• by Colin Kirkland , July 13, 2026

Following Bluesky founder Jay Graber’s decision to step down as CEO in March, the decentralized social media company has named its interim chief, Toni Schneider, Graber’s permanent replacement, marking a continued push in the potential promise of open-sourced alternatives.

On his personal blog, Schneider wrote that he agreed to the job in order to “drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation,” ultimately promoting an effort toward “an open social web."

Schneider was the founding CEO of Automattic, the company that launched WordPress, a free, open-source website building CMS that powers almost half of all websites on the internet. He is also a partner of True Ventures, a venture capital firm that also invests in the social media app.

As an investor and advisor to Bluesky for the past two years, Schneider is focused on attempting to usher in major growth across the AT Protocol’s app ecosystem, which currently hosts over 500 third-party apps and over 40 million users.

Hoping to onboard “hundreds of millions of users, hundreds of thousands of apps, and communities, and many thousands of thriving businesses,” Schneider says he will first work to “create smaller spaces and more private communities” within the protocol.

In June, Bluesky’s head of product announced the upcoming launch of “Communities,” niche Reddit-style spaces.

For the past five months, Schneider has held the role of interim CEO, following Bluesky co-founder Jay Graber's move to “building news things” as the platform's chief innovation officer.

When Graber stepped down as CEO in March, she said she wanted to make room for “a seasoned operator focused on scaling and execution.”

“We’re at the very beginning of this story,” Schneider, the now-permanent Bluesky CEO, wrote on Friday.