Discussion

A New Chapter for Bluesky

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

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?

Zigurd: I suppose in the same way that all eating is health and nutrition driven. Good or bad.

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.

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

multisport: 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: 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.

mcdonje: Seriously? If a company is publicly traded, they're legally required to prioritize shareholder value, unless they're a benefit corp or something with multiple bottom lines. I suppose you could call it values-driven to drive up the bottom line, but that's not normally what people mean.

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

AuthAuth: 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.

ribosometronome: 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: 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.

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.

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

x0x0: Sounds like a firing / soft firing / come to jesus moment about the viability of the business...

alephnerd: 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.

spacechild1: What's fun about it?

DiabloD3: Huh, I guess betting on Mastodon winning was the right bet.

embedding-shape: Mastodon already won, by being used by people. Bluesky also won, by also being used by people. Not sure if this is a "winner takes it all" scenario? As long as you can host it yourself, I don't really mind where people are, both seem to work and have "won" for what they set out to do.

asymmetric: And so it begins.

jb1991: Go on..

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.

_heimdall: Values aren't the only motivator, unless you take an extremely broad definition of values.

plufz: Yeah, the value of money is ironically usually not what we mean with ”values”.

rakovsky89: bluesky is a disaster, worse than reddit and that's a low bar

orphea: Matt M. was behind the drama from WordPress' side though. Toni Schneider left in 2014.

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.

relaxing: You know how there are two sexual orientations: straight, and Political?It’s sort of like that.

pfraze: 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.

jakelazaroff: [delayed]

qcoret: This is false, he has been on Bluesky since 2024. https://bsky.app/profile/toni.bsky.team

paxys: The only value driving most things you see online is the value of money. Which is not the kind of values they are referring to.

12_throw_away: 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: > 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.

davidw: 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.

alterom: That's not what the comment you're responding to is about.

small_model: Yes, also X does have both left and right opinions and is open to all, before it was slanted to left too much and that's now been fixed. I would urge people to try it before judging it because of some political bias.

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. It's an honor to have him on board to lead us into this next stage of growth.

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."

fritzo: The community has voted for convenience over privacy, and twitter and bluesky have won over mastodon. You're right, but people don't actually care about privacy

ghaff: As someone who was once an avid twitter user, my sense is that Mastodon--after a somewhat hopeful start just never gained the network momentum. Bluesky came closest to Twitter's old reach but is still something of a shadow of the old Twitter (and Twitter/X is as well).

paxys: Why is that bad?

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

alterom: >You're right, but people don't actually care about privacyThe 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...

CactusBlue: How do you feel about the recent communication failures from the team to the userbase? As another builder of an open-source social platform, We must all understand that it is paramount for any company to not antagonize its customers, doubly so for a SOCIAL platform. I do understand that Bluesky and ATProto has to deal with a lot of baggage from both the old userbase and the new influx from the X/Twitter exodus, but engaging in user-antagonistic communication caused me to sour on the whole protocol.

parl_match: > user-antagonistic communicationcould you provide some examples? i didn't really see this, but maybe i just missed it

CactusBlue: https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/05/waffles-eat-bluesky/

egorfine: Is the new blocking age verification page the kind of innovation we should expect from BlueSky?

Dracophoenix: Since you're focusing on the AT protocol, will E2EE/OTR become a priority?

catapart: Big time +1, here. Would love to hear something - anything - from the bsky team that takes some accountability.

pfraze: Same

volkercraig: What is it that doctors call growth at any cost? Cancer?

verdverm: 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.

archagon: Why would I use a social network run by someone with opinions straight from the pages of Stormfront? I don't need white supremacy mixed in with my light recreational reading, thanks.

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.

CactusBlue: We don't need "open" networks (Digital Panopticons), we need private networks.

pfraze: Both are good

parl_match: I don't like Jesse Singal's work or his political positions, but this is hardly antagonistic except to maybe a small group of terminally online posters who take posting too seriously.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.

CactusBlue: I don't even think having Jesse Singal on the platform is the problem (like it or not, I believe that all beings must have the right to communicate); the problem here was the communication failure when communicating this decision to the userbase. They could have just reiterated their rules and left it at that; instead, they chose to mock their userbase, write them off as harassment, and banned users left and right, abusing their position in network to censor people at every layer of the protocol.

danabramov: There's a recent post by Daniel (who works on atproto) on why E2EE is not a current focus: https://dholms.leaflet.pub/3meluqcwky22a

lich_king: Bluesky is not just a shadow, it's on a pretty steady decline. Their DAU numbers are dropping every month. Which probably tells you something about the unspoken reason for this change.

ghaff: Without researching actual numbers, it feels like that whole category of social media is pretty much uninteresting at this point. Not sure what really replaces it given that Facebook seems increasingly infested with AI slop and sponsored posts at this point.

mjr00: 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

pron: 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.

ChicagoDave: They are aware:https://jobs.gem.com/bluesky/am9icG9zdDqRK9D8osOaeyyESJ7cPsX...Job opening to build sports relationships.

Aboutplants: This is massively true and was the last thing that I had to overcome when dropping Twitter. Certain sports have better engagement than others but it is pretty staggering the difference. If BlueSky could figure that out then they would have a legitimate shot at substantial success

haunter: >If BlueSky could figure that outIt'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.

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

Hamuko: Who is this "we" and where can I read their opinions?

baliex: What are your thoughts on people self hosting their own websites and blogs instead of posting to big tech platforms? I’d say that extra openness was a good thing. I absolutely believe in privacy as well, and think ownership is important too.

CactusBlue: We already could've done that before, just throw a HTML file on a HTTP server on a cheap VPS

danabramov: That's pretty much what atproto is, except it's typed JSON rather than HTML, and HTTP+WebSockets to allow aggregation.

nout: Or if you want something actually better at the core, you can switch to nostr. It's quite easy to even implement your own client app for nostr (even more so with LLMs), so you can get the experience you want.

gethly: Bluesky, is that the digital version of a mental asylum?

bananamogul: "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.

jeromegv: Elon Mush has introduced political biais in the algo, not all opinions are worth the same when you have a white suprematicst at the reign.

reagan83: i'm sure bluesky will continue to attract the best and brightest minds for diversity of thought. enjoy your time in the bubble while the rest of the world is on twitter.

mjmsmith: Why does the very existence of bluesky make so many people angry? You're free to stay at the Nazi bar if that's where you're comfortable.

ajsalminen: I'd rather say Twitter and Threads are the current winners if we're talking about userbase. Bluesky is basically in the same league with Mastodon while those two are so far above that you can't even see them without a telescope.

jrm4: I 100% agree, I always thought that even Private Messages were a bad idea.But no, we're way past "if you don't want it public don't post it." and then wiping our hands and being done. We need to think in a policy kind of way on this.And again, things are already dangerous -- but ATProto makes them more dangerous. It's something like a chain-of-custody thing. I think the world is collectively safer where the gathering of data like this is less reliable and less verifiable.ATProto's model makes the building of the proverbial evil Big Brother panopticon thing a LOT easier.

lukev: Bluesky is very intentionally about public posting. It's a bit weird to say people "don't care about privacy" when speaking of a platform designed to amplify and distribute posts as widely and effectively as possible.

PaulHoule: There is a lot of weirdness around Mastodon, particularly some people can’t seem to make up their minds if they want the stuff they post to be visible or not.

irishcoffee: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.#Judgme...Allow me introduce you to the inception of enshittification