Keeping an Eye on Bluesky

In case you missed it, Bluesky’s founding CEO, Jay Graber, stepped down on March 9, 2026 and was replaced on an interim basis by Toni Schneider, a venture capital partner and former CEO of Automattic. This transition, combined with observable shifts in hiring priorities, product language, and financial pressures, leads me to believe that we are seeing signals consistent with early-stage mission drift and, ultimately, a shift in priorities for BlueSky.

Do we have clear proof that Bluesky is drifting from their stated values? No.

Do we have subtle indicators that, when combined with our experiences around how venture-backed entities like Bluesky evolve, create a narrow set of potential trajectories? Yes.

I’ve had fairly neutral-to-positive positions on Bluesky up to now. This transition has me skeptically and solidly in the neutral territory, and while I genuinely hope that there is a near future where a federated reality continues to be molded and shaped by the powers at play, I am old enough to recognize a familiar pattern that I just don’t want to live through again.

I’m really writing this article to help collect my own thoughts about the future of Bluesky. The TL;DR is nothing really new: the next Bluesky CEO will be a strong indicator of where Bluesky is headed from now to 2028.¹ The rest of this article is my attempt to clearly lay out where my concerns about Bluesky’s future are grounded–and hopefully, maybe, help you form a stronger opinion about where we are at and where we are headed as well.

So here’s what we know so far:

• Jay Graber announced on March 9, 2026 that she would step back from CEO and take a new title: Chief Innovation Officer. (Bluesky Blog — A New Chapter for Bluesky)
• Toni Schneider, former CEO of Automattic (WordPress.com parent company) and current partner at True Ventures, was named interim CEO. (Bluesky Blog — Coming Off the Bench for Bluesky)
• The board has begun a formal search for a permanent chief executive. (CNBC; GV Wire)

In my experience, both external to organizations that use it and when I’ve personally been assigned a similar role, the CIO title is a kind of soft-landing pattern. “Chief Innovation Officer” is frequently used to retain a founder’s brand equity and reassure the community while removing them from operational decision-making. They’re still here, we’re still what they are all about, but things are changing. It doesn’t necessarily indicate any conflict or problems per se–and we would be overstepping if we tried to intuit anything about Graber’s future involvement with Bluesky’s strategic direction from this action alone–but it is certainly consistent with investor-driven leadership “professionalization.”

Speaking of leadership, Schneider’s dual role is, to me, a governance signal. Schneider disclosed that he will remain an active partner at True Ventures (an investor in Bluesky) while serving as interim CEO (Bluesky blog post; Yahoo Finance). Both Automattic and True Ventures are Bluesky investors. This means an investor representative is now running the company, creating a potential conflict of interest that official communications present as alignment rather than risk. It also means people like me (and I suppose you, too, since you’re here reading this) are waiting with some mixture of hesitant optimism or reserved pessimism to see what the nudge will be that starts the Venture Capital Avalanche of Enshittification.²

I use the word nudge because I would be genuinely surprised if BlueSky just jumps the shark and in the next three months announces something crazy like in-feed advertisements. I do not think the people who are steering that ship are so clueless to believe that anything resembling immediate revenue pivots will be met with joy and acceptance. Rather, changes to growth-oriented startups tend to happen in a series of nudges–an important one being a change in framing language.

Note how Graber frames the transition around the company needing “a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution” (Bluesky Blog — A New Chapter). Some external financial analysts interpret this as a move that signals “a strategic shift from visionary growth to disciplined scaling” at a $700M valuation. (ainvest.com) On top of that, multiple outlets have noted that the lack of detail about the transition leaves a lot of room for interpretation– much like my post here. Planned succession, board pressure, or founder burnout are all plausible readings given the limited amount of information we really have.

So what concrete information do we have about where BlueSky is going right now, in light of Graber’s role change?

One place to look at how a startup is thinking about the future (and their present runway) is in their open roles. At the time of writing this (March 12, 2026), the Bluesky Jobs Page shows the following open roles:

• Machine Learning: Senior ML Engineer
• Product: Business Intelligence Data Scientist, Senior Product Engineer (React Native), Senior Backend Engineer (TypeScript & Go), Senior Product Designer
• Growth: Sports Partnership Manager
• Trust & Safety: Senior Go Developer (T&S Platform), Fullstack TypeScript Developer (T&S)
• Internal Platform: Senior Software Engineer — Data Infrastructure / Go

Let me caveat what I’m about to say real quick. It’s impossible for me to know for sure what these roles entail, and it is equally impossible for me to accurately predict who they are looking to hire and the difference between the stated role’s work and what becomes the actual work done by the person they hire. Anyone who has ever worked at a startup knows exactly what I’m talking about. Often times, roles are brought on to do a specific thing based on historic analysis of future needs, but on-going analysis of present and future needs necessitate changes to a job that weren’t totally articulated in the original job description. That’s startup life!

So that all being said, here’s what I see when I look at their jobs page:

First and foremost, the “Sports Partnership Manager” is a clear directional signal. Filed under “Growth,” this role indicates to me that Bluesky is investing in content partnerships and live media engagement. In my experience working alongside ad-tech startups, these priorities are characteristic of advertising-supported platforms competing for real-time attention. If we cross-reference this with Bluesky’s January product roadmap, where Bluesky’s head of product writes that the company is “intentionally building for” live sports and event moments, we can reasonably predict revenue-generating experiments around, at a minimum, NBA and NFL partnerships.

I don’t follow sports and I’m not personally interested in sports, but I am interested in data and intelligence–so the Business Intelligence Data Scientist role is one that jumps out to me. In my experience, when startups build out business intelligence work internally, they’re not looking to, say, understand their own operational infrastructure and make internal processes more efficient. Instead, they’re building out a data-driven decision engine to support monetization infrastructure. To be fair, BI roles are standard for scaling companies; at a certain point every startup brings on someone to make sense of all the data their platforms are generating, especially when it comes to identifying potential revenue-generating or operational pivot opportunities (both of which usually go hand-in-hand). However, BI roles alongside ML and data infrastructure hiring suggests an organization that is building the analytical backbone needed for engagement optimization and revenue modeling.

Zooming out, there are two things that I want to leave you with. First, the hiring pattern is entirely product, growth, and data. None of the listed roles directly serve the premise of Bluesky’s original promise: decentralization. Does this mean protocol work isn’t happening internally? Absolutely not, but it does mean external hiring is not being directed there.

And that’s the second takeaway: there are no protocol-level roles listed. There are zero open positions related to AT Protocol development, federation infrastructure, relay engineering, or decentralized identity (DID) systems. Does this mean that Bluesky isn’t working on these things internally? No. But if decentralization were the operative organizational priority, this absence is difficult to explain.

Given that, what can we intuit about Bluesky’s operative organizational priorities based on what is available?

Let’s go back to the January 2026 product roadmap. Here we can see a focus on feed improvements, discovery, drafts, video, and live event features. The AT Protocol is mentioned as enabling infrastructure but is not framed as the mission itself. One way to look at this is that the “Atmosphere” branding reframes decentralization as ecosystem marketing. The ecosystem of third-party apps is branded the “Atmosphere” and positioned as a product differentiator rather than, say, a structural commitment to openness.

The same blog post states that only “about half a dozen people” at Bluesky are fully dedicated to building app features. I’m aware of some new hires since then, but I don’t think they’ve doubled or tripled their staff in two months. Maybe, but I doubt it. For a 40M+ user platform, this is extremely lean, which doesn’t necessarily mean they’re unable to accomplish a mission that includes protocol commitment and decentralization, but it does mean, to me, that every hire is a high-signal directional bet.

Combine all that with the way language is subtly drifting in how executive leadership talks about BlueSky, and I think you can start seeing what I am seeing. Early Bluesky communications foregrounded decentralization as the mission (“transition the social web from platforms to protocols”–which, interestingly, is still in the “We’re Hiring” CTA below Graber’s recent blog post). Current communications foreground product engagement (live events, sports, discovery, feeds) and reference decentralization as a competitive advantage or architectural feature. In my experience, the trajectory of mission to feature to marketing point is a pattern in values-driven tech companies entering a monetization phase.

It’s impossible to know for sure, of course, if drifting language is nothing more than a latent effect of a lean team working extremely fast under a globally-sized microscope.

So where else can we look for clues about what this CEO change ultimately will mean for Bluesky?

How about Bluesky’s financial posture. From what I can tell, Bluesky is currently valued by venture capitalists at approximately $700M, thanks to a funding round led by Bain Capital Ventures (The Information; Benzinga). This brings total capital raised is approximately $36M across multiple rounds, plus ~$13M in original funding from Twitter (Sacra).

You can’t value a B2C company at $X million unless you see a viable path to multiples of X in revenue–but Bluesky right now doesn’t generate nearly as much revenue as would be needed for venture capitalists to sink their teeth into it. So while Graber has expressed concerns over enshittification before, there’s a new CEO coming in–and unless they share the same concerns, it’s highly unlikely, in my experience, that Graber’s stance will survive holistically in the company.

And frankly, Graber has never been so naive as to think that advertising was completely off the table. Here are some highlights from a December 2024 TechCrunch interview:

While Graber has committed not to “enshittify” the platform with ads, she’s not ruling out ads altogether.

“At heart, I’m a digital rights activist,” said Graber. “People need to be able to control the social networks they communicate on because they’ve become really vital structures. I just think it’s necessary to be done.”

… Bluesky may eventually experiment with ads in a way that doesn’t compromise the core user experience. That could include running ads in Bluesky’s search results, the CEO later clarified offstage, as an example of a less intrusive advertising method the platform could try out.

These stand out to me because with Graber not at the helm, we lose this kind of philosophical groundskeeping stance that likely yielded influence over decision-making. In 2023, Bluesky made an explicit, architecturally-grounded argument for why advertising couldn’t work for them, pledged transparency about business model experiments, and committed to paid services. Back then, the app was a vehicle for protocol adoption. Nearly three years later, Bluesky hasn’t published a single update on any of that. The protocol today feels more like a marketing tool than a primary facet of their mission.

We can see that directly by comparing language choices between the 2023 Business Plan article and the 2026 What’s Next article.

In 2023:

• Decentralization is the mission (“develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation.”)
• The app is a means to the protocol (“Last fall, we started building our own client app to drive adoption and development of the AT Protocol.”)
• The success metric appears to be protocol adoption

By 2026:

• Decentralization is a competitive advantage (“Bluesky is one of vanishingly few public networks where you can [discuss events] without feeling trapped in an extractive propaganda machine owned by a billionaire.”)
• The protocol is a means to the app; it’s the app that’s the product, not the protocol (“Bluesky is the best place to talk about what’s happening in the world — live, together.”)
• The success metric appears to be app engagement (“People just want a place with good vibes to hang out and post online.”)

To be fair to Bluesky as a for-profit venture, these kinds of changes aren’t surprising. In fact, the app becoming the product makes a lot of sense from a product standpoint. But that doesn’t change the fact that, in 2023, the app existed to bootstrap the protocol, and by 2026, the protocol exists to differentiate the app. Is this alone a signal of mission drift? Let’s keep comparing.

The 2023 post also made the rejection of advertising a logical consequence of the architecture. If leadership is now exploring ad formats (I would be surprised if they weren’t), it either means the architectural argument was overstated, or the architecture is being modified to accommodate ads. Either way, this represents a material departure from the stated rationale. Notably, the 2026 post doesn’t address this tension at all; they simply stop discussing monetization altogether. In my experience, this kind of silence tends to be a loud kind of signal.

Bringing this back around to Bluesky’s financial posture, it’s hard to look at a $700M valuation with ~$36M raised (along with no venture-meaningful revenue) and not start thinking about either rapid monetization or continued fundraising, both of which shift organizational incentives toward growth and engagement metrics over protocol development. Again, I don’t know any of this for sure; I don’t work at Bluesky and don’t know any of these people personally or professionally. All I can do is look at the data that’s available, place my experiential lens on top of it, and see what stands out.

Like when I see Bain Capital Ventures, a well-known returns-driven institutional investor. Unlike early backers with ideological alignment to decentralization, BCV is interested in making money off their investments. To me, their involvement increases the probability that we will start seeing monetization activity sooner than later. Early investors were “values-aligned investors who share our vision for an open and decentralized commons for public conversation”; three years later, Graber steps down and the interim CEO is selected because “the company needs a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution.”

All of this is to say that there are increasingly distinct competitors for organizational attention. In 2023, the app was explicitly subordinate to the protocol, a “reference client” meant to prove and popularize the underlying technology. By 2026, the Bluesky app has become the gravitational center of the entire enterprise, and the protocol is positioned as the thing that makes the app special. To be clear, this flip-flop is not by itself a bad thing; it’s very likely that it’s just a reflection of the practical reality that protocol adoption requires a compelling consumer product. That being said, though, these kinds of shifts–along with these kinds of investors–change the organization’s incentive structure. An organization optimizing for app engagement will make different decisions than one optimizing for protocol adoption when those goals conflict.

To me, Bluesky is entering the transition zone, a period where founding vision meets institutional capital’s expectations. The signals that I’m seeing are fairly consistent with early-stage mission drift but are, to be clear, not proof of an intentional departure from stated values. The CEO transition, hiring patterns, financial pressures, and language shifts form what we might call a “coherent cluster of signals” that should at least be monitored.

The most likely near-term trajectory will be a gradual accommodation of revenue-generating experiments. Bluesky will likely pursue monetization strategies like partnerships and advertisements while maintaining the rhetorical commitment to decentralization, with the practical question being whether protocol development keeps pace with product development or falls behind.

Ultimately, whoever becomes the permanent CEO going forward is the most informative signal to watch for. The background, incentives, and track record of the person chosen will reveal more about Bluesky’s actual direction than any amount of blog posts from Bluesky insiders or opinions from people like me.

I’ll leave you now with some important caveats to accompany the aforementioned caveats:

• Much, much, and I mean much of today’s internet infrastructure has been brought to the masses thanks to the work of people at venture-backed organizations. My personal discomfort with venture-backed incentive structures is separate from my acknowledgement of venture capital’s contribution to the development of, well, most of what we have come to enjoy (as well as loathe) about today’s information superhighway.
• It is improbable (but not impossible) for a global social network to grow in a world dominated by capitalism (which is where we find ourselves, in case you missed it) without the financial resources of venture capital.
• Bluesky is a good idea. Even if, a hundred years from now, it’s a defunct and unused protocol, it’s good to experiment with new ways of sharing information and as a digitally augmented species, we ought to build and deploy new ways of sharing information.
• Do all venture-backed companies go to shit? No, but all companies that go to shit tend to be venture-backed.