Parmy Olson, Columnist

Bluesky’s Radical Idea: Let Users Set the Rules of Social Media

The platform could spark an internet renaissance if it doesn’t get caught up in dry technicalities.

March 10, 2025 at 5:00 AM UTC

Parmy Olson is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology. A former reporter for the Wall Street Journal and Forbes, she is author of “Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World.”

Flying high.
Photographer: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto/Getty Images

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If you’re a child of the ‘70s or ‘80s, your first experience of the internet was probably AOL Inc. The hum, crackle and static screech of the connecting modem ushered you into busy chatrooms and vibrant forums. That era didn’t last long. Through the ‘90s and early 2000s, AOL’s walled garden crumbled as millions of websites populated what we now call the open web. Protocols like “HTTP” and “SMTP” allowed people to jump between pages or send emails between international servers.

Yet today’s web experience is less open and more like AOL again. Those who “surf the web” now spend at least half their time on a few sites owned by companies like Meta Platforms Inc., Alphabet Inc.’s Google and Amazon.com Inc. The sprawling, creative wilderness of the early internet is a distant memory — one that Jay Graber is trying to bring back.