Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

Toni is very well regarded among Automattic employees. I'm personally stoked to see him work on Bluesky.

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

> 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?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Maybe they can finally crack down on communist symbols. IDK how they haven't been investigated in most of Europe yet.

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.

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.

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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.

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And so it begins.

Blue sky seems like a bit of a flop

Let’s not forget Jack Dorsey laid off half of Cash the other week