Dec. 14 -- Devin Ivy has been a "big nerd" for the internet since he was in elementary school, drawn in by what he sees as a playground for creative expression.
That longstanding fascination helped land the South Portland native a key role in the creation of Bluesky, a Twitter-like social media platform that's been growing rapidly in recent months.
Ivy, 34, who now lives in Boston, joined Bluesky in fall 2022, just before Elon Musk purchased Twitter and turned it into X. At the time, Ivy, a senior software engineer, was one of four working on the site. Two years later, the team has expanded to 21.
Initially an offshoot of Twitter, Bluesky looks almost identical to its predecessor. Users can post short messages with pictures and videos, and follow friends, celebrities, media, businesses and government agencies. But unlike X or Meta's Threads -- where one company controls all user data -- Bluesky operates on an open network, allowing people to choose which servers host their data. That "decentralized" approach -- encouraged by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey -- gives users more control over their online experience.
When Bluesky launched in 2023, people had to be "invited" to join, but the site is now open to anyone with an email address. New accounts started increasing sharply after the election, as many people fled Musk's X, fed up with the changes he introduced that promote polarized views and foster misinformation. For nearly a week, Bluesky was gaining around 1 million new users a day. Now, the site has just shy of 25 million users. Comparatively, X has about 336 million users, and Threads has about 275 million users.
Still, the rapid growth is nothing to sneeze at, and for Ivy and his fellow Bluesky developers, the last few weeks have been a whirlwind. It's been a privilege to experience, Ivy said, but it takes a lot of work to make sure the website can handle the increased traffic.
"I think the team is finding a lot of purpose in this moment, and that's good because it's also really hard. Everyone is just kind of firing on all cylinders, but there's a lot of excitement," he said.
Ivy anticipates the social media platform will continue gaining steam in the new year.
"One of the hard things with getting people to switch social networks ... is that when just a few people show up, you don't build those connections on the other side," he said. "It's a lot less sticky than if you and your friends and the celebrities you follow and the news people you follow also come over."
The critical mass that has flocked to the site in the last few weeks has made it more likely that people will stick around, he said.
Before joining Bluesky, Ivy worked at Big Room Technologies -- then Big Room Studios -- in Portland for about a decade. The software engineering company builds websites and mobile applications for companies. It was his only other professional gig. Ivy credits his 10 years at Big Room Technologies with a lot of his success at Bluesky.
"At Bluesky, you'll find a bunch of well-meaning nerds for the web and people inspired by the best ideals of the web, and at Big Room you find a really similar thing," he said. "Those are Mainers showing up and throwing down in the technology space and bringing as high quality as you can find anywhere, and it's cool that we have that."
He started dabbling with HTML coding as a kid in the late '90s and early 2000s, fueled by the early buzz around the internet and what it could become.
The first "social adjacent" platform he used was with the now-defunct Headbone Studios, a website where kids could play games like stock market simulator "The Price of Fame."
By the time Myspace rolled around when he was in late middle school, he was into programming and graphic design and could "deck out" his page with custom backgrounds. Facebook and Twitter became increasingly important by the time he was attending Cheverus High School and then later at Tufts University, though Ivy said he was never a prolific poster.
"Once you learn some of these skills, there's just so much that is possible and the web is permission-less, so you don't have to ask anybody to go publish on the web," Ivy said. "I got this taste for building stuff from scratch, and you can do it in a completely self-directed way and there's just no rules."
Ivy has been interested in the idea of "decentralized social media" for years, following other experimental efforts like "Secure Scuttlebutt" or the better-known Mastodon. Bluesky's approach is carefully considered and pragmatic, he said, and is one of the few he can picture working in practice.
"Threads and X are these incumbent platforms that thrive on being able to hoard people's attention and bottleneck public conversation," Ivy said, "where we're trying to create an open ecosystem."
By having open data, any developers can go in and build a custom feed or an algorithm, he said, and features like "starter packs" of recommended accounts, plus a concept called "stackable moderation" that allows additional security or use parameters (for example, an add-on that blocks screenshots from other social media websites).
People can expect to see a lot more experimentation on the edges of Bluesky as that developer ecosystem takes off, Ivy said.
"I just have the sense that in social, there's so much more room for fun and innovation than we've seen for the past whatever decade-plus now," he said. "I don't know if it'll look like Myspace where it's like completely out of control, but I hope that we can kind of reclaim that sense of play."