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Posted by minimaxir 5 hours ago

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down(bsky.social)
https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-is-steppi... (https://web.archive.org/web/20260309191134/https://www.wired...)

https://toni.org/2026/03/09/coming-off-the-bench-for-bluesky...

241 points | 218 commentspage 2
muppetman 4 hours 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
taurath 4 hours ago||
Cue 3 months to the “I’m having to make some hard decisions” email. Whats the board at Bluesky like?
Ekaros 4 hours ago||
Wait Bluesky had a CEO? I thought it was some type of organic open source collective.
AuthAuth 4 hours 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.
asmor 4 hours ago|||
If you need a reference measure of "Public Benefit Corporation", Anthropic is one too.
dbbk 4 hours ago|||
There is an actual difference
AuthAuth 1 hour ago||
No there isnt.
MarsIronPI 4 hours ago|||
Nah, that's Nostr. fiatjaf created it but doesn't hold any actual authority. All the extensions are community-driven.
SideburnsOfDoom 4 hours ago|||
You're thinking of mastodon, and even that had a lead: https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/19/mastodon_ceo_steps_do...
snapetom 4 hours ago||
I'm not going to speak for OP, but I definitely remember it also being a rallying cry for Bluesky too. "No one person can control the network blah blah blah"
simonw 4 hours ago|||
That's not at all incompatible with Bluesky having a funded company with a CEO.

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.

SideburnsOfDoom 4 hours ago|||
Bluesky's claims of being decentralised were always way way ahead of the de-facto reality of it. That's not the same as Mastodon.

It has been a "rallying cry" but it doesn't stand up to much scrutiny of how Bluesky actually functions: an "open protocol" with one central server means little. Maybe this will change at some point in the future, and maybe it is changing, see https://blacksky.community/ . But this is not the same as Mastodon, where it's been that way for a while.

rakovsky89 4 hours ago||
[flagged]
small_model 4 hours ago||
[flagged]
davidw 4 hours ago||
I was enjoying having one social network not run by horrid people. Maybe it's time to go back to IRC or something.
pfraze 4 hours 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 4 hours ago||
I mean, the competition isn't setting a high bar, between the guy complaining about 'white people not having a homeland' and the other guy peddling addictive stuff to teens and AI slop to their grandparents.

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.

pfraze 4 hours ago||
Same
ynniv 4 hours ago||
nostr
verdverm 4 hours ago||
no sir, never gonna do crypto social media
AirMax98 4 hours 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 4 hours 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...ver...

[2] https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers

nout 3 hours 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.
ChrisArchitect 5 hours ago||
Post from new CEO Toni Schneider https://toni.org/2026/03/09/coming-off-the-bench-for-bluesky...
12_throw_away 4 hours 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 4 hours 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.

volkercraig 4 hours ago|||
What is it that doctors call growth at any cost? Cancer?
verdverm 4 hours 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.

TyrunDemeg101 4 hours ago||
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...
Devasta 4 hours 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 3 hours ago|
[dead]
guywithahat 2 hours 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
x0x0 4 hours ago|
Sounds like a firing / soft firing / come to jesus moment about the viability of the business...
verdverm 4 hours ago||
They could have launched paid subscriptions, they even said they were looking into it, crickets...
alephnerd 4 hours 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.

pfraze 4 hours 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 4 hours 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

spacechild1 4 hours ago|||
What's fun about it?
alephnerd 4 hours 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.
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