Toni Schneider, now permanent CEO after four months in an interim role, talked through Bluesky’s growth, its coming push into private communities, and how it plans to make money without ads
Toni Schneider has officially dropped the “interim” from his title at Bluesky, becoming the social platform’s full-time chief executive after roughly four months running the company on a temporary basis. Schneider, a venture partner at True Ventures and the former CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress, took over from Jay Graber, who founded Bluesky and stepped back into a new role as chief innovation officer earlier this year. In a wide-ranging conversation on The Verge’s Decoder podcast, Schneider laid out how he thinks about the company’s next decade, from its approach to moderation to how it plans to eventually make money.
Schneider described the transition as gradual rather than sudden. He’d already been involved with Bluesky as an early investor for roughly two years before stepping into the interim role, and he said the shift to permanent CEO changed relatively little about the actual day to day work. What it did change, he said, was the signal it sent to the broader community of developers building on Bluesky’s underlying technology, making clear that the company has stable, long term leadership rather than a placeholder waiting to be replaced.
Two products under one roof
Bluesky operates as two distinct things at once. There’s the consumer facing app, the Twitter-like social network most people associate with the Bluesky name, which Schneider said has grown to around 45 million users. Underneath that sits the AT Protocol, an open technical standard that allows outside developers to build their own social apps that can interoperate with Bluesky and with each other. Schneider said more than a thousand apps have now been built on top of that protocol, an ecosystem the company refers to internally as the ATmosphere.
Schneider frames the consumer app as an entry point into that broader ecosystem rather than the end goal in itself. He pointed to a recent example called Standard Site, a shared publishing format that emerged when several newsletter and blogging apps built on the protocol, including ones called Leaflet, Pocket and Off Print, agreed on a common way to structure their posts. Because Bluesky adopted that same format, content published on those other apps now shows up seamlessly inside the main Bluesky feed, and WordPress itself has since begun supporting the format too. Schneider held it up as a model for how the ecosystem can grow without requiring formal partnerships or licensing deals between individual companies.
The company itself remains small relative to its ambitions, with about 50 employees organized into small, largely autonomous teams. Three core product groups make up the bulk of that structure: a team focused on the consumer app, a team focused on developer tools for the wider protocol, and a newer exploration team led by Graber that recently shipped Attie, an AI layer built on top of the ATmosphere. Schneider said daily active apps on the protocol have roughly doubled since the start of the year, closing in on a thousand, while downloads of the company’s developer tools have tripled and are on pace to hit roughly a million a month later this year.
A different approach to moderation
One area where Bluesky diverges sharply from traditional social platforms is content moderation. Rather than relying entirely on a single internal team to review and label everything posted across the network, Bluesky built its moderation system to be modular, letting any developer or organization apply their own labels to content, which other apps on the protocol can then choose to adopt or ignore. Schneider pointed to BlackSky, a separate network built on the same protocol that focuses specifically on serving Black users with its own moderation policies, as an early example of that approach working in practice.
He argued this distributed model scales better than a single company trying to police an entire, growing network on its own, since different communities can define moderation standards suited to their own needs rather than having one policy applied universally. Bluesky still maintains its own moderation team, supplemented by contractors, but Schneider said the burden becomes far more manageable when it’s spread across many independent teams rather than concentrated entirely inside one company.
Betting on private spaces
The biggest technical shift Schneider described is already underway: extending the AT Protocol to support private data, something the entire network currently lacks. Everything built on the protocol today is fundamentally public, which has pushed Bluesky to build certain features, like direct messages inside its own app, entirely outside the protocol because there was no way to keep that data private within it.
Schneider said this has consistently been the most requested feature from developers building on the platform, and the company is now actively rolling it out, aiming to let users create smaller, membership based communities, closer in spirit to Reddit than to a fully public feed like Twitter. He argued Bluesky can offer something neither fully public networks nor fully private, self hosted communities currently manage on their own: full ownership of a private community by the people running it, while still remaining connected to the wider network through a single shared login and identity system. He compared the eventual goal to how email or the web function today, where the underlying protocol becomes invisible and people simply expect to reach anyone regardless of which specific service they use.
Giving up control on purpose
Schneider was direct about not wanting Bluesky the company to control the AT Protocol long term, describing several concrete steps already taken to hand pieces of the system to independent parties. The core identity lookup system, the part of the protocol comparable to how DNS works for the web, is being transferred to a newly formed Swiss nonprofit with its own separate board. Separately, the protocol specification itself was recently accepted by the Internet Engineering Task Force as an official work stream, a step toward making AT Protocol a fully independent internet standard rather than something governed by Bluesky alone.
He pointed to a recent test of that design’s resilience: a major distributed denial of service attack knocked the main Bluesky app offline for several hours, but other independent networks built on the same protocol, including BlackSky, continued operating normally throughout the outage. Schneider treated that as validation that the underlying architecture doesn’t collapse if Bluesky specifically goes down, which he considers essential if the protocol is ever going to be trusted the way open standards like email or the web are.
How Bluesky plans to make money
Bluesky has not yet turned on any significant revenue stream, but Schneider said that’s changing this year. Rather than pursuing an advertising model, he described an approach closer to an affiliate system, where Bluesky would take a percentage of value it directly helps create, such as traffic it sends to publishers who convert those visitors into paying subscribers. He said the company already sends roughly two million clicks a day to outside publishers and is already one of the largest referral sources for some of them, without taking any cut of that traffic today.
Schneider explicitly ruled out building any kind of cryptocurrency based payment scheme, describing the intended model instead as centralized enough to handle billing responsibly while still working within a fundamentally decentralized network. He said the goal is a system where Bluesky earns money only when it demonstrably helps someone else earn money too, rather than building a model where the company’s incentives run counter to those of the people creating content on the network.
Addressing the “bubble” reputation
Schneider also addressed Bluesky’s reputation as a haven primarily for left leaning users, a characterization he said the company wants to change over time, though not by discouraging any particular group. He pointed to a deliberate push over the past year to bring sports leagues and sports journalists onto the platform as one example of successfully broadening its user base beyond politics, alongside live coverage efforts around elections that he said have drawn strong engagement without the platform being overrun by spam. He described diversifying Bluesky’s audience as an ongoing, gradual project rather than something the company expects to solve quickly, given how deeply the platform’s early growth was tied to one particular kind of highly engaged political user base.
