Bluesky’s interim CEO, Toni Schneider, drops the ‘interim’

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

Schneider, who has led the company as interim CEO for the past four months, is now dropping the “interim” status and becoming its permanent chief executive.

“I’m four months into my interim CEO role at Bluesky, and it’s time for an update,” Schneider wrote on his personal blog. “Most importantly, as of today, the interim part of the title is gone. I’m loving the mission and the job, and I’m all in as Bluesky’s official CEO.”

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

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

Bluesky, which was originally spun off from Twitter, became a haven for those who wished to avoid the changes Elon Musk brought to the platform after he took it over in 2022 (the site was eventually renamed X and now it is a subsidiary of Musk’s combination rocket and AI company, SpaceXAI).

Under Graber, the site grew to 43 million users, while the site’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol — a system that lets Bluesky and other apps share the same social network — was significantly expanded.

Lately, though, the site has struggled to retain or grow its user base. Some have questioned whether it is dying — pointing to apparent declines in both engagement and its overall community of users. Bluesky saw a sharp rise in users in the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election (when Elon Musk was most active in politics), but the site appears to have seen a drop off since then.

In short: Schneider will have his work cut out for him. He seems game for it, though. “We’re at the very beginning of this story,” he wrote Friday.