Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-09-2026-a-new-chapter-for-bluesky

by minimaxir • 5 months ago

403 355 5 months ago

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...

ChrisArchitect2• 5 months ago

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

12_throw_away• 5 months 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

rvz5• 5 months 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.

zoul• 4 months ago

“The vision was always compelling. A social web that no single company controls, where users own their identity and their relationships,” says the new CEO of the single company that can control what millions of Bluesky users see in their apps.

multisport2• 5 months ago

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.

plsft• 5 months ago

thats not a good sign

jsheard• 5 months ago

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

multisport2• 5 months ago

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

ribosometronome• 5 months ago

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• 5 months ago

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.

paxys2• 5 months ago

Why is that bad?

mjr002• 5 months ago

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

pron4• 5 months ago

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.

verdverm22• 5 months ago

That user number is not reproducible last time I tried (~8 months ago). I was looking at the code the other day and saw what I believe is one of the reasons, but I still couldn't find several million accounts (>10%), which is pretty hard to lose. (8+ bsky run pds equivalents)

This also does not account for (1) people with multiple accounts (labellers, feeds, bots, intent) or actual activity (significant % are likely churned, didn't delete)

unselect591710• 4 months ago

From an actual content perspective Bluesky is fine

From a content perspective nothing important is permitted to be discussed there. It's just another hivemind with the exact same opinions as reddit and HN. Completely pointless and nothing more than the output of a temper tantrum over not getting to be the censors in charge and the whole world knows it.

Bnjoroge• 5 months ago

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

RIMR3• 5 months ago

To be honest, I was never entirely on board with Jay's almost exclusively cryptocurrency background. I think she's done an acceptable job as CEO, but I have also felt that leadership at Bluesky was never good enough to see legitimate success.

Today, Bluesky remains largely undermoderated and they have managed to bake in more toxic features Twitter ever did in such a short timespan. Its success is largely driven by having a UI closer to Twitter's original UI than any other alternative, and taking a stronger stance against far-right rhetoric than Twitter.

The only technical saving grace is the broad control you can take over the algorithm to avoid the content you don't want to see, but Bluesky is generally covered with more calls for violence than their nascent content team could ever actually deal with.

And I have yet to actually see a real use of ATproto that isn't just immediately blown out of the water by ActivityPub.

But I digress, the new CEO pretty much hammers that final nail in the coffin for me. I have zero belief in Bluesky to be anything but another awful corporate corner of the web that I should avoid.

reverius42• 5 months ago

Its success is largely driven by having a UI closer to Twitter's original UI than any other alternative, and taking a stronger stance against far-right rhetoric than Twitter.

These things are very valuable, and if Bluesky can't succeed doing them, I hope someone else can.

bdavisx• 4 months ago

they have managed to bake in more toxic features Twitter ever did in such a short timespan.

Not arguing, just curious - what toxic features are you talking about?

danabramov8• 4 months ago

And I have yet to actually see a real use of ATproto that isn't just immediately blown out of the water by ActivityPub.

ActivityPub doesn’t remotely even try to solve problems solved by atproto. What are you talking about?

In short, atproto makes apps interoperable by default by decoupling data hosting from applications. This means that apps become projections of everyone’s data, and can embed and interpret typed data from each other. ActivityPub doesn’t offer anything close, which is why you don’t have projects like http://leaflet.pub, https://standard.site, https://tangled.org, https://semble.so in the AP ecosystem.

If you genuinely want to learn about atproto, I have two longreads for you:

- https://overreacted.io/open-social/

- https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/

jnwatson• 5 months ago

Transitioning to an interim CEO is never a good look. Should have waited until conclusion of the executive search.

isodev• 4 months ago

They put it quite plainly indeed:

As Bluesky matures, the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution

Translation: enshittification

That’s the other shoe where they will iterate on ways to monetise the party. Ads, paid “verification”, making users pay to use atproto apps (or making developers pay to use the managed storage)… the sky is the limit.

In a way I’m happy Bluesky never took root and outside a few enthusiasts in my bubble it’s practically unknown.

blackqueeriroh3• 4 months ago

Former CEO that kept Wordpress open source and never oversaw any layoffs.

asymmetric• 5 months ago

And so it begins.

jb1991• 5 months ago

Go on..

TyrunDemeg101• 5 months ago

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

dannyfritz072• 4 months ago

I won't get fooled again!

amadeuspagel• 5 months ago

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?

_heimdall• 5 months ago

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

plufz• 5 months ago

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

mcdonje• 5 months ago

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.

jakelazaroff2• 5 months ago

IANAL but no, executives are not actually legally required to increase shareholder value.

Zigurd• 5 months ago

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

paxys2• 5 months ago

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.

relaxing• 5 months ago

You know how there are two sexual orientations: straight, and Political?

It’s sort of like that.

rchaud• 5 months ago

"values-driven" is the TedTalk-ified equivalent of MBA-speak like "synergy". Meaningless and unmeasurable, but sounds good in a pitch deck.

zachlatta• 5 months ago

This is really not true. It’s important that when people say this, we hold them to it and reward them when they see it through.

The internet has a tendency to penalize people who try to do bold things. As a result, it’s too often strategic to stay quiet and boring and focus on the bottom line.

We shouldn’t be cynical. We should be excited when people say bold things and reward them when they live up to it.

x0x0• 5 months ago

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

alephnerd2• 5 months 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.

spacechild1• 5 months ago

What's fun about it?

pfraze7• 5 months 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.

verdverm22• 5 months ago

They could have launched paid subscriptions, they even said they were looking into it, crickets...

DiabloD3• 5 months ago

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

embedding-shape• 5 months ago

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.

verdverm22• 5 months ago

Since developing on ATProto, one thing I have hoped for is less of this "winner take all" world. I think the protocol can be for much more than social media, could do dropbox if permissions and private data are designed well. This comment by the main protocol dev working on this does not inspire confidence on my part.

https://bsky.app/profile/dholms.at/post/3mfsehg6ius2a

lich_king4• 5 months ago

It is a zero-sum game in some sense, because you go where your friends or "influencers" are.

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...

dbbk2• 5 months ago

"Mastodon already won, by being used by people" I'm sorry what

rvz5• 5 months ago

What did Mastodon win exactly?

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.

jeromegv• 5 months ago

In what world did the Mastodon CEO made money out of Mastodon beside the small public salary he's been taking? You are making things up.

BeetleB4• 5 months ago

I won't doubt your statistics. In practice, my experience is that it really is distributed.

I just went to my feed (only people I follow), and although mastodon.social showed up a few times, the majority of users I interact with are on distinct servers. So out of 20 people, I see 17 different servers.

My feed will not be impacted much if mastodon.social dies.

Ekaros• 5 months ago

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

AuthAuth3• 5 months 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.

_cenw• 5 months ago

If you need a reference measure of "Public Benefit Corporation", Anthropic is one too.

dbbk2• 5 months ago

There is an actual difference

asadotzler2• 4 months ago

Wrong. B Corp boards are legally protected from lawsuits if they reject the highest bid when they put the company up for sale. In a C Corp, once the board puts the company on the auction block, not taking the highest bid, even from a company that's diametrically opposed to the goals of the C Corp, opens the board up to lawsuits from shareholders pissed about not getting the maximal return. Suggesting this is no difference shows a lack of understanding of the legal regime these types of corporations operate under.

SideburnsOfDoom2• 5 months ago

You're thinking of mastodon, and even that had a lead: https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/19/mastodon_ceo_steps_do...

snapetom• 5 months 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"

MarsIronPI• 5 months ago

Nah, that's Nostr. fiatjaf created it but doesn't hold any actual authority. All the extensions are community-driven.

Kye• 5 months ago

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.

davidw2• 5 months ago

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

ynniv• 5 months ago

nostr

verdverm22• 5 months ago

no sir, never gonna do crypto social media

pfraze7• 5 months 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.

davidw2• 5 months 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.

dannyfritz072• 4 months ago

I hesitate to write this here, but https://libera.chat is a lovely and thriving IRC server.

rvz5• 5 months ago

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.

qcoret• 5 months ago

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

Lammy• 5 months ago

Last activity 17 days ago, 23 days ago, 3 months ago, 3 months ago, 4 months ago

rvz5• 5 months ago

"17 posts" since 2024.

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.

baggachipz• 5 months ago

Threads? The twitter clone owned by Meta? Yeah no thanks.

PaulHoule5• 5 months ago

… most social networks give you a “notification” if somebody follows you or engages with a post but there are two exceptions: (1) is LinkedIn which gives you a double-dose of main feed items you didn’t click on and that you never clicked on anything like ever so it’s a chance to prove their model is right… most social networks play a “ding” sound if somebody likes your post but LinkedIn dings when you post something because their standards are low. (2) Threads posts “notifications” that are somewhere between completely senseless and “political outrage of some kind but I can’t tell if they like Trump or hate Trump”

nout3• 5 months ago

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.

wolvoleo4• 4 months ago

Yeah and nostr really is decentralised and doesn't even require providing an email address. The only thing I don't really like is the cryptobro vibe there. But technically it's really good.

jrm414• 5 months ago

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."

fritzo2• 5 months ago

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

ghaff5• 5 months ago

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 (as Twitter/X is these days as well).

lukev3• 5 months ago

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.

archagon• 5 months ago

If a social network stays comparatively small but still active, I see that as a huge win. Half the people I follow are happily on Mastodon. I don't see that changing anytime soon.

alterom2• 5 months ago

You're right, but people don't actually care about privacy

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...

ajsalminen4• 5 months ago

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.

jrm414• 5 months ago

I mostly don't like this take because it presumes a precise definition of privacy that we all agree on. And it's not even remotely close to that, which is why I think the Bluesky model is perhaps insidious.

lukev3• 5 months ago

You can care a lot about plausible deniability and the ability to delete your own data, but it seems a bit weird to denounce a whole ecosystem as "generally a bad idea" on those grounds, when that is a deliberate anti-goal of the system design.

Don't use it if you don't like it. Some of us like the strong identity and content verification.

jrm414• 5 months ago

"Don't use it if you don't like it" is not a sufficient response here, because the gathering and verifying of personal data is NOT PURELY AN INDIVIDUAL PROBLEM. You might post about me. Etc.

Proverbial Big Brother ALSO likes "strong identity and content verification."

Zak3• 5 months ago

The Mastodon model does not offer much ability to delete. Well-behaved servers will honor delete requests, but the protocol doesn't mandate it. Additionally, a user cannot generate delete requests if they get banned from their server or the server shuts down. Users and server admins can't control whether another server permits archiving of their content. Mastodon and other fediverse software allows following public posts by RSS, and RSS clients might keep them forever.

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.

NoahZuniga• 5 months ago

But at proto is equally open? You can also just save all of at proto.

jrm414• 5 months ago

Actually, yes, it does.

Or more precisely, it might. We now have a better idea of how people actually behave and it's not in accordance with "the internet is forever," and I have no interest in blaming them for 'human nature' in that way.

And it's all still dangerous. Again, I know the internet is forever, but someone else posting about ME might not.

This isn't an individual thing. It's "ecological."

And I have no interest in making Big Brother THAT MUCH EASIER to build.

RIMR3• 5 months ago

I think it's important to remember that decentralization is a barrier to having control over your data. If you're going to participate in these systems, you should treat everything you do as permanent, because by design you will not be in control of where that data is stored.

giancarlostoro• 4 months ago

The Mastodon model does not offer much ability to delete.

The internet is forever, don't want it propagated? Don't post it.

Well-behaved servers will honor delete requests, but the protocol doesn't mandate it.

Probably because they cannot truly guarantee or enforce it.

AlienRobot2• 5 months ago

What? You don't even need to understand how Mastodon works in depth to realize that sending a post to 500 different servers owned by completely different people in completely different jurisdictions is going to make it harder to delete later.

jrm414• 4 months ago

Sure -- but it also makes it harder to verify. That's my issue with Bluesky, perhaps I'm thinking like a lawyer. ATProto's most touted feature is also its biggest danger. A post on 2 servers thats hashed/verified (and perhaps admissible in court) might be more dangerous than many more rando Mastodon servers.

muyuu2• 4 months ago

deleting published stuff in any sort of decentralised network is always going to be limited at best

there is just no way to police what happens to data that is broadcast, which doesn't remove control away from the reader

it's annoying because in the abstract it's something everybody has the potential to need and need badly, but if you're afraid to put something out there to your name/pseudonym you really shouldn't

muppetman• 5 months 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

pfraze7• 5 months ago

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.

CactusBlue10• 5 months ago

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

pfraze7• 5 months ago

Both are good

baliex• 5 months ago

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.

Hamuko• 5 months ago

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

jauntywundrkind4• 5 months ago

We have never had an online open public space where each of us has our voice, can shape our experience, can use our own compsable moderation, can integrate with whatever apps we choose.

How, in spite of having no data on what it would be like, people are so confident that leaving shared open connected mediums behind is the only way to go is such a mystery to me.

The radio station I'm on just played a modem tone, Mountain Chill Radio. But I was already gearing up to write what an amazing era this has been, how incredible a rise it has been that we can connect & talk, with so many people. My dialtone travels so much further & that is glorious. I have no idea, feel like I would have no chance to build a good private network for myself, that my life would stagnante and closed, if I had to build my networks myself in private, smuggling the light of my soul to others rather than being able to let it out.

I am happy to be online. I am proud of my "data", my voice, my app records. There's some less pleasant less shiny corners! But it is mad incredible that I get to do this live, that I get to have so many edges of connection and serendipity. People provide the most wild interesting comments and suggestions and topics, ongoingly. I benefit so much from them sharing their lives.

I spiritually believe deeply that we have our light to share with the universe. To turn your nose up at sharing, to renounce & see only evil, to let the Fear Uncertainty and Doubt, this spectre of the closed/bad/no-good controlling systems shape our thinking here is a pandora's box: I say you are shutting the door right as hope is finally trying to get out.

hinkley• 5 months ago

There is a very common inflection point in companies where the CEO needs to be about maintaining what is built instead of growing forever. You cannot, for instance, when you have 60% market share expect the company to keep growing linearly. The people who do end up stooping to questionable means to grow new markets they have no business growing, like for instance children.

Some orgs will go through three, from founder, to growth, to sustaining.

tcbrah• 4 months ago

The WordPress analogy is actually pretty apt here given Toni's background. Automattic went through exactly this - Matt stayed as the visionary/product guy while bringing in operators to handle the scaling side. And WordPress is arguably one of the most successful open source projects in terms of actual mainstream adoption.

The tricky part with Bluesky is figuring out which phase they're even in. 40M signups sounds like growth phase, but the retention numbers tell a different story. They might need a sustaining CEO before they've actually finished growing, which is an awkward spot to be in.

AJRF• 5 months ago

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.

somedude895• 4 months ago

YouTube is absolutely flourishing when it comes to quality content. It‘s the only UGC platform I use anymore. Besides the only thing I consume on the internet at this point is the news and check HN once or twice a week.

haunter3• 5 months ago

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.

Aboutplants• 5 months ago

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

haunter3• 5 months ago

If BlueSky could figure that out

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.

ChicagoDave2• 5 months ago

They are aware:

https://jobs.gem.com/bluesky/am9icG9zdDqRK9D8osOaeyyESJ7cPsX...

Job opening to build sports relationships.

qingcharles2• 5 months ago

There's an absolute ton of niches which are completely anchored to Twitter. It's hard to get a whole raft of people to move at once :(

rorylawless• 5 months ago

For high-level football/calcio/soccer at least, Reddit is and has been better for a long time. Often goal and other key highlights are uploaded before the broadcasters.

nomilk• 5 months ago

Are there tools that let users post to both simultaneously? (e.g. similar to how streamers can simultaneously stream to Twitch/YT/X easily)

tlogan• 5 months ago

True, but the BlueSky audience is not really into following professional sports. I believe there was statistics (or just rumor) showing that conservative-leaning people are about 50% more likely to follow professional sports than liberal-leaning people. Sadly, I cannot find the source, but it might be so obvious that nobody bothered to run a proper poll. Or this is just what everybody believes so everybody goes with it.

t0lo2• 4 months ago

A lot of bluesky users don't really go outside ;^)

monster_truck2• 5 months ago

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.

monster_truck2• 4 months ago

Great example of the userbase quality to be found here: https://bsky.app/profile/patriotnicole.bsky.social/followers

This account has posted once and has over 700 followers in like an hour, which looks like this: https://i.imgur.com/hQcKDZQ.png

There are countless "patriot" "true blue" "blue heart emoji american flag emoji" accounts just like this

AbstractH24• 5 months ago

Blue sky seems like a bit of a flop

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

fredgrott• 5 months ago

by what metric....

for example name the only Twitter investment that made money....

hint...Bluesky.....all other Twitter projects failed.

taurath• 5 months ago

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

arcalinea• 5 months ago

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.

CactusBlue10• 5 months ago

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.

catapart• 5 months ago

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

parl_match5• 5 months ago

user-antagonistic communication

could you provide some examples? i didn't really see this, but maybe i just missed it

jauntywundrkind4• 5 months ago

Meh. People are going to antagonize themselves. Trying to win em all is a fools game.

I wrote this to a discord on the 7th:

i know it's so obviously stupid, but i like that they are having fun with being online, even if it is at their users expense. and omg the users are so so awful to them, so much. again, it seems obviously bad to do, but i can't help but want them to keep at having fun online anyways.

That was in semi private. I'd de-enohazize the expense part seirously, I'd spin it a little differently now, emphasizing more the Douglas Adams nature of it all:

In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people angry, and been widely regarded as a bad move.

But that is also not owning it either, and I think this is an ownable lesson in just being human too, in deciding whether online mediums are corporate, lawyer, marketing, and engineer checked reviewed approved and wise correct words, or whether there must be some permission to be ourselves online, and some expectations that people are only human, and we should be thankful they are sharing their human experiences with us or not. It's not just having fun: whether we can be ourselves online is in question. Whether that is socially allowed.

(And generally I haven't found the character of the team to be deeply off. They haven't been, in my view, going out of their way to create injury, but they have been sharing sides that people have never wanted to hear!)

I see how this has been a bad taste for some. And I don't want to belittle your feelings here at all. Yes being more correct would be the wise obvious choice. Ultimately though I think these team member's are more beholden to remaining human, having fun, enjoying themselves.

And to creating (to credit another soul in the discord) personal / compsable moderation & filter systems (not top down enforcement!) such that they can enjoy being a "main character" online (like it or not), even in the midst of strident focused directed continual hostility. Which is a capability atproto is truly uniquely without compare set up to support & enable.

Props to the team. Please keep posting. Sorry about humanity. Sorry to people who are upset and turned off by this. No one is perfect, we work with what we got, and our responses are human and our own and valid, whether they are the wisest sharpest most all correct choice or no. With the good willing souls, we work towards synthesis & understanding; hopefully all sides find that agreeable.

yuestion3• 5 months ago

The most vocal and obnoxious of the Bluesky userbase get antagonized by pretty much anything. Pleasing that lot is a fruitless task.

What Bluesky should do now is focus on expanding their userbase away from this particular group of insufferables.

Dracophoenix• 5 months ago

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

danabramov8• 5 months ago

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

egorfine5• 5 months ago

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

esskay• 5 months ago

Counterpoint - its a legal requirement in several parts of the world now (and rapidly expanding), how do you think they should handle it whilst you know...still being able to exist?

idiotsecant2• 5 months ago

I don't know why people have to be like this. Are you not capable of asking the question without the aggressive snark? Just be cool for a second and maybe you'll get an actual conversation where you learn something.

ChicagoDave2• 5 months ago

If there was an Internet Technology hall of fame, your work with atproto would qualify.

One big innovation is to drag a large bank or Stripe on board to enable payments on the network.

Good luck!

brchr• 4 months ago

FYI, There is absolutely an Internet Hall of Fame and anyone would be welcome to nominate Jay! https://www.internethalloffame.org

bushbaba• 4 months ago

Why would Jay get the award when they didn’t actually lead or build such protocol?

yieldcrv• 5 months ago

I'm glad you were able to reach your goal, been following your professional journey since I met you at a silicon valley event 10 years ago, looking forward to what you do with the ecosystem

yuestion3• 5 months ago

With the new CEO in place, are there any plans to deal with the obnoxious userbase of Bluesky, and perhaps try to expand it out to reach people who don't exhibit such high levels of toxicity?

whattheheckheck• 5 months ago

Yeah its the same plans Elon has for X

smt88• 4 months ago

This is a valid question. I agree politically with a lot of Bluesky users and still find it to be an awful space to hang out in.

t0lo2• 4 months ago

As one of the first 10k beta users, who was fairly active, then moved back to twitter, I agree with this. The userbase is extremely off putting from the get go- it's not the fault of Graber or anyone else- but they should allow people to turn off the turbo redditor type people with a few settings.

subscribed3• 4 months ago

And that in comparison to Reddit ot Twitter?! :D

marxisttemp2• 5 months ago

Why did you deliberately steal Mastodon’s thunder? Why don’t you support ActivityPub?

danabramov8• 5 months ago

ActivityPub does not solve any of the stated goals of atproto.

Comparing ActivityPub with atproto is like pitting Email against Web. These are just differently shaped solutions to differently shaped problems.

KoftaBob• 5 months ago

What thunder? Mastodon has had nearly a decade to go mainstream and it's still mostly tech enthusiasts explaining to their friends what an 'instance' is.

ActivityPub is fine if you enjoy your identity being held hostage by whatever random server admin decides to keep the lights on. Want to move servers? Hope you're cool with losing your followers. Want real account portability? Too bad. Want scalable search and flexible moderation? Also too bad.

ATproto wasn't built to compete with Mastodon out of pettiness, it was built because ActivityPub fundamentally cannot accomplish the task that ATProto/Bluesky is aiming for: a decentralized social network that isn't a cumbersome pain in the ass to use.

sbinnee• 4 months ago

Thanks for commenting on here. I do own bluesky account, but it's been dormant, shamefully. So I appreciate your comment on HN!

Can folks, including me, have hints what sorts of innovative features or changes we will see?

stackghost• 4 months ago

Hi Jay,

It's my understanding that Toni was so uninterested in bsky that his account was inactive. What makes Toni the right person at the helm, even in the interim?

etchalon• 4 months ago

You did such amazing things. I'm excited to see what you do next.

vincnetas• 4 months ago

Question about Bluesky and Persona integration. As i understand there are plans to delegate government id verifications to Persona? (https://withpersona.com)

Any confirmation? Comments?

popalchemist2• 4 months ago

Jay please answer this.

blackqueeriroh3• 4 months ago

You understand it from where?

user3939382• 5 months ago

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.

Devasta• 5 months 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.

nout3• 5 months 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.

muyuu2• 4 months ago

it does have a similar problem to other systems in that it's so free-form there is no cohesive experience

ChrisArchitect2• 5 months ago

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.

guywithahat• 5 months 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

KingMob• 4 months ago

Agree. You'd think Musk would do something about the CSAM AI. I guess he reined it in a bit, at least.

alexose• 5 months ago

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

dzhiurgis• 5 months ago

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

ElijahLynn• 5 months ago

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.

ddtaylor• 5 months ago

Almost all of social media right now is terrible. Each is a little faction of whatever echo chamber controls it mixed in with the most engagement hungry garbage you can imagine.

partiallypro• 5 months ago

BlueSky is vastly worse than Twitter/X now or ever was. It was a good idea, but it ruins the "community square" aspect when BlueSky has just become a total echo chamber. Twitter is still diverse, even if voices that were once banned now have bigger platforms. Now I'd rank BlueSky has a net negative for society. It's basically a DailyKos leaning miniblog with a small userbase. Things you would just used to find in comment sections of left leaning sites.

tensor2• 4 months ago

You rank Bluesky as a net negative for society and a rank what’s become ann alt-right propaganda service as diverse? Interesting. No thanks.

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

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