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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 Blue

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 7mo ago
thats not a good sign
jsheard 7mo ago
He's only meant to be filling in temporarily per the Wired article, but we'll see.
- multisport 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
      That's not what the comment you're responding to is about.
ribosometronome 7mo 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 7mo ago
  There was some WP drama between Automattic and the WP community a while back. Also the whole point of Bluesky is that they aren't supposed to be a big evil silicon valley tech company. But now you have a silicon-valley VC running the thing.
  - captainbland 7mo ago
    They'd already taken VC money hadn't they? It's got to be said though that tech startups are getting very formulaic. Monster of the week vibes.
  - orphea 7mo ago
    Matt M. was behind the drama from WordPress' side though. It looks like Toni Schneider left in 2014.
    - rmccue 7mo ago
      Toni was in fact the adult supervision brought in by Automattic’s board when the company was young and Matt was inexperienced.
      - bombcar 7mo ago
        And apparently adult supervision was needed.
        qingcharles 7mo ago
        And still needed...
  - sieabahlpark 7mo ago
    [dead]
  - bananamogul 7mo ago
    "Some drama"...yeah, the way there was drama between Germany and the Soviet Union back in 1941. Automattic's Matt Mullenweg is downright insane. Just google their war with WP Engine and by extension the entire WordPress community.
paxys 7mo ago
Why is that bad?
mjr00 7mo ago
Ultimately the goal "build a nice community where people can enjoy social interactions" is fully incompatible with "build the next Everything For Everyone Social Website like twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/etc so that we can get 5 billion users and start pushing ads at people". Unfortunately once you take VC funding, you no longer have the option of doing the former. From an actual content perspective Bluesky is fine, but there's no investor who would take a look at the site's user statistics[0] and say "oh yeah things are going great." There needs to be drastic changes if investors hope to have any return on investment. [0] https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
- pron 7mo ago
  Another problem is that Twitter's demise left people who liked the format disenchanted and suspicious (and rightly so), and because of that, trying to recreate Twitter is bound to fail, at least until some more time passes.
  - ghaff 7mo ago
    For whatever faults the old Twitter had pre-Musk, it did establish a certain critical mass for a certain type of short form threaded discussion which seems to be largely dead at this point.
    - alex1138 7mo ago
      Jack seemed interested in the protocol side of the house and making a good product that was in spirit of the internet, it also had a mix of people you might know IRL (with reasonable privacy defaults) and official sources/public figures. I don't think he was much interested in the censorship, it feels they got run over by a bunch of activist types during covid (who decided it was de rigeur to censor real doctors for perceived 'misinformation'). Jack started work on Bluesky and now is involved in Nostr Speaking personally, supposedly Twitter now (X) still has a bunch of censorship and I don't especially like Musk (but what he did was valuable, showing Jay Bhattacharya he'd be put on a trending blacklist) and the site is... well, I should be able to follow threads without having an account but they crippled it so much. It reminds me of Instagram, "log in to see any PUBLIC page"
Bnjoroge 7mo ago
The vision of Bluesky isnt compatible with it existing in a capitalistic society.
RIMR 7mo ago
To be honest, I was never entirely on board with Jay's almost exclusively cryptocurrency background. I think she's done an acceptable job as CEO, but I have also felt that leadership at Bluesky was never good enough to see legitimate success. Today, Bluesky remains largely undermoderated and they have managed to bake in more toxic features Twitter ever did in such a short timespan. Its success is largely driven by having a UI closer to Twitter's original UI than any other alternative, and taking a stronger stance against far-right rhetoric than Twitter. The only technical saving grace is the broad control you can take over the algorithm to avoid the content you don't want to see, but Bluesky is generally covered with more calls for violence than their nascent content team could ever actually deal with. And I have yet to actually see a real use of ATproto that isn't just immediately blown out of the water by ActivityPub. But I digress, the new CEO pretty much hammers that final nail in the coffin for me. I have zero belief in Bluesky to be anything but another awful corporate corner of the web that I should avoid.
- reverius42 7mo ago
  > Its success is largely driven by having a UI closer to Twitter's original UI than any other alternative, and taking a stronger stance against far-right rhetoric than Twitter. These things are very valuable, and if Bluesky can't succeed doing them, I hope someone else can.
- bdavisx 7mo ago
  > they have managed to bake in more toxic features Twitter ever did in such a short timespan. Not arguing, just curious - what toxic features are you talking about?
  - RIMR 7mo ago
    Quote posts (dunk feature). Auto-tagging, which allows you to tag users based on who they follow. (shame feature)
- danabramov 7mo ago
  > And I have yet to actually see a real use of ATproto that isn't just immediately blown out of the water by ActivityPub. ActivityPub doesn’t remotely even try to solve problems solved by atproto. What are you talking about? In short, atproto makes apps interoperable by default by decoupling data hosting from applications. This means that apps become projections of everyone’s data, and can embed and interpret typed data from each other. ActivityPub doesn’t offer anything close, which is why you don’t have projects like http://leaflet.pub http://leaflet.pub, https://standard.site https://standard.site, https://tangled.org https://tangled.org, https://semble.so https://semble.so in the AP ecosystem. If you genuinely want to learn about atproto, I have two longreads for you: - https://overreacted.io/open-social/ https://overreacted.io/open-social/ - https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/ https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/
jnwatson 7mo ago
Transitioning to an interim CEO is never a good look. Should have waited until conclusion of the executive search.
isodev 7mo ago
They put it quite plainly indeed: > As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution Translation: enshittification That’s the other shoe where they will iterate on ways to monetise the party. Ads, paid “verification”, making users pay to use atproto apps (or making developers pay to use the managed storage)… the sky is the limit. In a way I’m happy Bluesky never took root and outside a few enthusiasts in my bubble it’s practically unknown.
blackqueeriroh 7mo ago
Former CEO that kept Wordpress open source and never oversaw any layoffs.

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 7mo ago

thats not a good sign

jsheard 7mo ago

He's only meant to be filling in temporarily per the Wired article, but we'll see.

multisport 7mo 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 7mo 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 7mo ago
    That's not what the comment you're responding to is about.

ribosometronome 7mo 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 7mo ago
There was some WP drama between Automattic and the WP community a while back. Also the whole point of Bluesky is that they aren't supposed to be a big evil silicon valley tech company. But now you have a silicon-valley VC running the thing.
- captainbland 7mo ago
  They'd already taken VC money hadn't they? It's got to be said though that tech startups are getting very formulaic. Monster of the week vibes.
- orphea 7mo ago
  Matt M. was behind the drama from WordPress' side though. It looks like Toni Schneider left in 2014.
  - rmccue 7mo ago
    Toni was in fact the adult supervision brought in by Automattic’s board when the company was young and Matt was inexperienced.
    - bombcar 7mo ago
      And apparently adult supervision was needed.
      - qingcharles 7mo ago
        And still needed...
- sieabahlpark 7mo ago
  [dead]
- bananamogul 7mo ago
  "Some drama"...yeah, the way there was drama between Germany and the Soviet Union back in 1941. Automattic's Matt Mullenweg is downright insane. Just google their war with WP Engine and by extension the entire WordPress community.

paxys 7mo ago

Why is that bad?

mjr00 7mo ago

Ultimately the goal "build a nice community where people can enjoy social interactions" is fully incompatible with "build the next Everything For Everyone Social Website like twitter/facebook/instagram/youtube/tiktok/etc so that we can get 5 billion users and start pushing ads at people". Unfortunately once you take VC funding, you no longer have the option of doing the former. From an actual content perspective Bluesky is fine, but there's no investor who would take a look at the site's user statistics[0] and say "oh yeah things are going great." There needs to be drastic changes if investors hope to have any return on investment. [0] https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

pron 7mo ago
Another problem is that Twitter's demise left people who liked the format disenchanted and suspicious (and rightly so), and because of that, trying to recreate Twitter is bound to fail, at least until some more time passes.
- ghaff 7mo ago
  For whatever faults the old Twitter had pre-Musk, it did establish a certain critical mass for a certain type of short form threaded discussion which seems to be largely dead at this point.
  - alex1138 7mo ago
    Jack seemed interested in the protocol side of the house and making a good product that was in spirit of the internet, it also had a mix of people you might know IRL (with reasonable privacy defaults) and official sources/public figures. I don't think he was much interested in the censorship, it feels they got run over by a bunch of activist types during covid (who decided it was de rigeur to censor real doctors for perceived 'misinformation'). Jack started work on Bluesky and now is involved in Nostr Speaking personally, supposedly Twitter now (X) still has a bunch of censorship and I don't especially like Musk (but what he did was valuable, showing Jay Bhattacharya he'd be put on a trending blacklist) and the site is... well, I should be able to follow threads without having an account but they crippled it so much. It reminds me of Instagram, "log in to see any PUBLIC page"

Bnjoroge 7mo ago

The vision of Bluesky isnt compatible with it existing in a capitalistic society.

RIMR 7mo ago

To be honest, I was never entirely on board with Jay's almost exclusively cryptocurrency background. I think she's done an acceptable job as CEO, but I have also felt that leadership at Bluesky was never good enough to see legitimate success. Today, Bluesky remains largely undermoderated and they have managed to bake in more toxic features Twitter ever did in such a short timespan. Its success is largely driven by having a UI closer to Twitter's original UI than any other alternative, and taking a stronger stance against far-right rhetoric than Twitter. The only technical saving grace is the broad control you can take over the algorithm to avoid the content you don't want to see, but Bluesky is generally covered with more calls for violence than their nascent content team could ever actually deal with. And I have yet to actually see a real use of ATproto that isn't just immediately blown out of the water by ActivityPub. But I digress, the new CEO pretty much hammers that final nail in the coffin for me. I have zero belief in Bluesky to be anything but another awful corporate corner of the web that I should avoid.

reverius42 7mo ago
> Its success is largely driven by having a UI closer to Twitter's original UI than any other alternative, and taking a stronger stance against far-right rhetoric than Twitter. These things are very valuable, and if Bluesky can't succeed doing them, I hope someone else can.
bdavisx 7mo ago
> they have managed to bake in more toxic features Twitter ever did in such a short timespan. Not arguing, just curious - what toxic features are you talking about?
- RIMR 7mo ago
  Quote posts (dunk feature). Auto-tagging, which allows you to tag users based on who they follow. (shame feature)
danabramov 7mo ago
> And I have yet to actually see a real use of ATproto that isn't just immediately blown out of the water by ActivityPub. ActivityPub doesn’t remotely even try to solve problems solved by atproto. What are you talking about? In short, atproto makes apps interoperable by default by decoupling data hosting from applications. This means that apps become projections of everyone’s data, and can embed and interpret typed data from each other. ActivityPub doesn’t offer anything close, which is why you don’t have projects like http://leaflet.pub http://leaflet.pub, https://standard.site https://standard.site, https://tangled.org https://tangled.org, https://semble.so https://semble.so in the AP ecosystem. If you genuinely want to learn about atproto, I have two longreads for you: - https://overreacted.io/open-social/ https://overreacted.io/open-social/ - https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/ https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/

jnwatson 7mo ago

Transitioning to an interim CEO is never a good look. Should have waited until conclusion of the executive search.

isodev 7mo ago

They put it quite plainly indeed: > As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution Translation: enshittification That’s the other shoe where they will iterate on ways to monetise the party. Ads, paid “verification”, making users pay to use atproto apps (or making developers pay to use the managed storage)… the sky is the limit. In a way I’m happy Bluesky never took root and outside a few enthusiasts in my bubble it’s practically unknown.

blackqueeriroh 7mo ago

Former CEO that kept Wordpress open source and never oversaw any layoffs.