Image: Kelsey Hightower
As Bluesky continues to attract the scientific and tech community fleeing from X, Ann O’Dea spoke to US software engineer and open-source champion Kelsey Hightower about the promise of the AT protocol.
US software engineer Kelsey Hightower, best known for his work with Kubernetes and Google, is bullish about the prospects of Bluesky.
He says we have been presented with a new opportunity to get social media right, but we all have a responsibility to ensure that happens.
Bluesky has been set up as a B Corp – a public benefit corporation – and that the social network is powered by the AT protocol, an open standard for decentralised social networking services that offers the greatest promise.
And Hightower says he is hugely impressed with the ambitions of its small team – having just met with Blusky’s engineering team in Seattle days before we spoke.
Bluesky began life as an independent research group within Twitter, under Jack Dorsey, as a proof of concept of the AT protocol – not unlike Kubernetes within Google. Bluesky too has committed to ultimately transferring the protocol’s development to a standards body, possible the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).
After a long career as a developer, speaker, community builder and open-source enthusiast, from 2015 Hightower worked for Google as an engineer in their cloud computing division, retiring in 2023 as a Google distinguished engineer.
These days Hightower is an adviser, board member of various entities and is still very active in the Kubernetes community. Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration system for automating software deployment, scaling, and management.
Its origins are in Google, but today, the trademark is held by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, and it is maintained by a passionate worldwide community. It is why I was keen to get Hightower’s perspective on the potential of Bluesky.
Hightower went from hardly using social media to becoming an avid user of what was then Twitter, while he worked at Puppet Labs back in 2012. “That means I was using Twitter maybe 10 years prior to Elon [Musk] buying X and I started using things like Twitter spaces,” he says.
“I was all in. Social media became a huge part of my personal brand, my side businesses, the connections I made throughout the tech industry. That was a whole journey, but that whole learning in public was my primary use case for social media.”
Musk’s use case is clearly very different, says Hightower, something widely recognised now. “It’s like the billionaire buying a newspaper, right? And billionaires buy newspapers, not because they want cheaper subscriptions. They see this as a point of control for society. And I think maybe Elon looked at Twitter as the ultimate newspaper, a real-time one. And imagine being able to control that.”
Making an X-it
These days Hightower is a frequent Bluesky poster and has left X behind, but only recently. “I opened my Bluesky account a year ago when they were doing invite-only. I played with the platform. At the time, in my mind, it was just a Twitter clone. What’s the point of being on a Twitter clone if I’m just going to have to rebuild my following and just be on an island talking to myself?”
He continued to dabble with it, and did the whole cross-posting journey, as he was initially loathe to leave his 250,000+ X followers behind. He didn’t leave Twitter when Musk bought it, not when it was renamed X, not even when it became overrun with trolls and far-right talking points, but then the realisation began to kick in.
“I realised that it had been my ego talking. While I believe in free speech, I am not looking to attend a Klan rally. I think a lot of people get this whole free speech thing kind of confused. Never in human history have people willingly put themselves in environments that they don’t want to be in, and I think that holds true for speech. But even that didn’t push me off of X. What pushed me off X was just watching good people behave badly,” he says.
Hightower watched as the algorithm on X rewarded obnoxious behaviour. “Then Musk started paying people to behave this way. So you already turn up the social incentives of reactionary tweets. Then you put fuel on the fire by making a monetary outcome for being this way. And I’m just thinking about this and saying, ‘Why am I here? Does my ego really trump every other belief that I have?”
Hightower deleted his X account more than a month ago – before the US elections. “I just decided, I’m going to stop using it. And I said, this is my final post. I just woke up in the morning and decided I don’t want to engage with good people behaving badly. This is my last tweet.”
Needless to say, he got immediate pushback. “Remember a lot of people on X don’t follow you because they want to see your work. They follow to troll you. They want to be the first person to say ‘that’s never going to work’. And you can pay a couple of bucks to make sure that when you say that, it rises to the top of the feed so everyone can see it,” he says.
“And they were all saying ‘you’ll be back tomorrow. You can’t leave this place. This place controls you’. Well, I got my archive and hit delete, and it said, if you don’t log in by the 20th, it’s gone forever.”
Hightower didn’t log in on the 20th, and he is clearly happy with his decision when we speak. It was that idea of us being controlled by the platform, rather than owning our own content, that really hit home, he says.
“On Twitter, Facebook, YouTube you don’t own your own content. You are a guest at the Hotel California. It gives people reach, the ability to build up their identities. But what X also demonstrated is that it can be taken away.”
A ‘Kubernetes moment’
It’s not Bluesky’s use as a Twitter clone that excites Hightower, but rather its potential to allow users to control what they read, and what they share and own. He believes Bluesky is having it “Kubernetes moment”.
“Everything we learned about cloud at Google, we made into an open-source project, Kubernetes. Most people couldn’t see that in 2012, but what I saw was access to amazing code. Google went from writing white papers to producing something you can touch.
“So when we talk about Bluesky, what I see is the AT protocol, which sits underneath. Chatting with the Bluesky engineering team the other day in Seattle confirmed my suspicion that this is definitely a Kubernetes-like effort,” he says.
“Some people will say, ‘Oh, it’ll never take off’. Well, it won’t take off if we don’t do the work. I’m not putting this all on the Bluesky team and their venture capitalists that chose to invest in them. The people that are building this protocol are saying, ‘Hey, we learned a lot in the last 10 to 15 years. Here’s the source code, here’s the documentation. Maybe one day it may find its way into a foundation.”
As a result, today you can host your own data, and create your own domain name, just like in the old website days.
“You can then allow companies like Bluesky – because there’s only one today that dominates that – to pull in that data into one big fire hose, and then they take that data and render a website and a mobile app. But if you look at the architecture, there is nothing stopping you from doing exactly the same thing and competing on the same fire hose as everyone else.
“It reminds me of something. It reminds me of the original promise of the internet. And they’re working diligently and doing it transparently, thanks to the VCs that are temporarily funding this effort. Whether they succeed as a business or not, I don’t think this idea goes away.”
Owning your data
Currently, the only real way to verify your account on Bluesky is to purchase your own domain name – you can buy that from BlueSky if you wish, but again this means you get to retain your ‘handle’ and data.
“I pay for KelseyHightower.com and I can just point it at my Bluesky account, and that becomes my identity,” says Hightower. “That way, if I have to leave, I can just tell people to continue to find me at KelseyHightower.com. It feels like I am now reclaiming my own name.
“The next phase is that if I do want to take sovereign ownership of my data, well, that’s possible too. I can go to GitHub, download this little binary and run it, and for the first time in some people’s lives – some people missed the whole build-your-own-website era, they only know a world where we put content into other systems – they return to a world where, if you have a Raspberry Pi or you want to use a cloud provider, that choice is yours, you can now start posting directly to your server.”
Here Hightower returns to his open-source roots and cites a favourite phrase: “It’s easy to predict the future if you’re working on it.” He believes the community has a responsibility to ensure this works.
“This is the first time we have this type of platform, so maybe we should be held accountable if it doesn’t work out the way we want. That’s my current stance. I see this now from an open-source lens of shared responsibility. Right now, we get another opportunity to get this right. Let’s make it happen.”
Will it be different this time? Will Bluesky give us the social network many have been crying out for? Well, I’m with Hightower. That will be down to all of us.
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