Coming Off the Bench for Bluesky
Bluesky must succeed. It just might.
I’m mostly pretty excited about Bluesky’s CEO change. Toni Schneider was the CEO of Automattic for a very long time, and was arguably the grownup in the room. I’ve never met him, but he seems to understand open source and the principles that Bluesky is trying to uphold.
Jay Graber, of course, did an amazing thing. She first wrangled the community that was established to figure out what Bluesky even was, then was the keeper of the argument that it should be an independent entity rather than part of Twitter, and finally marshaled it into a real startup that raised millions of dollars to bring the platform to life. When Jack Dorsey became upset that Bluesky was embracing community safety over laissez-faire decentralization, she weathered that too, and he left the board. These things are hard. I’m glad she’s sticking around as Chief Innovation Officer; my sense is that she’s going to kick ass in tech for a long time.
Toni explains the miracle here:
“I’ll be honest: I was skeptical about decentralized social. The vision was always compelling. A social web that no single company controls, where users own their identity and their relationships, where anyone can build on top of the protocol. But I’d seen enough promising decentralized projects fade or fragment that I had stopped expecting one to get to scale.
Bluesky changed that. Hearing their vision and, more importantly, learning about the architecture they’d built (the AT Protocol) I became a believer. This was a real, scalable foundation for a different kind of internet.”
Over 40 million people use Bluesky. Toni’s job is to add a zero, or find the right person who will — and wrestle with all of the organizational, financial, engineering, and product decisions that lead to that growth. The result will be a significant decentralized platform in social media, a realm where the underlying power dynamics of centralization have led to thrown elections, genocides, wars, and a global rise of fascism. So no pressure! The world needs a change, and I want Bluesky to succeed.
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