Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down
bsky.social
bsky.social
Any confirmation? Comments?
Can folks, including me, have hints what sorts of innovative features or changes we will see?
One big innovation is to drag a large bank or Stripe on board to enable payments on the network.
Good luck!
The "Grok-based Transformer"[0] that uses P(click/dwell/not_interested/photo_expand/video_view) seems pretty important and I can't tell how atproto is capturing it. I use @spacecowboy17.bsky.social's For You and from what I understand that feed wouldn't get that data?
[0]:https://github.com/xai-org/x-algorithm?tab=readme-ov-file#sc... (this isn't an endorsement of grok/x, it's more that the transformer recommender has been very steerable via those signals in my experience)
(I also struggle with the omni-purpose likes - endorsement, approval, discover-algorithm-input. Maybe a more prominent more/less button addresses this, but then provides less network signal.)
could you provide some examples? i didn't really see this, but maybe i just missed it
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.
I respect the CEO for laughing at a melodramatic harassment campaign. The last thing those outrage addicts need is coddling & corporate babytalk.
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.
What Bluesky should do now is focus on expanding their userbase away from this particular group of insufferables.
What they should also do is redesign (or remove) the "nuclear block" feature. In its current state, it helps perpetuate a hostile and exclusionary atmosphere to new users, which isn't going to help Bluesky grow an active and diverse userbase.
You have to make hard product decisions about which user bases to serve.
Also, unlike ActivityPub, it's actually useful for building features that normal people expect from social apps — for example, algorithmic feeds and search, and a single interlinked world (rather than fragmented "servers").
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?
It has a long way to go.
Fair enough
> moved back to twitter
"The summer heat in Phoenix is extremely off putting, so I moved to Riyadh"
Very surprised to hear this... the few times I've visited Twitter in the last year I've been met with a deluge of racist, homophobic, transphobic, and misogynistic comments. Like there's practically no moderation on there. People saying "Hitler was right the whole time" and shit like that.
I don't use Bluesky much either but I definitely wouldn't have considered it worse than Twitter
Personally, I've found bsky has a far healthier culture than Twitter, even before Musk turned it into his own personal megaphone/therapist and neo-nazi safe-space (and I follow a lot of political accounts)
The lack of payouts for engaging posts and the robust blocking really does change the incentive structure over there. That twitter-style toxic engagement-bait type posting doesn't get rewarded as much.
There are some far-left groups there who are very toxic and will harass some people, but they are easy to block. Most of them seem to block people at the drop of a hat anyways, and so end up in their own isolated bubbles.
I personally believe it's because they replicated the same incentive structure as Twitter. Being provocative generates engagement, which gets you reach and creates the perception of relevance.
At first, people were just happy to be at an alternative to Elon Twitter. But good vibes only get you so far when the incentives point the other direction.
Comparing ActivityPub with atproto is like pitting Email against Web. These are just differently shaped solutions to differently shaped problems.
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.
Mastodon is shaped like email so you have “servers” sending messages to each other.
Atproto is shaped more like RSS with aggregation. Everyone posts data to their hosting (which anyone could move at any time), and apps like Bluesky aggregate data from everyone’s hosting.
So a concept like “Bluesky server” is nonsensical. What you have is “atproto hosting” (which can be provided by Bluesky, by other communities, by other companies, or can be self-hosted — it’s all open source and you can even implement your own) and “Bluesky app” (of which there’s only one — but there are forks like Blacksky which fork the entire stack including the server). There also “other atproto apps” like https://leaflet.pub, https://tangled.org, etc, which have nothing to do with Bluesky.
I know that for Twitter-brained people this is considered an anti-feature (and yes account mobility is an issue), but a PITA to use it really is not
Besides, people sometimes have fallings-out.
I think they should resist as much as possible. Yes it was a legal requirement to gas the Jews and it was illegal to hide them.
Who do we cheer now? Those who abided to the law or those who broke it?
This makes me have zero respect for those who volunteer to go the extra mile in the implementation of repressive laws.
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.
Some orgs will go through three, from founder, to growth, to sustaining.
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.
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.
I wrote more about how it works here if you're curious: https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/
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.
I just checked https://apps.apple.com/us/iphone/charts/6009 and X (formerly twitter) is the #1 news app followed by substack, CrimeRadar Dispatch Audio, and coming in at 4th place is reddit.
So if twitter's dead, what does that make reddit, 3 spots behind it? Well, not dead, obviously. Pretending that twitter is gone or dead is just not rational behavior.
I'm not saying it's "fully dead", but it clearly lost the cultural relevance and impact it once had.
That's all been gone. The algorithm fav'ing paid blue check users massively made things worse from there.
Bluesky attempts to be better on all fronts here. Interesting apps/services are welcome, permissionless. There is no top down pro-facsism pro-racism pro-MAGA finger-on-the-dial algo-shaping.
Sure there's some who will just be burned out & not interested. But there's so many interesting structural safeguards & such a openness to play & creativity & tuning... I really encourage folks to give it a time. I would definitely hope that "bound to fail" is perhaps not a cast die, that, we tried something great once, it's gone, never again, is not how this works.
I was a customer of a bank that treated me with nothing but contempt. Whenever I called the bank because of a problem, I would stay on the line forever to eventually talk to an unbothered representative. One day, instead of calling, I complained on twitter and tagged the bank. Half an hour later the bank apologised and fixed my problem.
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)
Again, this is not a reflection of anything bad about Bluesky as a user. IMO a smaller and more focused is a good thing for the actual community, hence why I read/post on HN and not Reddit or Twitter. However as an investor there's basically no way to interpret those statistics as anything but bad.
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.
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.
These things are very valuable, and if Bluesky can't succeed doing them, I hope someone else can.
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:
Not arguing, just curious - what toxic features are you talking about?
Auto-tagging, which allows you to tag users based on who they follow. (shame feature)
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.
Automattic's Matt Mullenweg is downright insane. Just google their war with WP Engine and by extension the entire WordPress community.
> 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.
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."
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.
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.
I understand why people want to be able to delete things from the internet, but it doesn't work that way. It has never worked that way. It can't work that way unless every computer is locked down to running remotely attested government-approved software, and that's obviously worse.
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.
It does seem like fewer people are posting personal content that way lately. Perhaps most people are better off sharing things one to one, or in small groups that are meant to stay private. That doesn't make it bad for the more public formats to exist; they're just not for everyone.
Don't use it if you don't like it. Some of us like the strong identity and content verification.
Proverbial Big Brother ALSO likes "strong identity and content verification."
I'm also putting forth the idea that the ATProto thing for social media makes us marginally less safe, due to its technical "centralization via confirmation" of the data it "broadcasts."
Except that the design of Bluesky severely increases the possibility of your data getting out of your control. And I can hear the immediate responses of "oh if you didn't want it public, don't post it," but as should be frightfully obvious -- not everyone thinks like that.
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...
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.
twitter/x/bluesky - a big tech company owns your data
mastodon - a grassroots community organization owns your data
zulip - someone you've met personally owns the data
your blog - you own the data
(and yes these are a bit of a category error, but to achieve privacy maybe we should broaden the category and sacrifice reach)
Because you have "possesses" (which can be anyone) vs. "controls?"
Twitter - single point of big company external control
Mastodon - One or multiple unverifiable fallible likely grassroots, points of external control
Bluesky - Once out, merely the illusion of control, because your data is out there, verifiable?.
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
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.
https://jobs.gem.com/bluesky/am9icG9zdDqRK9D8osOaeyyESJ7cPsX...
Job opening to build sports relationships.
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.
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...
I believe, due to the format of engagement, its easy to spend a lot of time there scrolling - so consider
(1) only using the platform on your desktop computer, instead of phone,
(2) limiting time - 25 minutes a day is enough!
(3) Mute spammers, complainers, people with negative attiudes - you can't catch them all, but you can intentionally shape your experience over time.
(4) Subscribe to tags of your passions (example: #piano, #makerspace, #drawing, #cats, #jujitsu, #cncrouter, #3dprinting), and try to lean into that instead of getting caught up in endless political reactions - which never ends. You can be intentional, and subscribe to people who have a positive vision for the version of the future you prefer.
Same, more or less. Twitter started as a place to be interrupted by attention-seekers, and Bluesky was just "that but with less Elon Musk and more implementation throat-clearing." I never saw the point. Mastodon feels more like old-school Usenet, where you could find communities with shared interests, block the attention-seekers, and shrug at the usual human drama.
I certainly don't need a billion users. I think I'd be happy with 100,000 users -- what is your number?
I think this is related to the question of how big of a city do you need to live in before you can find something to do and are not bored living there. I'm fine with a city of, say, 50,000-100,000. That is more than sufficient for me to find an appropriate number of likeminded friends and neighbors as well as interesting pursuits.
I don't think that's a meaningful parameter to think about? I'd say that on any social network, I have meaningful, ongoing relationship with maybe 20 people. I suspect that's the norm. But that doesn't mean you can join a social network with 20 users and get that. I mean, if it's a mailing list for friends and family, sure. But not if it's 20 randomly-selected strangers from around the world.
So the critical mass to make the "random stranger" type of a social network work is much, much higher than the number of daily interactions you need to keep coming back.
Some people call that bubbles, I call it sanity. I try not to spend my time giving out about the other side though. It just gives me negative energy.
Mastodon has been great for tech communities in my experience though.
Bluesky and Mastodon users can interact with each other (provided both parties opt in). I'm on Mastodon, but I see my friend's messages (he's on BlueSky) and vice versa. My replies show on up on BlueSky and vice versa.
I don’t see why it is “zero” sum, nothing stops you from posting to more than one social. I mean, I have relatives on Facebook and no prospect for getting them to change so I cut-n-paste what I posted on Mastodon to Facebook, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Tumblr, and all sorts of places.
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.
Here on Earth, Europe, Germany, Berlin, Mastodon GmbH.
So he didn't tell you that he got a €1M one-off payment from Mastodon? [0]
> You are making things up.
It is true. [0]
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/11/18/mastodon-ceo-steps-down-as...
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.
> I’ve been a partner at True Ventures for many years
This 'growth' comes with a lot of negative things and rarely lots of good things.
This is separate from ATProto, which I still maintain positive sentiment for.
How could a social network, or anything humans create, not be values-driven?
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.
It’s sort of like that.
Allow me introduce you to the inception of enshittification
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have concerns about one piece of messaging I've seen lately, working on a writeup, stay tuned
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.
The interim CEO doesn't even use Bluesky himself, so at this point you might as well move to Threads.
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.
https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:cwf4mmm7mpzistinx3ox2zhj#coll...
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
Let’s not forget Jack Dorsey laid off half of Cash the other week
for example name the only Twitter investment that made money....
hint...Bluesky.....all other Twitter projects failed.