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.
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."
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.
One big innovation is to drag a large bank or Stripe on board to enable payments on the network.
Good luck!
Some orgs will go through three, from founder, to growth, to sustaining.
How could a social network, or anything humans create, not be values-driven?
Let’s not forget Jack Dorsey laid off half of Cash the other week
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.
The interim CEO doesn't even use Bluesky himself, so at this point you might as well move to Threads.
BlogA New Chapter for Bluesky
March 9, 2026
by Jay Graber
After several intense and incredible years building Bluesky from the ground up, I've decided to step back as CEO and transition to a new role as Bluesky's Chief Innovation Officer.
In 2019, I set out to build an open protocol for social media, with the goal of enabling the development of a new generation of applications designed to empower users. The Bluesky app started off as a reference client for the protocol, but has since grown into a thriving platform with over 40 million users. Last year, we grew a world-class team, expanded the AT Protocol ecosystem, and proved that a values-driven social network could thrive at scale.
As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution, while I return to what I do best: building new things. As part of this transition, Toni Schneider, former CEO of Automattic and partner at True Ventures, will join our team as interim CEO, while our board runs a search for a permanent chief executive.
Toni believes deeply in the Bluesky mission, and has been an advisor to the company and me personally for over a year. Both Automattic and True Ventures are also investors in Bluesky, and support the development of a more open, user-driven internet. Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, has built their business on open source software, working to make the web a better and more participatory place. Toni was a key part of guiding that mission, and is someone who leads with genuine curiosity, takes the long view, and deeply understands what it means to build a company around a mission. I am confident that he is the right person to lead us into this next chapter.
Scaling up this company has been a learning experience unlike anything else. I've grown a lot as a leader and had the privilege of assembling the best team I've ever worked with. As we've grown, I've found that people thrive when they're in a role where their passions overlap with their strengths. This is as true for me as it is for our team. I'm most energized by exploring new ideas, bringing a vision to life, and helping people discover their strengths. Transitioning to a more focused role where I can do what brings me energy is my way of putting that belief into practice.
I'm excited to dig into the next frontier of what decentralized social can be, while bringing Toni in to support our team as an experienced operator and leader. The work that got us here was just the beginning, and I'm grateful to keep building alongside this team and community.
Don't use it if you don't like it. Some of us like the strong identity and content verification.
https://jobs.gem.com/bluesky/am9icG9zdDqRK9D8osOaeyyESJ7cPsX...
Job opening to build sports relationships.
It’s sort of like that.
for example name the only Twitter investment that made money....
hint...Bluesky.....all other Twitter projects failed.
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.
The only reasonable understanding is that these protocols are for for publishing to the public. It is not possible to reliably retract anything published to thousands of other peoples' computers. We used to try to teach people that the internet is forever, and that's even more true with federated protocols. That doesn't make them a bad idea.
Threads being the biggest Mastodon instance and federating with mastodon.social (Meta signed contracts with instance maintainers to do so) and the other 3 largest instances (Pawoo, baragg (d_o_t) net, and mstdn (d-o-t) jp) taking up more that >70% of the total users using it?
That doesn't sound good.
The CEO sold all of us out and was the only one that made real money on Mastodon.
> I’ve been a partner at True Ventures for many years
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.
The entire point of a platform like Twitter / Bluesky is reach, not privacy.
Posts and discussions there are meant to be public, and highly visible.
It's not that people don't care. It's that this is not what the platform is for.
What's important for a platform like that is not even anonymity, but functional pseudonymity.
And that thing is on its way to the effectively outlawed with the push for "age verification".
People do notice it and leave [1], but at some point, there might be no place to go to.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1rmlzhy/welp_goodb...
It's a "people problem" not a technical one. For example if you are following anything from Asia, or just generally from Japan and Korea you will most likely see it on Twitter, there was never a big exodus of users there. Bsky has almost 0 engagement. Just watching WBC this week and I wanted to see korean highlights of their games. They are all over on Twitter, nothing on Bsky.
It is not a place that is trying to showcase diverse opinions in an unbiased way.
That said, I have genuinely been enjoying Blue Sky. It has 'enough' for me. There are a bunch of YIMBYs and urbanists. The mayor of my city and one of my city councilors are there. There is starting to be a bike racing community. There are some good local journalists.
I read your other comment; I hope your optimism is warranted.
This 'growth' comes with a lot of negative things and rarely lots of good things.
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.
could you provide some examples? i didn't really see this, but maybe i just missed it
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.
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...
Automattic's Matt Mullenweg is downright insane. Just google their war with WP Engine and by extension the entire WordPress community.
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.
The term they use for this is "credible exit" - designing the entire protocol such that if the company itself misbehaves the affected users can leave to a separate instance without losing their relationships or data.
This is separate from ATProto, which I still maintain positive sentiment for.
I have concerns about one piece of messaging I've seen lately, working on a writeup, stay tuned
https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:cwf4mmm7mpzistinx3ox2zhj#coll...
I understand why people want to be able to delete things from the internet, but it doesn't work that way. It has never worked that way. It can't work that way unless every computer is locked down to running remotely attested government-approved software, and that's obviously worse.
The more interesting perspective is a Plug-n-Play Distributed System [2]
[1] https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/compare/main...ver...
[2] https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
Although, I guess that is the audience bluesky was targeting when they first started. So I guess I understand the criticism.
Also, it is a very ironic demonstration of the pancakes/waffles meme. Interjecting into an unrelated topic to ask the mods to ban someone you don't like is a tradition as old as dial up BBS. So I'm glad to see the torch is being carried forward to a younger generation.
I wrote more about how it works here if you're curious: https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/
This is also visible in your stats if you extend the time window. They had a peak in 2024 and are pretty much declining month to month ever since.
[0]: https://www.change.org/p/bluesky-must-enforce-its-community-...
