earlier. And all the local artists, comedians, bands... they've given up. They're trying to engage on Tiktok, or on Instagram, or anywhere other than Facebook, because Facebook wants to charge them an arm and a leg for visibility.
The only thing keeping Facebook even remotely afloat these days is the fact that nobody else has created an actual "Your friends here, timeline-based and with event coordination functions" social network to replace it. Twitter/X is a nazi-infested dumpster fire, Bluesky is just trying to copy Twitter, and the rest of them are just photosplat and video-snippet-splat versions of Twitter.
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But then they turned it into what people wanted
Peer centralization. Underneath it was nothing more than a september-friendly craigslist.
But yes it's amazing that they squandered it. All you had to do was NOT fuck it up and people would keep coming to facebook because people kept coming facebook and thus people would always keep coming to facebook since people keep coming to facebook.
The motherlode of all captive audiences. The holy grail. The single LAST boat you'd want to over-rock with MBA revemonetizationstreams.
And they blew it.
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But then they turned it into what people wanted
Peer centralization. Underneath it was nothing more than a september-friendly craigslist.
But yes it's amazing that they squandered it. All you had to do was NOT fuck it up and people would keep coming to facebook because people kept coming facebook and thus people would always keep coming to facebook since people keep coming to facebook.
The motherlode of all captive audiences. The holy grail. The single LAST boat you'd want to over-rock with MBA revemonetizationstreams.
And they blew it.
How did they "blow it"? Facebook is the world's largest social media company, and still growing, especially in countries like India where the population will add millions of more Internet users over the coming decades. Facebook is still growing at steady clip, they've acquired other outlets to diversify. They're absolutely THE dominant social media company on the planet [backlinko.com]:
"Right now, 3.98 billion people access Meta-owned services (FB, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp) every month, a 6.42% increase year-over-yea
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And by now, in 2025: check your feed. How many bullshit ad-posts and "suggested" posts do you have to scroll past to even FIND a post from one of your friends? Even the people you're pretty sure on the network?
Very few, as I use FB Purity add on with Firefox. I'm mostly still there because family stuff.
Poor zuck (Score:2)
That midlife crisis is really hitting him hard.
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What is it with these ultra-fragile multi-billionaire tech bros and their need to be considered elite game players? Being an incredibly successful businessman just isn't enough, I guess.
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Elon botted Path of Exile, a PC game, claimed he was one of the best in the world
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sorry, paid other people to play 24/7 then exposed himself in a live stream as clueless according to content creators for the game
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Sucess in business is a lot of luck. Zuckerberg's hot or not college webpage took off for some reason. Lots didn't. You'd like to believe it's due to how smart you are and what a great leader you are, so business types like to do things like read Sun Tzu and preach whacky management systems. And if you're a strategic genius that should extend to strategic games too, right?
Infinite free-riders (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with the open-protocol model is it's almost impossible to make money.
If you show ads, charge subscriptions, etc, customers will take their business elsewhere. But if you aren't making money, how do you pay people to do content moderation? How can you afford to comply with the DSA, DMA, GDPR, and various CSAM laws?
Maybe Bluesky has found a solution. We'll see.
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The problem with the open-protocol model is it's almost impossible to make money.
If you show ads, charge subscriptions, etc, customers will take their business elsewhere. But if you aren't making money, how do you pay people to do content moderation? How can you afford to comply with the DSA, DMA, GDPR, and various CSAM laws?
Maybe Bluesky has found a solution. We'll see.
Maybe Bluesky should sell those t-shirts. They wouldn't make a pile of money, but they'd probably find a decent number of buyers before someone else ripped off the design.
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Image search the phrase; already t-shirted across the quick scam sites.
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And yet, people make money with email. Many email providers have ads, including the most popular: Gmail and Outlook. Many others use paid subscriptions and profitable. And they all have to comply with local regulations. There is no real content moderation because it is direct messaging, but there are spam filters.
Email is a very open protocol, too open actually. Along the years, development made the barrier to entry a little higher to combat spam, but it is still accessible.
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A subscription to allow for higher quality uploads would be an easy gotcha for some cash flow. Right now they crunch everything down to 2000x2000px JPG, and the art community on there is really noticing it.
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Because those laws exist for a reason that society collectively decided is important.
FYI when you say "why not encourage more speech" in this context, that "speech" is kiddie porn, trying to seduce kids (COPPA), other people's PII (GDPR), etc.
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Okay. nothing we didn't already know except that Bluesky is doubling down on the censorship. But this is a woman in tech story! It has to go up. What can we do? Maybe talk about her fashion choices and hairstyle?
To be fair, if a male SXSW keynote speaker wore a T-shirt with a Latin phrase poking fun at Zuckerberg, it would probably show up here too. It might not be "here's what a woman wore" as "someone denounced Zuckerberg in a clever way."
Then again, Slashdot hasn't yet run a story on my cool T-shirt that says "Guck Foogle." It's either because I'm a man, because I'm not that important, or because it's not particularly witty.
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It's kind of sad you don't seem to realize that you care. Much more than any well adjusted person does. You appear to have some ... opinions. Hope you can join us in the land of the adults some day.
Re:I care what's between her legs why? (Score:4, Interesting)
"By empowering users in these ways, Bluesky aims to create a more democratic and user-centric social media landscape."
So woke right?
Let's use Claude 3.7 to see how uncensored Twitter/X is:
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Despite Elon Musk describing himself as a "free speech absolutist" when he acquired Twitter in October 2022, there have been numerous documented instances of censorship on the platform since then:
Government Compliance
Twitter/X has complied with 98.8% of government takedown requests under Musk's ownership, a significant increase from around 50% before his takeover.
The platform has approved 83% of censorship requests from authoritarian governments, including restricting content critical of ruling parties in countries like Turkey and India.
Personal Censorship Actions
Musk banned the account that tracked his personal jet's movements.
He subsequently banned journalists who reported on the jet-tracking ban.
Posts discussing "Trans Day of Vengeance" were deleted en masse due to inconsistently applied rules.
Platform-Wide Actions
According to X's transparency report from September 2024, 5.3 million accounts were suspended in just the first half of that year.
A study found that hate speech increased by 50% between Musk's acquisition in October 2022 and June 2023, when he blocked researchers' and journalists' access to the network's data.
The evidence suggests that despite promises of increased free speech, Twitter/X under Musk has actually increased certain forms of content moderation and censorship, particularly in response to government requests, while also implementing personal censorship decisions that appear to contradict free speech principles.
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It seems like the 'free speech' wasn't the problem, but rather that users want control over what speech they actually see. It seems like from your AI Sumary bluesky realizes this and is trying to deliver it.
To quote Elon Musk, "Interesting"
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Beyond the above, let's add, first re: government requests:
* Re, government takedown requests, right-wing-authoritarian Turkey was responsible for half of them, followed by Germany and India. The EFF is alarmed at Musk's near-total acquiescence to takedown requests. But Musk made a giant fuss of fighting against takedown requests for people advocating for the overthrow of Brazil's (left) government (only to ultimately comply).
* For compliance requests more broadly, from January to June, Twit
Re: Insane Asylum Bluesky's CEO Pokes Fun. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Sorry AC, nobody can understand a word you are saying with that cock in your mouth.
Currently +4, Insightful. Well done, Slashdot. Well done.
A world without Caesars ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Romani ite domum (Score:2)
Serio dico!