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.
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down
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Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down
#72If 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.
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Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
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.
That's not what the comment you're responding to is about.
Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down
#74I was enjoying having one social network not run by horrid people. Maybe it's time to go back to IRC or something.
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.
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.
Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down
#75If 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.
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
Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
IANAL but no, executives are not actually legally required to increase shareholder value.
They generally are aiui. Bluesky was formed as a PBC, which is basically a corporation where investors cannot sue for deralict of fiduciary duty.
Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down
#77Just 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.
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.
Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down
#78Doomed 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 "abili…
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.
Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down
#79Translation: 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.
This is false, he has been on Bluesky since 2024. https://bsky.app/profile/toni.bsky.team
"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.
Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down
#80Wait Bluesky had a CEO? I thought it was some type of organic open source collective.
You're thinking of mastodon, and even that had a lead: https://www.theregister.com/2025/11/19/mastodon_ceo_steps_do...
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"