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.
How do you feel about the recent communication failures from the team to the userbase? As another builder of an open-source social platform, we must all understand that it is paramount for any company to not antagonize its customers, doubly so for a SOCIAL platform. I do understand that Bluesky and ATProto has to deal with a lot of baggage from both the old userbase and the new influx from the X/Twitter exodus, but engaging in user-antagonistic communication caused me to sour on the whole protocol.
I don't like Jesse Singal's work or his political positions (he fucking sucks!), but this is hardly antagonistic except to maybe a small group of terminally online posters who take posting too seriously.
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 don't even think having Jesse Singal on the platform is the problem (like it or not, I believe that all beings must have the right to communicate); the problem here was the communication failure when communicating this decision to the userbase. They could have just reiterated their rules and left it at that; instead, they chose to mock their userbase, write them off as harassment, and banned users left and right, abusing their position in network to censor people at every layer of the protocol.
The central complaint doesn't seem to be distaste, but rather the fact that he is uniquely privileged over other users, despite violating Bluesky's terms of service.[0]
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 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.
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.
What are your thoughts on people self hosting their own websites and blogs instead of posting to big tech platforms? I’d say that extra openness was a good thing. I absolutely believe in privacy as well, and think ownership is important too.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
There was some WP drama between Automattic and the WP community a while back.
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.
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 "ability to delete" and more "plausible deniability."
The Mastodon model does not offer much ability to delete. Well-behaved servers will honor delete requests, but the protocol doesn't mandate it. Additionally, a user cannot generate delete requests if they get banned from their server or the server shuts down. Users and server admins can't control whether another server permits archiving of their content. Mastodon and other fediverse software allows following public posts by RSS, and RSS clients might keep them forever.
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.
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 government-approved software, and that's obviously worse.
The community has voted for convenience over privacy, and twitter and bluesky have won over mastodon. You're right, but people don't actually care about privacy
Bluesky is very intentionally about public posting. It's a bit weird to say people "don't care about privacy" when speaking of a platform designed to amplify and distribute posts as widely and effectively as possible.
As someone who was once an avid twitter user, my sense is that Mastodon--after a somewhat hopeful start just never gained the network momentum. Bluesky came closest to Twitter's old reach but is still something of a shadow of the old Twitter (as Twitter/X is these days as well).
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.
Without researching actual numbers, it feels like that whole category of social media is pretty much uninteresting at this point. Not sure what really replaces it given that Facebook seems increasingly infested with AI slop and sponsored posts.
If a social network stays comparatively small but still active, I see that as a huge win. Half the people I follow are happily on Mastodon. I don't see that changing anytime soon.
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.
If 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
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.
Yes, also X does have both left and right opinions and is open to all, before it was slanted to left too much and that's now been fixed. I would urge people to try it before judging it because of some political bias.
i'm sure bluesky will continue to attract the best and brightest minds for diversity of thought. enjoy your time in the bubble while the rest of the world is on twitter.
Why would I use a social network run by someone with opinions straight from the pages of Stormfront? I don't need white supremacy mixed in with my light recreational reading, thanks.
Musk is openly and heavy handedly messing with the recommendation algorithm to fit whatever views he wants to push. On top of that, he started paying people for their viral tweets, which promotes content farms and rage bait.
It is not a place that is trying to showcase diverse opinions in an unbiased way.
I've found lately that between age gating and twitter being - well I don't want to get into it - I am no longer looking for replacements - I just want to stop using those parts of the internet.
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.
Mastodon already won, by being used by people. Bluesky also won, by also being used by people. Not sure if this is a "winner takes it all" scenario? As long as you can host it yourself, I don't really mind where people are, both seem to work and have "won" for what they set out to do.
It is a zero-sum game in some sense, because you go where your friends or "influencers" are.
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...
Just an anecdote - I never used Twitter/X, and never used BlueSky. Recently (about a year ago), joined Mastodon. I enjoy it, find a lot of value there, and have interesting conversations (recently about Mint Debian Linux & sound-systems, and also maker-space CNC design tools). There seems to be active investment in good features & quality on the platform, including making it easier to host your own organization server.
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.
Since developing on ATProto, one thing I have hoped for is less of this "winner take all" world. I think the protocol can be for much more than social media, could do dropbox if permissions and private data are designed well. This comment by the main protocol dev working on this does not inspire confidence on my part.
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.
Ahhh yup, wondered how long it'd take before this happened. Sorry to sound like THAT guy, but I'm glad I deleted my account ages ago. I liked BS and it seemed good but yea, here comes Twitter 3.0
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.
They constantly say they are a Public benefit corporation but there is no actual difference between that an a corporation. This leads to people assuming some kind of benevolence.
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"
That's not at all incompatible with Bluesky having a funded company with a CEO.
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.
Bluesky's claims of being decentralised were always way way ahead of the de-facto reality of it. That's not the same as Mastodon. It has been a "rallying cry" but it doesn't stand up to much scrutiny of how Bluesky actually functions.
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.
Fun fact: under the hood atproto bears many similarities to blockchain... it was funded in during the 2019/2020 crypto craze. I'm not too involved, but outside of a consensus mechanism, atproto looks a bit like a chain, kinda like IPFS.
I'm very deep into ATProto development, in particular I have the first Permissioned PDS implementation [1]. It definitely has roots in blockchain / federated, but makes tradeoffs for UX.
The more interesting perspective is a Plug-n-Play Distributed System [2]
Bluesky is very strange, it's got potential to endure as a fairly popular social media site but it's kinda obvious that it's staff are contemptuous of their users.
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.
The brand already has a defined public perception that will be hard to change, even for those who've only heard it by name (eg Fox News). As a user, I generally agree with the Blue MAGA sentiments, even though it is much more diverse than that and you can filter out political content if you want. This is likely Bluesky's biggest challenge in a return to growth.
This is separate from ATProto, which I still maintain positive sentiment for.
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.
I have no idea what to think of this. Especially the Automattic connection, the company with the petty tyrant running it. I would want anyone coming from there to have learned something from the failure of the WordPress Foundation since Bluesky will need some foundationing too.
Pretty much. It's fun seeing idealists get slapped by reality. If you want to protect your ideals you better know how to fight for them using the same tactics as your competitors.
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.
You are wrong about pretty much all of that, including your assumed reasoning for why this is happening. Jay chose to change her role so she could do deeper work on the technology. That's it.
It’s a social network premised on not liking Elon Musk as far as I remember. The inverse is not true, Twitter user adoption as far as I can tell is not primarily driven by left/right political fanaticism. Not sure what reason it even has to exist.
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.
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.
If there was an Internet Technology hall of fame, your work with atproto would qualify.
One big innovation is to drag a large bank or Stripe on board to enable payments on the network.
Good luck!
Since you're now focusing on the AT protocol, will E2EE/OTR become a priority?
There's a recent post by Daniel (who works on atproto) on why E2EE is not a current focus: https://dholms.leaflet.pub/3meluqcwky22a
Is the new blocking age verification page the kind of innovation we should expect from BlueSky?
How do you feel about the recent communication failures from the team to the userbase? As another builder of an open-source social platform, we must all understand that it is paramount for any company to not antagonize its customers, doubly so for a SOCIAL platform. I do understand that Bluesky and ATProto has to deal with a lot of baggage from both the old userbase and the new influx from the X/Twitter exodus, but engaging in user-antagonistic communication caused me to sour on the whole protocol.
> user-antagonistic communication
could you provide some examples? i didn't really see this, but maybe i just missed it
https://techcrunch.com/2025/10/05/waffles-eat-bluesky/
I don't like Jesse Singal's work or his political positions (he fucking sucks!), but this is hardly antagonistic except to maybe a small group of terminally online posters who take posting too seriously.
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 don't even think having Jesse Singal on the platform is the problem (like it or not, I believe that all beings must have the right to communicate); the problem here was the communication failure when communicating this decision to the userbase. They could have just reiterated their rules and left it at that; instead, they chose to mock their userbase, write them off as harassment, and banned users left and right, abusing their position in network to censor people at every layer of the protocol.
The central complaint doesn't seem to be distaste, but rather the fact that he is uniquely privileged over other users, despite violating Bluesky's terms of service.[0]
[0]: https://www.change.org/p/bluesky-must-enforce-its-community-...
Big time +1, here. Would love to hear something - anything - from the bsky team that takes some accountability.
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 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.
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.
We don't need "open" networks (Digital Panopticons), we need private networks.
What are your thoughts on people self hosting their own websites and blogs instead of posting to big tech platforms? I’d say that extra openness was a good thing. I absolutely believe in privacy as well, and think ownership is important too.
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.
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.
Both are good
Who is this "we" and where can I read their opinions?
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 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.
[0] https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
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.
He's only meant to be filling in temporarily per the Wired article, but we'll see.
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.
Apologies, I'm probably under a rock, but why is that bad? I see they're behind WordPress but am not sure what the 1:1 is. The WP Engine stuff?
There was some WP drama between Automattic and the WP community a while back.
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.
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.
They'd already taken VC money hadn't they? It's got to be said though that tech startups are getting very formulaic. Monster of the week vibes.
Why is that bad?
thats not a good sign
The vision of Bluesky isnt compatible with it existing in a capitalistic society.
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 "ability to delete" and more "plausible deniability."
The Mastodon model does not offer much ability to delete. Well-behaved servers will honor delete requests, but the protocol doesn't mandate it. Additionally, a user cannot generate delete requests if they get banned from their server or the server shuts down. Users and server admins can't control whether another server permits archiving of their content. Mastodon and other fediverse software allows following public posts by RSS, and RSS clients might keep them forever.
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.
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 government-approved software, and that's obviously worse.
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.
The community has voted for convenience over privacy, and twitter and bluesky have won over mastodon. You're right, but people don't actually care about privacy
Bluesky is very intentionally about public posting. It's a bit weird to say people "don't care about privacy" when speaking of a platform designed to amplify and distribute posts as widely and effectively as possible.
As someone who was once an avid twitter user, my sense is that Mastodon--after a somewhat hopeful start just never gained the network momentum. Bluesky came closest to Twitter's old reach but is still something of a shadow of the old Twitter (as Twitter/X is these days as well).
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.
Are we seeing the same? All the stats are steadily going down https://i.imgur.com/QJakG56.png
Without researching actual numbers, it feels like that whole category of social media is pretty much uninteresting at this point. Not sure what really replaces it given that Facebook seems increasingly infested with AI slop and sponsored posts.
>You're right, but people don't actually care about privacy
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...
If a social network stays comparatively small but still active, I see that as a huge win. Half the people I follow are happily on Mastodon. I don't see that changing anytime soon.
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.
If 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.
They are aware:
https://jobs.gem.com/bluesky/am9icG9zdDqRK9D8osOaeyyESJ7cPsX...
Job opening to build sports relationships.
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
>If BlueSky could figure that out
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.
Yes, also X does have both left and right opinions and is open to all, before it was slanted to left too much and that's now been fixed. I would urge people to try it before judging it because of some political bias.
Elon Mush has introduced political biais in the algo, not all opinions are worth the same when you have a white suprematicst at the reign.
i'm sure bluesky will continue to attract the best and brightest minds for diversity of thought. enjoy your time in the bubble while the rest of the world is on twitter.
Why would I use a social network run by someone with opinions straight from the pages of Stormfront? I don't need white supremacy mixed in with my light recreational reading, thanks.
Musk is openly and heavy handedly messing with the recommendation algorithm to fit whatever views he wants to push. On top of that, he started paying people for their viral tweets, which promotes content farms and rage bait.
It is not a place that is trying to showcase diverse opinions in an unbiased way.
I've found lately that between age gating and twitter being - well I don't want to get into it - I am no longer looking for replacements - I just want to stop using those parts of the internet.
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.
Huh, I guess betting on Mastodon winning was the right bet.
Mastodon already won, by being used by people. Bluesky also won, by also being used by people. Not sure if this is a "winner takes it all" scenario? As long as you can host it yourself, I don't really mind where people are, both seem to work and have "won" for what they set out to do.
It is a zero-sum game in some sense, because you go where your friends or "influencers" are.
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...
Just an anecdote - I never used Twitter/X, and never used BlueSky. Recently (about a year ago), joined Mastodon. I enjoy it, find a lot of value there, and have interesting conversations (recently about Mint Debian Linux & sound-systems, and also maker-space CNC design tools). There seems to be active investment in good features & quality on the platform, including making it easier to host your own organization server.
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.
Since developing on ATProto, one thing I have hoped for is less of this "winner take all" world. I think the protocol can be for much more than social media, could do dropbox if permissions and private data are designed well. This comment by the main protocol dev working on this does not inspire confidence on my part.
https://bsky.app/profile/dholms.at/post/3mfsehg6ius2a
What did Mastodon win exactly?
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.
In what world did the Mastodon CEO made money out of Mastodon beside the small public salary he's been taking? You are making things up.
Ahhh yup, wondered how long it'd take before this happened. Sorry to sound like THAT guy, but I'm glad I deleted my account ages ago. I liked BS and it seemed good but yea, here comes Twitter 3.0
> 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.
Values aren't the only motivator, unless you take an extremely broad definition of values.
Yeah, the value of money is ironically usually not what we mean with ”values”.
The only value driving most things you see online is the value of money. Which is not the kind of values they are referring to.
I suppose in the same way that all eating is health and nutrition driven. Good or bad.
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.
You know how there are two sexual orientations: straight, and Political?
It’s sort of like that.
Cue 3 months to the “I’m having to make some hard decisions” email. Whats the board at Bluesky like?
Wait Bluesky had a CEO? I thought it was some type of organic open source collective.
They constantly say they are a Public benefit corporation but there is no actual difference between that an a corporation. This leads to people assuming some kind of benevolence.
If you need a reference measure of "Public Benefit Corporation", Anthropic is one too.
There is an actual difference
Nah, that's Nostr. fiatjaf created it but doesn't hold any actual authority. All the extensions are community-driven.
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"
That's not at all incompatible with Bluesky having a funded company with a CEO.
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.
Bluesky's claims of being decentralised were always way way ahead of the de-facto reality of it. That's not the same as Mastodon. It has been a "rallying cry" but it doesn't stand up to much scrutiny of how Bluesky actually functions.
I 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.
Same
nostr
no sir, never gonna do crypto social media
Fun fact: under the hood atproto bears many similarities to blockchain... it was funded in during the 2019/2020 crypto craze. I'm not too involved, but outside of a consensus mechanism, atproto looks a bit like a chain, kinda like IPFS.
I'm very deep into ATProto development, in particular I have the first Permissioned PDS implementation [1]. It definitely has roots in blockchain / federated, but makes tradeoffs for UX.
The more interesting perspective is a Plug-n-Play Distributed System [2]
[1] https://github.com/bluesky-social/atproto/compare/main...ver...
[2] https://atproto.com/articles/atproto-for-distsys-engineers
Bluesky is very strange, it's got potential to endure as a fairly popular social media site but it's kinda obvious that it's staff are contemptuous of their users.
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.
Blue sky seems like a bit of a flop
Let’s not forget Jack Dorsey laid off half of Cash the other week
by what metric....
for example name the only Twitter investment that made money....
hint...Bluesky.....all other Twitter projects failed.
Post from new CEO Toni Schneider https://toni.org/2026/03/09/coming-off-the-bench-for-bluesky...
There's only a single non-platitude in the entire letter, but luckily it provides us with a wealth of information about what's coming next:
> I’ve been a partner at True Ventures for many years
> PS: My role as interim CEO will be to help set up Bluesky’s next phase of growth.
This 'growth' comes with a lot of negative things and rarely lots of good things.
What is it that doctors call growth at any cost? Cancer?
The brand already has a defined public perception that will be hard to change, even for those who've only heard it by name (eg Fox News). As a user, I generally agree with the Blue MAGA sentiments, even though it is much more diverse than that and you can filter out political content if you want. This is likely Bluesky's biggest challenge in a return to growth.
This is separate from ATProto, which I still maintain positive sentiment for.
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss...
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.
And so it begins.
Go on..
bluesky is a disaster, worse than reddit and that's a low bar
Gotta love the huge "We're Hiring" banner at the end of the article..
I have no idea what to think of this. Especially the Automattic connection, the company with the petty tyrant running it. I would want anyone coming from there to have learned something from the failure of the WordPress Foundation since Bluesky will need some foundationing too.
Sounds like a firing / soft firing / come to jesus moment about the viability of the business...
Pretty much. It's fun seeing idealists get slapped by reality. If you want to protect your ideals you better know how to fight for them using the same tactics as your competitors.
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.
You are wrong about pretty much all of that, including your assumed reasoning for why this is happening. Jay chose to change her role so she could do deeper work on the technology. That's it.
The issue is that no one really believes the corporate speak any more. Bluesky does not get a pass on this, re: VC funding
I have concerns about one piece of messaging I've seen lately, working on a writeup, stay tuned
What's fun about it?
It's like seeing your kid learn how to walk. They'll fail a couple of times, but they'll get toughen up and finally learn.
They could have launched paid subscriptions, they even said they were looking into it, crickets...
It’s a social network premised on not liking Elon Musk as far as I remember. The inverse is not true, Twitter user adoption as far as I can tell is not primarily driven by left/right political fanaticism. Not sure what reason it even has to exist.
People are still talking about bluehair.nosering?
Translation: 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
Last activity 17 days ago, 23 days ago, 3 months ago, 3 months ago, 4 months ago
Dive deeper with PDSLS
https://pdsls.dev/at://did:plc:cwf4mmm7mpzistinx3ox2zhj#coll...
"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.
Threads? The twitter clone owned by Meta? Yeah no thanks.