Overview of Bluesky’s new CEO wants a big tent, not a bubble
In this Decoder interview, The Verge’s Nilay Patel speaks with Bluesky CEO Tony Schneider about the company’s long-term strategy for building an open social network that is more than just a Twitter alternative. Schneider frames Bluesky as both a consumer app and a protocol-based ecosystem, arguing that the real opportunity is to create a “big tent” social web with interoperability, portable identity, distributed moderation, and eventually private communities. He also outlines how Bluesky plans to monetize without becoming an ad-driven walled garden, and why he believes the company should remain open rather than trying to own everything.
What Bluesky is trying to be
Schneider describes Bluesky as two linked products:
- The Bluesky app: a text-first social network designed to feel more human, with no ads and no algorithmic feed by default.
- AT Protocol: the open protocol underneath it, which now supports over a thousand apps and is intended to power a broader interoperable social ecosystem.
His core thesis is that Bluesky’s long-term mission is not just to grow one app, but to prove out a public-interest social web where many apps, communities, and services can work together.
Big idea
- The app acts as an on-ramp to the broader ecosystem.
- The protocol is the real foundation for a future where users and communities are not locked into one platform.
Why Schneider took the CEO job
Schneider says he was brought in as interim CEO because of his background with open-source systems and WordPress/Automattic, then decided to stay because the mission and team were energizing.
Key points:
- Jay Graber stepped back from CEO to focus on innovation and long-term product work.
- Schneider says the interim-to-permanent transition matters more externally than internally, because builders and developers need to know he is committed for the long haul.
- He views Bluesky as a decade-long project, not a quick product sprint.
Product vs. protocol: the central tension
A major theme of the interview is the tension between:
- Serving the app’s users, who want a good social experience now
- Building the protocol and ecosystem, which requires long-term, infrastructure-level thinking
Schneider argues that the app should remain a useful gateway to the network, but not become the sole center of gravity. He repeatedly emphasizes that Bluesky should not force the entire network to become one kind of product.
Example: Standardized content formats
He points to a recent success where other apps and publishing tools collaborated on a format for longer-form posts:
- Publishing apps like Leaflet, Pocket, and Offprint helped define a shared format.
- Bluesky then surfaced that content in its app.
- WordPress and others adopted the format, creating a ripple effect across the ecosystem.
Scale, team structure, and AI
Bluesky remains a small company, around 50 people, and Schneider says the team is structured into small, highly autonomous groups.
Core product teams
- App team: consumer-facing Bluesky app
- Atmosphere team: developer-facing ecosystem tools
- Exploration team: experimental products, including AI-assisted efforts like “Addy”
He says AI is making it easier to build new products quickly, but it does not eliminate the need for:
- strong product judgment
- design talent
- careful decisions about what to build
His view: AI speeds up execution, but the hardest part remains deciding what matters.
Moderation and trust & safety
Schneider explains that moderation is a major challenge, but Bluesky’s protocol design makes it less centralized than on traditional social platforms.
How moderation works
- Bluesky has its own moderation team and contractors.
- But moderation is composable/pluggable: other apps and communities can add their own labels and policies.
- Those labels can be reused across the ecosystem, so moderation isn’t entirely the burden of one company.
Why that matters
- Different communities want different rules.
- Distributed moderation means communities can self-govern more effectively.
- It also reduces the linear scaling problem that often makes moderation expensive on conventional platforms.
He gives BlackSky as an example of a community-specific network built on the protocol with its own moderation needs and norms.
Private communities are the next big protocol step
One of the most important future developments Schneider discusses is private data support on AT Protocol.
Current state
- Bluesky and the protocol are currently mostly public.
- DMs exist in the app, but they are not part of the protocol yet.
What’s coming
- Support for private, membership-based communities
- More Reddit-like spaces while still retaining the benefits of interoperability and portability
- Communities that are fully owned by users, not by Bluesky
Schneider says this is likely to unlock 10x to 100x more use cases.
Bluesky’s relationship to other networks
Schneider draws a distinction between AT Protocol and ActivityPub:
- ActivityPub is server-centric and works well for self-hosted communities and certain government/community use cases.
- AT Protocol is centered on portable personal data and identity.
He says the two standards can coexist and interoperate, and he expects they will.
On Threads and Mastodon
- Bluesky is talking with Mastodon/ActivityPub communities.
- He says there has been no direct conversation with Threads.
- He does not expect one standard to “eat” the other.
The “big tent” vs. the “bubble” problem
A large part of the interview is about Bluesky’s reputation as a liberal/progressive bubble compared with X’s hard-right ecosystem.
Schneider’s position:
- Bluesky does not want to be a bubble for one ideology.
- It wants to expand into a broader, more diverse set of communities.
- He specifically points to sports as an example of successful diversification beyond politics.
He says Bluesky wants to become known as:
- a place for civil, useful discourse
- a place for sports, culture, news, and niche communities
- not just a home for one political tribe
Traffic, links, and the open web
Schneider strongly defends Bluesky as a platform that should send traffic out, not trap users in.
Key points:
- Bluesky does not downrank links.
- It sends roughly 2 million clicks a day to publishers.
- He wants Bluesky to be a place where people discover things and then leave to read, watch, buy, or explore elsewhere.
This is part of his broader belief that Bluesky should behave more like the open web and less like a closed engagement machine.
Monetization: how Bluesky will make money
Schneider says monetization is coming this year, but Bluesky will only pursue models that work for the whole ecosystem.
What they are avoiding
- A model that depends purely on app-level ads
- A system that forces everyone into one business model
What they’re leaning toward
- Affiliate-style monetization
- Bluesky takes a cut only when it directly helps generate value, such as sending a user to a paid subscription or other conversion
- Revenue-sharing that can include other apps and services in the network
He is explicit that this is not a crypto scheme and that billing still needs some centralized trust, even in a decentralized system.
Key takeaways
- Bluesky sees itself as infrastructure for a new social web, not just a social app.
- Schneider’s leadership philosophy is long-term, reversible-vs.-irreversible decision-making.
- The company wants to divest control of core protocol pieces and avoid becoming a centralized gatekeeper.
- Private communities are the next major product/protocol frontier.
- Monetization will likely be network-aligned and affiliate-like, not a pure ad model.
- Bluesky wants to be a big tent, expanding beyond politics and beyond a single app identity.
Bottom line
Tony Schneider’s vision for Bluesky is deliberately anti-walled-garden: one app, many communities, many apps, one interoperable social layer. He argues the company’s real job is to bootstrap an open ecosystem, then steadily hand control outward so the network can outlive Bluesky itself.