In March, Bluesky’s former CEO, Jay Graber, stepped down from that role to become its chief innovation officer. Graber was immediately succeeded by Toni Schneider, the founding CEO of Automattic, which is the company behind WordPress and Tumblr.

Schneider, who has led the company as interim CEO for the past four months, will now abandon “interim” status and become its permanent CEO.

“I’m four months into my role as interim CEO at Bluesky and it’s time for an update,” Schneider wrote on his personal blog. “Most importantly, as of today, the interim part of the title no longer exists. I love the mission and the work, and I am fully committed as the official CEO of Bluesky.”

In the post, Schneider said one of his first tasks is to “create smaller spaces and more private communities,” which he said will “unlock the next wave of growth and innovation.”

Automattic and True Ventures, which is a venture capital firm in which Schneider is a partner, are investors in Bluesky.

Bluesky, which was originally spun off from Twitter, became a haven for those who wanted to avoid the changes Elon Musk brought to the platform after he took over in 2022 (the site was eventually renamed X and is now a subsidiary of Musk’s combined rocket and artificial intelligence company, SpaceXAI).

Under Graber, the site grew to 43 million users, while the site’s underlying technology, the AT Protocol, a system that allows Bluesky and other apps to share the same social network, expanded significantly.

However, the site has recently had difficulty retaining or growing its user base. Some have questioned whether it is dying, pointing to an apparent decline in both engagement and its overall user community. Bluesky saw a sharp increase in users in the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election (when Elon Musk was most active in politics), but the site appears to have seen a decline since then.

Bottom line: Schneider will have his work cut out for him. However, he seems willing to do so. “We are at the beginning of this story,” he wrote on Friday.