Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

ChrisArchitect

Post from new CEO Toni Schneider https://toni.org/2026/03/09/coming-off-the-bench-for-bluesky...

multisport

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.

asymmetric

And so it begins.

TyrunDemeg101

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...

amadeuspagel

> 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?

x0x0

Sounds like a firing / soft firing / come to jesus moment about the viability of the business...

DiabloD3

Huh, I guess betting on Mastodon winning was the right bet.

Ekaros

Wait Bluesky had a CEO? I thought it was some type of organic open source collective.

Kye

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

I was enjoying having one social network not run by horrid people. Maybe it's time to go back to IRC or something.

rvz

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.

jrm4

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."

muppetman

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

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.

AJRF

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.

haunter

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.

monster_truck

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.

AbstractH24

Blue sky seems like a bit of a flop Let’s not forget Jack Dorsey laid off half of Cash the other week

taurath

Cue 3 months to the “I’m having to make some hard decisions” email. Whats the board at Bluesky like?

arcalinea

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.