Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down • Hacker News Board

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#261

Post by KoftaBob » Mon, Mar 09, 2026, 11:56 PM UTC

marxisttemp wrote: post #230

arcalinea wrote: post #71

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.

Why did you deliberately steal Mastodon’s thunder? Why don’t you support ActivityPub?

What thunder? Mastodon has had nearly a decade to go mainstream and it's still mostly tech enthusiasts explaining to their friends what an 'instance' is.

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.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#262

Post by zachlatta » Mon, Mar 09, 2026, 11:59 PM UTC

rchaud wrote: post #65

amadeuspagel wrote: post #7

> and proved that a values-driven social network could thrive at scale. How could a social network, or anything humans create, not be values-driven?

"values-driven" is the TedTalk-ified equivalent of MBA-speak like "synergy". Meaningless and unmeasurable, but sounds good in a pitch deck.

This is really not true. It’s important that when people say this, we hold them to it and reward them when they see it through.

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.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#263

Post by partiallypro » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 12:02 AM UTC

ddtaylor wrote: post #258

Almost all of social media right now is terrible. Each is a little faction of whatever echo chamber controls it mixed in with the most engagement hungry garbage you can imagine.

BlueSky is vastly worse than Twitter/X now or ever was. It was a good idea, but it ruins the "community square" aspect when BlueSky has just become a total echo chamber. Twitter is still diverse, even if voices that were once banned now have bigger platforms. Now I'd rank BlueSky has a net negative for society. It's basically a DailyKos leaning miniblog with a small userbase. Things you would just used to find in comment sections of left leaning sites.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#264

Post by tclancy » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 12:06 AM UTC

tfghhjh wrote: post #260

danabramov wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a recent post by Daniel (who works on atproto) on why E2EE is not a current focus: https://dholms.leaflet.pub/3meluqcwky22a

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That you for signing up to make this comment, strange, new account.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#265

Post by monster_truck » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 12:13 AM UTC

monster_truck wrote: post #62

bsky is going to get "freenode boyking'd" so hard. It, the maybe 300k human users, and 42.7 million bots are going to be sold and they will pull up the drawbridges.

Great example of the userbase quality to be found here: https://bsky.app/profile/patriotnicole.bsky.social/followers

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

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#266

Post by easterncalculus » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 12:28 AM UTC

mossTechnician wrote: post #225

zdragnar wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it private if it is in a public affidavit?

In my opinion, inappropriately leaked information should probably still be considered private, even if it was made publicly accessible. But even if not, Singal says the same leaker directly contacted him with a new leak, which he also published.

> In my opinion, inappropriately leaked information should probably still be considered private.

I'd love to see the limitations of this opinion you definitely hold honestly and without favor.

You started by posting a change.org petition that links to a deleted post - in other words an "appeal to petition" that has no evidence. Now you are suggesting there is another leak that was published (presumably not mentioned in this petition?) that also has no evidence. Where is the evidence?

Everything from an actual search engine request for these posts (which to be clear, are deleted) suggests that these are anonymized and public, and contain no identifying information.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#267

Post by muyuu » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 12:32 AM UTC

jrm4 wrote: post #32

Doomed 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…

deleting published stuff in any sort of decentralised network is always going to be limited at best

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

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#268

Post by smt88 » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 12:39 AM UTC

yuestion wrote: post #216

arcalinea wrote: post #71

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.

With the new CEO in place, are there any plans to deal with the obnoxious userbase of Bluesky, and perhaps try to expand it out to reach people who don't exhibit such high levels of toxicity?

This is a valid question. I agree politically with a lot of Bluesky users and still find it to be an awful space to hang out in.

Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#269

Post by nailer » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 12:43 AM UTC

mjr00 wrote: post #77

multisport wrote: post #4

Just 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 Blue…

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Re: Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down

#270

Post by naasking » Tue, Mar 10, 2026, 12:45 AM UTC

mossTechnician wrote: post #242

naasking wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my opinion, inappropriately leaked information should probably be considered private. How is that relevant to BSky's terms of service? The information was public and did not identify the person. > But even if not, Singal says the same leaker directly contacted him with a new leak, which he also published. I notice that you didn't say whether this new leak was private information, or whether it was also already p…

> I notice that you didn't say whether this new leak was private information The new leak was, according to journalist Jesse Singal himself, absolutely private information.

Please cite Singal's statement and let's see what he actually said.