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Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• ChrisArchitect 8mo ago
  Post from new CEO Toni Schneider https://toni.org/2026/03/09/coming-off-the-bench-for-bluesky/ https://toni.org/2026/03/09/coming-off-the-bench-for-bluesky...
  • 12_throw_away 8mo ago
    There's only a single non-platitude in the entire letter, but luckily it provides us with a wealth of information about what's coming next: > I’ve been a partner at True Ventures for many years
    • rvz 8mo ago
      > PS: My role as interim CEO will be to help set up Bluesky’s next phase of growth. This 'growth' comes with a lot of negative things and rarely lots of good things.
      • verdverm 8mo ago
        The brand already has a defined public perception that will be hard to change, even for those who've only heard it by name (eg Fox News). As a user, I generally agree with the Blue MAGA sentiments, even though it is much more diverse than that and you can filter out political content if you want. This is likely Bluesky's biggest challenge in a return to growth. This is separate from ATProto, which I still maintain positive sentiment for.
      • volkercraig 8mo ago
        What is it that doctors call growth at any cost? Cancer?
  • zoul 8mo ago
    “The vision was always compelling. A social web that no single company controls, where users own their identity and their relationships,” says the new CEO of the single company that can control what millions of Bluesky users see in their apps.
• multisport 8mo ago
  Just to say the obvious: the new CEO is a VC partner and former CEO of Automattic. That seems very bad, no matter how "committed" they are to the vision of Bluesky.
  • plsft 8mo ago
    thats not a good sign
  • jsheard 8mo ago
    He's only meant to be filling in temporarily per the Wired article, but we'll see.
    • multisport 8mo ago
      Fair enough, I've never been involved in a CEO recruitment, I can't imagine the candidate pool tends to include people like the previous CEO of Bluesky
      • marksomnian 8mo ago
        It's not that unusual to have an interim CEO hold the reins (read: sign anything that needs the CEO's signature) while a permanent one is found.
        • alterom 8mo ago
          That's not what the comment you're responding to is about.
  • ribosometronome 8mo ago
    Apologies, I'm probably under a rock, but why is that bad? I see they're behind WordPress but am not sure what the 1:1 is. The WP Engine stuff?
    • Legend2440 8mo ago
• asymmetric 8mo ago
  And so it begins.
  • jb1991 8mo ago
    Go on..
• TyrunDemeg101 8mo ago
  Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...
  • dannyfritz07 8mo ago
    I won't get fooled again!
• amadeuspagel 8mo ago
  > and proved that a values-driven social network could thrive at scale. How could a social network, or anything humans create, not be values-driven?
  • _heimdall 8mo ago
    Values aren't the only motivator, unless you take an extremely broad definition of values.
    • plufz 8mo ago
      Yeah, the value of money is ironically usually not what we mean with ”values”.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • mcdonje 8mo ago
    Seriously? If a company is publicly traded, they're legally required to prioritize shareholder value, unless they're a benefit corp or something with multiple bottom lines. I suppose you could call it values-driven to drive up the bottom line, but that's not normally what people mean.
    • jakelazaroff 8mo ago
      IANAL but no, executives are not actually legally required to increase shareholder value.
      • verdverm 8mo ago
        They generally are aiui. Bluesky was formed as a PBC, which is basically a corporation where investors cannot sue for deralict of fiduciary duty.
      • irishcoffee 8mo ago
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.#Judgment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.#Judgme... Allow me introduce you to the inception of enshittification
• x0x0 8mo ago
  Sounds like a firing / soft firing / come to jesus moment about the viability of the business...
  • alephnerd 8mo ago
    Pretty much. It's fun seeing idealists get slapped by reality. If you want to protect your ideals you better know how to fight for them using the same tactics as your competitors. Learning how to build a board that is in your favor, making alliances with less than pure players if needed, and being ruthlessly competitive allows an ideal to become reality.
    • spacechild1 8mo ago
      What's fun about it?
      • alephnerd 8mo ago
        It's like seeing your kid learn how to walk. They'll fail a couple of times, but they'll get toughen up and finally learn.
    • pfraze 8mo ago
      You are wrong about pretty much all of that, including your assumed reasoning for why this is happening. Jay chose to change her role so she could do deeper work on the technology. That's it.
      • verdverm 8mo ago
        The issue is that no one really believes the corporate speak any more. Bluesky does not get a pass on this, re: VC funding I have concerns about one piece of messaging I've seen lately, working on a writeup, stay tuned
  • verdverm 8mo ago
    They could have launched paid subscriptions, they even said they were looking into it, crickets...
• DiabloD3 8mo ago
  Huh, I guess betting on Mastodon winning was the right bet.
  • embedding-shape 8mo ago
    Mastodon already won, by being used by people. Bluesky also won, by also being used by people. Not sure if this is a "winner takes it all" scenario? As long as you can host it yourself, I don't really mind where people are, both seem to work and have "won" for what they set out to do.
    • verdverm 8mo ago
      Since developing on ATProto, one thing I have hoped for is less of this "winner take all" world. I think the protocol can be for much more than social media, could do dropbox if permissions and private data are designed well. This comment by the main protocol dev working on this does not inspire confidence on my part. https://bsky.app/profile/dholms.at/post/3mfsehg6ius2a https://bsky.app/profile/dholms.at/post/3mfsehg6ius2a
    • lich_king 8mo ago
      It is a zero-sum game in some sense, because you go where your friends or "influencers" are. Mastodon ended up losing its user base to Bluesky during the early Twitter exodus because many influencers and journalists wanted to have an "elite" status and a special relationship with the platform, so they preferred a platform owned by Dorsey to some hippie open-source thing. Bluesky, in turn, ended up losing back to Twitter/X when it turned out to be a place where you mostly talk about how awful Twitter/X is. I want to say that we don't need social networks where we constantly interact with hundreds of thousands of strangers, but I'm writing this on HN, so...
      • dv35z 8mo ago
        Just an anecdote - I never used Twitter/X, and never used BlueSky. Recently (about a year ago), joined Mastodon. I enjoy it, find a lot of value there, and have interesting conversations (recently about Mint Debian Linux & sound-systems, and also maker-space CNC design tools). There seems to be active investment in good features & quality on the platform, including making it easier to host your own organization server. I believe, due to the format of engagement, its easy to spend a lot of time there scrolling - so consider (1) only using the platform on your desktop computer, instead of phone, (2) limiting time - 25 minutes a day is enough! (3) Mute spammers, complainers, people with negative attiudes - you can't catch them all, but you can intentionally shape your experience over time. (4) Subscribe to tags of your passions (example: #piano, #makerspace, #drawing, #cats, #jujitsu, #cncrouter, #3dprinting), and try to lean into that instead of getting caught up in endless political reactions - which never ends. You can be intentional, and subscribe to people who have a positive vision for the version of the future you prefer.
• Ekaros 8mo ago
  Wait Bluesky had a CEO? I thought it was some type of organic open source collective.
  • AuthAuth 8mo ago
    They constantly say they are a Public benefit corporation but there is no actual difference between that an a corporation. This leads to people assuming some kind of benevolence.
    • _cenw 8mo ago
      If you need a reference measure of "Public Benefit Corporation", Anthropic is one too.
    • dbbk 8mo ago
      There is an actual difference
      • AuthAuth 8mo ago
        No there isnt.
        • asadotzler 8mo ago
          Yes true. B Corps allow the board to weigh things besides shareholder value. That's a meaningful distinction. The idea is that shareholder primacy isn't compatible with everything every corporation wants to do, so having a board that's protected from lawsuits when they put things above shareholders is a useful thing and B Corps offer that. The board can, for example, reject a "superior" takeover bid without fear of lawsuits from shareholders pissed off they didn't get the biggest payday available. A typical C Corp's board MUST take the highest offer, and not doing so WILL get them sued. That means if GoodGuy B Corp is about to be taken over by BadGuy Inc., the GoodGuy board can say "No, they're not compatible with the public benefit mission we incorporated under so we're not going to accept their offer." That's actually really useful.
• Kye 8mo ago
  I have no idea what to think of this. Especially the Automattic connection, the company with the petty tyrant running it. I would want anyone coming from there to have learned something from the failure of the WordPress Foundation since Bluesky will need some foundationing too.
• davidw 8mo ago
  I was enjoying having one social network not run by horrid people. Maybe it's time to go back to IRC or something.
  • ynniv 8mo ago
    nostr
    • verdverm 8mo ago
      no sir, never gonna do crypto social media
      • AirMax98 8mo ago
        Fun fact: under the hood atproto bears many similarities to blockchain... it was funded in during the 2019/2020 crypto craze. I'm not too involved, but outside of a consensus mechanism, atproto looks a bit like a chain, kinda like IPFS.
        • verdverm 8mo ago
          I'm very deep into ATProto development, in particular I have the first Permissioned PDS implementation [1]. It definitely has roots in blockchain / federated, but makes tradeoffs for UX. The more interesting perspective is a Plug-n-Play Distributed System [2] [1] https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/compare/main...verdverm:atproto:main https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/compare/main...ver... [2] https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
  • pfraze 8mo ago
    I guess I'm honored that you feel like we weren't horrid. I have gotten a very positive impression from Toni so far, fwiw.
    • davidw 8mo ago
• rvz 8mo ago
  Translation: VCs and the board pushed Jay out. The interim CEO doesn't even use Bluesky himself, so at this point you might as well move to Threads.
  • qcoret 8mo ago
    This is false, he has been on Bluesky since 2024. https://bsky.app/profile/toni.bsky.team https://bsky.app/profile/toni.bsky.team
    • Lammy 8mo ago
      Last activity 17 days ago, 23 days ago, 3 months ago, 3 months ago, 4 months ago
      • verdverm 8mo ago
        Dive deeper with PDSLS https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:cwf4mmm7mpzistinx3ox2zhj#collections https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:cwf4mmm7mpzistinx3ox2zhj#coll...
    • rvz 8mo ago
      "17 posts" since 2024. 13 of them are reposts, and 2 of them are his own actual posts and then made 2 more posts about becoming the interim CEO of Bluesky and then "thanking" Jay. That doesn't seem like he even uses it regularly only up until the leadership changes.
  • baggachipz 8mo ago
    Threads? The twitter clone owned by Meta? Yeah no thanks.
    • tryrrr 8mo ago
      [dead]
    • PaulHoule 8mo ago
      … most social networks give you a “notification” if somebody follows you or engages with a post but there are two exceptions: (1) is LinkedIn which gives you a double-dose of main feed items you didn’t click on and that you never clicked on anything like ever so it’s a chance to prove their model is right… most social networks play a “ding” sound if somebody likes your post but LinkedIn dings when you post something because their standards are low. (2) Threads posts “notifications” that are somewhere between completely senseless and “political outrage of some kind but I can’t tell if they like Trump or hate Trump”
• jrm4 8mo ago
  Doomed from the start. It took me a while to figure this out, but ATProto is generally a bad idea; maybe even worse than Twitter. Which is to say, it provides a more robust model for your (true) information and data to be exploited by others than even the Twitter model. The Mastodon-slash-email model that relies on individual servers is better because decentralization is safer -- Those models bear more genuine "ability to delete" and more "plausible deniability."
  • fritzo 8mo ago
    The community has voted for convenience over privacy, and twitter and bluesky have won over mastodon. You're right, but people don't actually care about privacy
    • ghaff 8mo ago
      As someone who was once an avid twitter user, my sense is that Mastodon--after a somewhat hopeful start just never gained the network momentum. Bluesky came closest to Twitter's old reach but is still something of a shadow of the old Twitter (as Twitter/X is these days as well).
      • lich_king 8mo ago
        Bluesky is not just a shadow, it's on a pretty steady decline. Their DAU numbers are dropping every month. Which probably tells you something about the unspoken reason for this change.
        • ghaff 8mo ago
          Without researching actual numbers, it feels like that whole category of social media is pretty much uninteresting at this point. Not sure what really replaces it given that Facebook seems increasingly infested with AI slop and sponsored posts.
          • verdverm 8mo ago
• muppetman 8mo ago
  Ahhh yup, wondered how long it'd take before this happened. Sorry to sound like THAT guy, but I'm glad I deleted my account ages ago. I liked BS and it seemed good but yea, here comes Twitter 3.0
• pfraze 8mo ago
  This move came from Jay so that she could focus more on the atproto ecosystem and forward looking development. Personally, I'm happy for her. The CEO role gets extremely wrapped up in operations & org building, and as a technologist I'm not sure it would be for me. I've met with Toni a couple of times and he seems really excellent. He was CEO of Automattic (Wordpress) from 2006 to 2014, and that means a fair amount of expertise making an open-source-first company work. He cares about an open internet and protocol, and seems very keen to drive the mission forward. For a little extra assurance, atproto is hopefully quite close to establishing an IETF working group, and the DID PLC Directory is likewise close to establishing the independent entity. Our priorities for an open network are unchanged.
  • CactusBlue 8mo ago
    We don't need "open" networks (Digital Panopticons), we need private networks.
    • pfraze 8mo ago
      Both are good
    • baliex 8mo ago
      What are your thoughts on people self hosting their own websites and blogs instead of posting to big tech platforms? I’d say that extra openness was a good thing. I absolutely believe in privacy as well, and think ownership is important too.
      • CactusBlue 8mo ago
        We already could've done that before, just throw a HTML file on a HTTP server on a cheap VPS
        • danabramov 8mo ago
          That's pretty much what atproto is, except it's typed JSON rather than HTML, and HTTP+WebSockets to allow aggregation. I wrote more about how it works here if you're curious: https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/ https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/
• AJRF 8mo ago
  I've found lately that between age gating and twitter being - well I don't want to get into it - I am no longer looking for replacements - I just want to stop using those parts of the internet. Now I am down to file sharing, email and functions related to my job, a little youtube - but trying to ween myself of that. The internet as I knew it is dead.
  • deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  • somedude895 8mo ago
    YouTube is absolutely flourishing when it comes to quality content. It‘s the only UGC platform I use anymore. Besides the only thing I consume on the internet at this point is the news and check HN once or twice a week.
• deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
• haunter 8mo ago
  If you follow live sports then Twitter is still unparalleled because people (and broadcasters too) upload highlights in near real time. Every event, goal, home run, crash etc.
  • qingcharles 8mo ago
    There's an absolute ton of niches which are completely anchored to Twitter. It's hard to get a whole raft of people to move at once :(
  • small_model 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    • archagon 8mo ago
      Why would I use a social network run by someone with opinions straight from the pages of Stormfront? I don't need white supremacy mixed in with my light recreational reading, thanks.
      • small_model 8mo ago
        [flagged]
        • archagon 8mo ago
          If you truly believe "those days" are over, you're in for a depressing few decades as the world moves on without you. Most reasonable people — even white people like myself — are disgusted by the sort of rhetoric that Musk retweets and endorses on a daily basis[1]. It is, without any exaggeration, literal Stormfront shit as I remember from a decade ago. We will fight this putrid garbage and we will win. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk-posts-january-white-supremacists https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/12/elon-musk...
          • small_model 8mo ago
• rakovsky89 8mo ago
  [flagged]
• monster_truck 8mo ago
  bsky is going to get "freenode boyking'd" so hard. It, the maybe 300k human users, and 42.7 million bots are going to be sold and they will pull up the drawbridges.
  • monster_truck 8mo ago
    Great example of the userbase quality to be found here: https://bsky.app/profile/patriotnicole.bsky.social/followers https://bsky.app/profile/patriotnicole.bsky.social/followers This account has posted once and has over 700 followers in like an hour, which looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/hQcKDZQ.png https://i.imgur.com/hQcKDZQ.png There are countless "patriot" "true blue" "blue heart emoji american flag emoji" accounts just like this
• AbstractH24 8mo ago
  Blue sky seems like a bit of a flop Let’s not forget Jack Dorsey laid off half of Cash the other week
  • fredgrott 8mo ago
    by what metric.... for example name the only Twitter investment that made money.... hint...Bluesky.....all other Twitter projects failed.
• taurath 8mo ago
  Cue 3 months to the “I’m having to make some hard decisions” email. Whats the board at Bluesky like?
• arcalinea 8mo ago
  Jay here: this is a transition I've been working towards for awhile, and I'm looking forward to advancing the vision and ecosystem as CIO (Chief Innovation Officer). Toni has been an advisor to us for years, and I personally recruited him to take over as CEO while I focus on new projects within the company. It's an honor to have him on board to lead us into this next stage of growth.
  • sourcegrift 8mo ago
    [flagged]
    • brendoelfrendo 8mo ago
      Er, I don't know if she's discussed this elsewhere, but I don't think Jay is trans.
  • CactusBlue 8mo ago
    How do you feel about the recent communication failures from the team to the userbase? As another builder of an open-source social platform, we must all understand that it is paramount for any company to not antagonize its customers, doubly so for a SOCIAL platform. I do understand that Bluesky and ATProto has to deal with a lot of baggage from both the old userbase and the new influx from the X/Twitter exodus, but engaging in user-antagonistic communication caused me to sour on the whole protocol.
    • catapart 8mo ago
      Big time +1, here. Would love to hear something - anything - from the bsky team that takes some accountability.
    • parl_match 8mo ago
      > user-antagonistic communication could you provide some examples? i didn't really see this, but maybe i just missed it
      • 8mo ago
• pipeline_peak 8mo ago
  [flagged]
• user3939382 8mo ago
  It’s a social network premised on not liking Elon Musk as far as I remember. The inverse is not true, Twitter user adoption as far as I can tell is not primarily driven by left/right political fanaticism. Not sure what reason it even has to exist.
  • tryrrr 8mo ago
    [dead]
• Devasta 8mo ago
  Bluesky is very strange, it's got potential to endure as a fairly popular social media site but it's kinda obvious that it's staff are contemptuous of their users. The intended audience was meant to be blockchain weirdos with encyclopedic knowledge of the age of consent in every state, but instead they are stuck with a core userbase of Furries and LGBT people. They don't know how to fix this, so they'll be stuck floundering for a while to come trying and failing to return to their core mission.
  • tryrrr 8mo ago
    [dead]
• nout 8mo ago
  It's nice to be on a network that doesn't have a CEO or a board. I think this is why Nostr is really something different and more important.
  • muyuu 8mo ago
    it does have a similar problem to other systems in that it's so free-form there is no cohesive experience
• gethly 8mo ago
  [flagged]
• ChrisArchitect 8mo ago
  While I definitely appreciate the sentiments of ATproto and a bit more openness of Bluesky as a platform for development fun and perks like domain verification etc...... having to relive all of the development that we went thru with Twitter for over a decade as they 'build in the open' is frustrating. The network effects are there (which are super important to break out of silos and gain explorability) a bit more thanks to the centralization and hashtags (moreso that the go nowhere Fediverse) but there's a bigger hole: say what you want about daily user numbers, so much mainstream and big accounts are just not there. From news organizations (including the ones that are there that post 'selectively') to politicians, sports like some others have mentioned, entertainment and more. Abandoned accounts, or just not there. A chunk of the conversation (or even the 'fight') and reachability of those entities, even the usefulness of having an official source on the platform for their content, is not there in many instances. And I don't know why this isn't a major focus for growth and legitimacy. Hope there's some more direction on that if you want it to be anything other than an 'escape' for left-leaning people and those looking for a bit more independence over their profiles.
• guywithahat 8mo ago
  This makes sense, they've had a lot of issues with cp and have generally developed a poor reputation for their user-base and bans. It seems more like a systemic issue to me rather than a CEO issue, but I suppose all issues start at the CEO level in some regard
  • KingMob 8mo ago
    Agree. You'd think Musk would do something about the CSAM AI. I guess he reined it in a bit, at least.
• alexose 8mo ago
  Toni is very well regarded among Automattic employees. I'm personally stoked to see him work on Bluesky.
• dzhiurgis 8mo ago
  Maybe they can finally crack down on communist symbols. IDK how they haven't been investigated in most of Europe yet.
• ElijahLynn 8mo ago
  Clickbaity headline: Seems more accurate to stay stepping to the left, instead of stepping down. Stepping down implies leaving the company, which is not the case as Jay is moving into the Chief Innovation Officer role.
• arbglhcs0 8mo ago
  [flagged]
• ddtaylor 8mo ago
  Almost all of social media right now is terrible. Each is a little faction of whatever echo chamber controls it mixed in with the most engagement hungry garbage you can imagine.
  • partiallypro 8mo ago
    BlueSky is vastly worse than Twitter/X now or ever was. It was a good idea, but it ruins the "community square" aspect when BlueSky has just become a total echo chamber. Twitter is still diverse, even if voices that were once banned now have bigger platforms. Now I'd rank BlueSky has a net negative for society. It's basically a DailyKos leaning miniblog with a small userbase. Things you would just used to find in comment sections of left leaning sites.
    • tensor 8mo ago
      You rank Bluesky as a net negative for society and a rank what’s become ann alt-right propaganda service as diverse? Interesting. No thanks.
      • UberFly 8mo ago
        There are plenty of opinions on X. Are you just upset that there are diverse political opinions on there now?
      • reducesuffering 8mo ago
        I agree with GP. Twitter does have diverse viewpoints across progressive, centrist, and right wing voices. I abhor the alt-right stuff, and it is more widespread now under new ownership. However BlueSky is exclusively urban lefties. It's not diverse
        • pmdr 8mo ago
          I really don't think advertisers will ever embrace bsky. No one wants their brand under communist scrutiny all the time, one step away from another "cancellation." They will definitely return to X.
• huflungdung 8mo ago
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• deleted 8mo ago
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• kyle_martin1 8mo ago
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