Bluesky interim CEO Tony Schneider steps down ‘interim’

In March, Bluesky’s longtime CEO, Jay Graber, stepped down from that position to become the company’s chief innovation officer. Graber was immediately succeeded by Tony Schneider, the founding CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress and Tumblr.

Schneider, who has led the company as interim CEO for the past four months, is now stepping down from his “interim” position and becoming its permanent CEO.

“I’m four months into my role as interim CEO at Bluesky, and it’s time for a refresh,” Schneider wrote on his personal blog. “More importantly, as of today, the temporary part of the title is gone. I love the mission and the job, and I serve as the official CEO of Bluesky.”

In the post, Schneider said one of his first orders of business is to “create smaller spaces and more private communities,” which he said will “unleash the next wave of growth and innovation.”

Automattic and True Ventures, a venture capital firm in which Schneider is a partner, are both investors in Bluesky.

Bluesky, which originally spun off from Twitter, has become a haven for those who want to avoid the changes Elon Musk brought to the platform after his 2022 acquisition (the site was eventually renamed to X and is now a subsidiary of Musk’s rocket and artificial intelligence company SpaceXAI).

Under Graber’s leadership, the site grew to 43 million users, while the site’s core technology, the AT protocol — a system that allows Bluesky and other apps to share the same social network — was expanded dramatically.

But recently, the site has struggled to retain or grow its user base. Some have questioned whether or not it is on its way to death, pointing to the apparent decline in engagement and the user community in general. Bluesky saw a spike in users following Donald Trump’s re-election (when Elon Musk was more active in politics), but the site appears to have seen a decline since then.

In short: Schneider has his work cut out for him. He seems game for it, though. “We are at the beginning of this story,” he wrote on Friday.