Bluesky’s Emily Liu on rethinking social media (and why it’s time to chime in)

Emily Liu is the head of special projects at Bluesky.

Here at Mozilla, we are the first to admit the internet isn't perfect, but we know the internet is pretty darn magical. The internet opens up doors and opportunities, allows for human connection, and lets everyone find where they belong - their corners of the internet. We all have an internet story worth sharing. In My Corner Of The Internet, we talk with people about the online spaces they can't get enough of, the sites and forums that shaped them, and how they would design their own corner of the web.

We caught up with Emily Liu, head of special projects at Bluesky, as the open-source platform celebrates its first year launching to the public (you can follow Firefox on Bluesky here). She talks about how social media has changed over the last decade, her love for public forums and how her path started with a glitter cursor.

What is your favorite corner of the internet?

I'm at the two extremes on the spectrum of private to public content:

Firstly, I love a good iMessage group text, especially when it's moving at 100 miles per hour. I strongly believe that everyone needs a good group chat.

At the same time, I love public web forums. This feels like something that's increasingly rare on the internet as more of us move to private group apps, and I worry that this is equivalent to pulling the ladder up behind us for those who haven't found those private spaces yet. So I try to do my part by chiming in on public forums when I can offer something useful.

What is the one tab you always regret closing?

I live by Google Calendar and have widgets for it on probably every digital surface - my desktop, my phone lock screen, my laptop side menu, and of course, multiple tabs simultaneously. If something's not on my calendar, it's probably not happening.

What can you not stop talking about on the internet right now?

I'm super excited about Bluesky. Obviously I'm unbiased (I work here). We launched the Bluesky app publicly in just February 2024, and under a year later, we crossed 30M people on the network. But the real measure of Bluesky's growth is that my family has started sending me news articles and asking, Hey, isn't this where you work?"

Social networks have become vital public infrastructure, whether it's to get the latest breaking news, find jobs and opportunities, or stay in touch with our friends and family. Yet over the last decade, closed networks have locked users in, preventing competition and innovation in social media as their services deteriorate. On the other hand, Bluesky is both a social app where your experience online is yours to customize, and an open network that reintroduces competition to social media. This also means that the social network isn't defined by whoever the CEO is, however capricious they might be.

What was the first online community you engaged with?

In middle school, I ran an anonymous fashion blog on Tumblr. This was before Tumblr had group chats, so internet friends and I co-opted the product by creating a makeshift group DM - a private blog with multiple owners, where every message we sent was really just a post on a private blog. Where there is a will, there is a way, and people are infinitely creative; this is where I learned that the product you design may not be the product that users adopt.

Tumblr was also where I wrote my first lines of code out of desperation for a better blog theme than what the default marketplace provided. Who would've thought that adding a visitor counter and a glitter cursor would've led me to this point!

If you could create your own corner of the internet, what would it look like?

I feel lucky that in a sense, I am doing this right now through Bluesky. On one hand, there's the Bluesky app itself. There's still a bunch of low-hanging fruit to reach feature parity with other social networks, but on top of that, I'm excited about tweaks that might make social media less of a torment nexus" that other apps haven't tried yet. Maybe I shouldn't share them here just yet since I know a certain other company likes to implement Bluesky's ideas.

And on the other hand, Bluesky is already so customizable that I can configure my experience to be what I want. For example, I'm a big fan of the Quiet Posters custom feed, which shows you posts from people you follow who don't often post that much, giving you a cozier feel of the network.

What articles and/or videos are you waiting to read/watch right now?

I have so many open tabs and unread newsletters about China and AI that I need to get to.

What role do you see open web projects like Bluesky playing in shaping the future of the web?

I see Bluesky as just one contributor in the mission of building an open web - we're not the first project to build an open social network, and we won't be the last. The collaboration and constructive criticism from other players has been immensely useful. Recently, some independent groups have begun building alternative ATProto infrastructure, which I'm particularly excited about. (ATProto, or the AT Protocol, is the open standard that Bluesky is built upon.) Bluesky's vision of a decentralized and open social web only comes to fruition when users actually have alternatives to choose from, so I'm rooting for all of these projects too.

Emily Liu is the head of special projects at Bluesky, an open social network that gives creators independence from platforms, developers the freedom to build, and users a choice in their experience. Previously, Emily built election models and visualizations at The Washington Post, archival tooling at The New York Times, and automated fact-checking at the Duke Reporters' Lab.

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