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Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

bsky.social

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Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#131

Post by Hamuko »

CactusBlue wrote: post #110
pfraze wrote: post #38

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 o…

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

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

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#132

Post by lich_king »

rekmarks wrote: post #126
lich_king wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluesky is not just a shadow, it's on a pretty steady decline. Their DAU numbers are dropping every month. Which probably tells you something about the unspoken reason for this change.

No they’re not? https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

Yes they are? E.g., https://api.backlinko.com/app/uploads/2025/11/bluesky-websit...

This is also visible in your stats if you extend the time window. They had a peak in 2024 and are pretty much declining month to month ever since.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#133

Post by ghaff »

pron wrote: post #114
mjr00 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Blue…

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.

For whatever faults the old Twitter had pre-Musk, it did establish a certain critical mass for a certain type of short form threaded discussion which seems to be largely dead at this point.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#135

Post by haunter »

rekmarks wrote: post #126
lich_king wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluesky is not just a shadow, it's on a pretty steady decline. Their DAU numbers are dropping every month. Which probably tells you something about the unspoken reason for this change.

No they’re not? https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

Are we seeing the same? All the stats are steadily going down https://i.imgur.com/QJakG56.png

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#136

Post by hinkley »

pfraze wrote: post #38

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 o…

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.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#137

Post by bombcar »

rmccue wrote: post #129
orphea wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Matt M. was behind the drama from WordPress' side though. It looks like Toni Schneider left in 2014.

Toni was in fact the adult supervision brought in by Automattic’s board when the company was young and Matt was inexperienced.

And apparently adult supervision was needed.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#138

Post by CactusBlue »

danabramov wrote: post #130
CactusBlue wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already could've done that before, just throw a HTML file on a HTTP server on a cheap VPS

That's pretty much what atproto is, except it's typed JSON rather than HTML, and HTTP+WebSockets to allow aggregation. I wrote more about how it works here if you're curious: https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/

and I actually don't hate that bit (I really like lexicons, although I might have approached it in a different way) - what I hate is the aggregation layer. I know that it is possible to have an AppView-less atproto app (e.g. RedDwarf), but I feel like much of the ecosystem still defaults to the assumption that it will go through the Bluesky AppView.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#139

Post by danabramov »

CactusBlue wrote: post #138
danabramov wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's pretty much what atproto is, except it's typed JSON rather than HTML, and HTTP+WebSockets to allow aggregation. I wrote more about how it works here if you're curious: https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/

and I actually don't hate that bit (I really like lexicons, although I might have approached it in a different way) - what I hate is the aggregation layer. I know that it is possible to have an AppView-less atproto app (e.g. RedDwarf), but I feel like much of the ecosystem still defaults to the assumption that it will go through the Bluesky AppView.

Unrelated apps (https://leaflet.pub/, https://tangled.org/, http://semble.so/) don't go through Bluesky Appview (since they need aggregations of different kind of data). I think aggregation is the only model that can compete with centralized services on UX, but of course different apps would need different backends.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#140

Post by ghaff »

Zak wrote: post #119
NoahZuniga wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can save all of anything someone makes public with ATProto, ActivityPub, or RSS. You can do that with anything someone puts on a web page too, but those protocols simplify automation. 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 governm…

Once you hit publish, it's public and anyone and everyone can save a copy and distribute it. If you don't like that, don't hit publish.
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