Bluesky CEO Jay Graber Pokes Fun At Mark Zuckerberg With Latin Phrase T-Shirt (techcrunch.com)
- Reference: 0176669507
- News link: https://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/25/03/10/2111223/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-pokes-fun-at-mark-zuckerberg-with-latin-phrase-t-shirt
- Source link: https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/10/at-sxsw-bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-pokes-fun-at-mark-zuckerberg-with-latin-phrase-t-shirt/
> When Bluesky CEO Jay Graber walked on stage at SXSW 2025 for [1]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 [2]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."
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7OwcXCE5Rg
[2] https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/10/at-sxsw-bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-pokes-fun-at-mark-zuckerberg-with-latin-phrase-t-shirt/
Poor zuck (Score:2)
> The Meta founder and CEO has directly compared himself to the Roman emperor Julius Caesar.
That midlife crisis is really hitting him hard.
Re: (Score:2)
Apparently he really likes board games, and he's really good at them. [1]Somehow he always wins [bbc.com]. Apparently people who don't let him win end up fired.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly820v99ppo
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Is there another multi-billionaire in the same category?
Re: (Score:2)
Elon botted Path of Exile, a PC game, claimed he was one of the best in the world
Re: (Score:2)
sorry, paid other people to play 24/7 then exposed himself in a live stream as clueless according to content creators for the game
Infinite free-riders (Score:4, 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.
Re: (Score:2)
> 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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
I care what's between her legs why? (Score:1, Redundant)
Where's the meat in the article? One tech CEO mocked another one? That's what constitutes news? Nothing about innovation, accomplishments, some new thing Bluesky is doing to get ahead? There's a link to her keynote. Surely there's interesting stuff in there to talk about? Let me look up Bluesky. User revolt to demand censorship of the scary N word... extensive blocking and censorship features... Old twitter, but with way more censorship and the full load of liberals who left Twitter when Musk bought it and
Re: (Score:2)
> 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.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
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: Insane Asylum Bluesky's CEO Pokes Fun. (Score:3)
Sorry AC, nobody can understand a word you are saying with that cock in your mouth.
A world without Caesars ... (Score:4, Insightful)
... and governments w/o muskrats.
Move Fast and Break Democracy (Score:3, 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:4, 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 [1]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.
[1] https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/