Who really owns Bluesky?
Not some deliberately misleading two year old press release. Who are the owners of the Bluesky PBC corporation? Is there any debt or warrants? To whom? Where is the money coming from?
Why is this a secret?
Seeing reports of algorithmic amplification and suppression over there. Who has their hands on the knobs?
Who owns Bluesky?
I dun want to pay but there might be some stuffs in:
https://icis.corp.delaware.gov/ecorp/entitysearch/NameSearch.aspx
File No. 6282898
Thanks, but it is just as much about the principle of the matter.
Why is this a mystery?
Why should we need to conduct an investigation?
Why do we need to jump through hoops to discover who the owners are behind this company?
On the one hand they present themselves as the fresh open social media alternative, and yet they are circumspect about their ownership.
Why should the public trust such an entity?
Subject: Bluesky is cosplaying federation
Jay Graber and about 25 past or present Bluesky employees [plus or minus 5] together presently hold a majority share of the company. The rest is believed to be held by venture capital firms and other external investors, none of whom has as much as Graber does. The largest institutional investors are probably Blockchain Capital and Neo Collective LLC.
It isn't unusual for a company that isn't publicly traded to withhold details. There is also no indication yet that a group or individual not listed above owns enough of Bluesky to be able to demand much control.
Ownership is a red herring, though. There are concerns separate from ownership by specific parties that invalidate Bluesky as federated social media.
The vast majority of the Bluesky servers that hold user data, whether or not users supposedly "own" their data, are centralized and under the control of the one single [and private] company. That isn't expected to change.
In theory, Bluesky users may now set up self-hosted servers [referred to as Personal Data Servers] as in the Fediverse. In practice, the visibility of such servers requires the cooperation of the company's central servers.
Additionally, the Bluesky central servers control the identity of each Bluesky user whether or not the user runs a self-hosted server. Bluesky users can't migrate their identity and data without the cooperation of the central servers.
Further, for technical reasons, full or even just large scale decentralization of Bluesky isn't even possible.
Bluesky is designed so that due to high operational costs the infrastructure needed to support full operation independent of the Bluesky central servers is expected to be unaffordable to all but a few wealthy entities. In short, a billionaire's club.
I fail to see a difference, in a topological sense, between Bluesky and Twitter. My advice to those who prefer not to be krill is to run away, run away fast.
I intend no offense to #Bluesky users. However, the future of social media as a force for truth and for change is in #federation and nowhere else. When I researched this post, I found a comment that Bluesky is just "cosplaying federation" and the comment strikes me as accurate.
I asked an LLM to comment on my conclusions. Yes, LLMs are bad. See my recent posts for a related 15-page essay. Hold flames on the subject. This said, the following LLM response has merit. [This is lightly edited.]
"Most social media startups follow a trajectory where the need for a Return on Investment (ROI) eventually necessitates the monetization of user attention. And, even if the protocol is open, the most popular [i.e., commercial core] instance exerts gatekeeping power. For a platform to serve the public good, it must be insulated from the whims of the owners of such instances."
I mean tbh "PBC" is pretty much whatev they say too so I trust them as much as I trust any corpo (not at all.)
I dunno why Delaware charges for that. But yesh mostly anything corpo ownership should be free and easy to find, incl parent and sub corpos.
Of course 'PBC' is simply more of the smokescreen.
The point is that uncovering the owners, through such investigation if possible, might be useful, but is secondary to the issue that the company is not transparent about its ownership or financial matters. And yet they ask the public for trust with the stewardship of their members social media activities.
@mastodonmigration
They're just the samr stuffs as Meta or whatev yesh, that's one reason I will never use.
@mastodonmigration if you don't know who is the owner of a company it is most likely venture capital.
@mastodonmigration
Well, the initial investment was from Twitter. Could it have been the most important one?
Until the investment rounds run out, they need to find a way to monetize the platform. At some point, they’ll have to take the training wheels off the bike and start with ads or subscriptions. Maybe they’ll do it with a cryptocurrency, to make it feel more modern and fresh.
Who cares who owns it, it is centralized and once it gets big, "whoever" can sell to the highest bidder and it will be X all over again. Hell, some people say it is X all over again right now.
@mastodonmigration https://opencorporates.com/companies/us_wa/605608574 there's probably a way to follow the paper trail upwards.
@mastodonmigration one sec, fact checking this before I boost it, lemme see if I can find the owner or if it's actually secret
@mastodonmigration unless I'm missing something Jay is the CEO, i.e., owner https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jay_Graber
You are missing something. The CEO of a corporation is not the owner. She certainly has some equity (stock) in the corporation, but actual ownership is distributed among those who own it's stock (or debt/warrants). Bluesky has not been transparent about who these owners are and in what percentages. We know some things from press releases concerning their VC funding rounds, but not who really owns Bluesky or how they continue to fund their operations with no apparent revenue.
@mastodonmigration for the record I don't use bluesky, according to Wikipedia in addition to being the CEO she also owns the most equity
"Graber has the largest ownership share of the company. In late 2024, members of the board of directors included Graber, Jeremie Miller, Mike Masnick, and Kinjal Shah."
Those are all from old deliberately misleading press releases. Familiar with everything published on the subject, and nowhere is the ownership breakdown delineated. Further, there is no financial information at all available for the company, including no information concerning any revenue or burn rate. No information on any debts, convertable debt, or warrants. In truth, no authoritative public information on who owns Bluesky or how they continue to operate.
@mastodonmigration @jackie From what i can find without registering and asking for more info, they got Series B funding in 2025. They've had at least 22 investors.
https://pitchbook.com/profiles/company/484831-81
https://www.cbinsights.com/company/bluesky-8/financials
They are in part funded by
https://pitchbook.com/profiles/investor/300219-22
https://pitchbook.com/profiles/investor/300219-22
https://www.cbinsights.com/investor/joe-beda
Bluesky has invested in https://www.cbinsights.com/company/sky-bridge
@mastodonmigration
A copy of twitter started by a founder of twitter turns out to be like twitter?
The processing and storage can be distributed, but it's centrally controlled. Not federated, nor distributed control.
If you set up a Bluesky server you are simply subsidising the Bluesky management.
