In March, Bluesky’s longtime CEO Jay Graber left his position to become Chief Innovation Officer. Graber was immediately succeeded by Toni Schneider, the founder and CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress and Tumblr.
Schneider, who has led the company as interim CEO for the past four months, will now drop the ‘interim’ status and become the permanent CEO.
“I’m four months into my interim CEO role at Bluesky and it’s time for an update,” says Schneider wrote on his personal blog. “Most importantly, as of today, the interim part of the title is gone. I love the mission and the job, and I’m doing everything I can as Bluesky’s official CEO.”
In the post, Schneider said one of his first orders of business is to “create smaller spaces and more private communities,” which he said would “unlock the next wave of growth and innovation.”
Automattic and True Ventures, a venture capital firm where Schneider is a partner, are both investors in Bluesky.
Originally an offshoot of Twitter, Bluesky became a haven for those wanting to avoid the changes Elon Musk made to the platform after he took over in 2022 (the site was eventually renamed X and is now a subsidiary of Musk’s combination rocket and AI company SpaceXAI).
The site grew under Graber 43 million userswhile the site’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol – a system that allows Bluesky and other apps to share the same social network – was significantly expanded.
Lately, however, the site has struggled to maintain or grow its user base. Some have wondered if it was dying – pointing to a marked decline in both engagement and the overall user community. Bluesky saw one strong increase in the number of users in the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election (when Elon Musk was most active in politics), but the site seems I saw an exit ever since.
In short: Schneider has his work cut out for him. However, he seems to be in favor of it. “We are only at the beginning of this story,” he wrote on Friday.
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