Last March, Bluesky’s longtime CEO Jay Graber stepped down from that role to become chief innovation officer. Graber was immediately succeeded by Toni Schneider, the founding 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 move out of his ‘interim’ status and become permanent CEO.
“I’ve been in the interim CEO role at Bluesky for four months now, and it’s time for an update,” 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 work, and I am all in as the official CEO of Blue Sky.”
In the post, Schneider said one of his first orders of business was “creating smaller spaces and more private communities,” which he said would “unlock the next wave of growth and innovation.”
Automattic and True Ventures, venture capital firms where Schneider is a partner, are both investors in Bluesky.
Originally spun off from Twitter, Bluesky became a haven for those looking to avoid the changes Elon Musk brought to the platform after he acquired it in 2022 (the site was eventually renamed X and is now a subsidiary of Musk’s rocket and AI conglomerate, SpaceXAI).
Under Graber, the site’s users grew to 43 million, and the site’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol – a system that allows Bluesky and other apps to share the same social network – expanded significantly.
But lately the site has been having trouble maintaining or growing its user base. Some have questioned whether it is dying, noting an apparent decline in both engagement and the overall user community. Blue Sky saw a rapid increase in users following Donald Trump’s re-election (the period when Elon Musk was most active in politics), but the number of users appears to have decreased since then.
Simply put, Schneider will have his work cut out for him. But he seems game for it. “We are at the beginning of this story,” he wrote Friday.
If you purchase through links in our articles, we may receive a small commission. This does not affect our editorial independence.
