Jay Graber, CEO of the social media platform Bluesky is taking a different job at the company while venture capitalist and former Automattic CEO Toni Schneider fills in as interim CEO. Graber will become chief innovation officer instead, a role in which, Graber wrote in a blog post, she will return to “building new things”
Since its rise has been closely tied to Twitter/X user defections in the Elon era, Bluesky has become a warm environment people who call themselves “progressives.” Avowed centrists seem tolerated if they don’t make a splash about culture war issues. Right-wing Bluesky users exist, but they are mostly there to troll. Far-leftists (communists and such) are also a somewhat uneasy fit in Bluesky culture, though they are far from unheard of.
Graber has at times seemed uncomfortable with the political uniformity on Bluesky. In one famous incident this past October, Graber seemed to agree that Bluesky was too much of an echo chamber.
Then she got a bit prickly and dismissive at users who pushed back, and briefly became the main character of her social media platform, which then merited a thread about what it all meant.
Partisan politics aside, a 2023 Forbes profile of Graber paints her in a light that makes her seem like an unlikely steward of the app Bluesky eventually became. In 2015, she had a job, “soldering together bitcoin mining equipmment in a repurposed ammunition factory,” Forbes notes. She soon transitioned to building the cryptocurrency zcash.
Crypto and Bluesky were once conceptually linked. Bluesky was launched by RFK, Jr. fan Jack Dorsey, who wanted Bluesky to be “an open and decentralized standard for social media” that gives “users control over the algorithms that decide what they see” the Forbes profile notes. Dorsey later claimed Bluesky was repeating the mistakes he made during his tenure at Twitter by taking a heavy hand with moderation.
Bluesky’s daily active user numbers have not been looking great in recent history. According to research from Similarweb published this past November, Bluesky usage in the mobile app was down 39.8% from the same point a year earlier—just before the 2024 election.
In Graber’s blog post about her job change, she says she’s “most energized by exploring new ideas, bringing a vision to life, and helping people discover their strengths,” and that chief innovation officer is a more “focused role where I can do what brings me energy.”
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