Hello again, and welcome back to Fast Company‘s Plugged In.
On March 9, Jay Graber stepped down as CEO of Bluesky. She will become the social networking platform’s chief innovation officer, while Toni Schneider, a venture capitalist and former CEO of WordPress parent company Automattic, joins Bluesky as interim CEO. (I may be the last person left who also associates Schneider with Oddpost, an impressive browser-based email client he co-created way back before Gmail existed.)
Graber explained her decision as stemming in part from a desire to turn the CEO role over to someone who can help scale up the platform. From November 2024 to January 2025, as Elon Musk’s role in Donald Trump’s reelection prompted many Twitter users (including me) to hatch exit strategies, Bluesky added 10 million users. That turned out to be the peak of the network’s boom, at least so far; 10 million users is also how many it’s added in the past 12 months. It’s still growing, but not at the torrid pace that will get it to hundreds of millions of people anytime soon.
If I had invested in Bluesky—which Schneider’s venture firm, True Ventures, has—I’d want to see it grow far larger. As an individual user, however, I find it quite pleasant at its current size. Maybe even cozy, in a way Twitter had stopped being long before Musk trashed it. (I also enjoy the even tinier Mastodon.) Should Bluesky ever get ginormous, I hope it manages to retain the intimacy that it kindles today.
But I’m less curious about the future of Bluesky the social network than I am about the technology behind it. Called AT Protocol, it’s responsible for organizing all those users and posts so that the right people see the right stuff at the right time. And unlike the comparable infrastructure in place at behemoths such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, it’s open. Anyone can create their own social network based upon AT Protocol, or remix an existing one (such as Bluesky) by tweaking its algorithm or other attributes. Users can preserve their personal social graphs even if they use several otherwise distinct networks based on the protocol.
When I first talked to Graber in December 2023, Bluesky wasn’t yet fully open to the public, and had just 2.3 million members. She seemed as excited about AT Protocol as Bluesky itself, and told me she saw it as a potential antidote to social-media toxicity, moderation problems, and general user dissatisfaction with how the people who operate social networks do their jobs. If you didn’t like Bluesky as Graber managed it, you could switch to a version of the service powered by a different algorithm, or a wholly independent social network running AT Protocol. You wouldn’t even have to do so much as create a user account.
From both a technological and cultural standpoint, that’s a way more grandiose goal than simply building a social network that’s bigger and better than Twitter. As someone who loved Twitter until I didn’t, I found it immensely appealing. Who wouldn’t want more control over their social presence? But a little over two years later, it remains a vision more than reality. Indeed, Bluesky has a festering reputation in some quarters as an obnoxious liberal bubble unwelcoming of other perspectives, which might not be a problem if people were remastering the network or creating new alternatives based on its technology.
