After Twitter was renamed X, some users left and began looking for a replacement. One of them is Bluesky, a network that grew directly out of the Twitter project and now presents itself as its counterpart. At the October TechCrunch Disrupt conference, its leadership will argue a thesis that TechCrunch described: social media can be rebuilt, and differently from how Meta or X built it today.
Behind this thesis stands Toni Schneider, who has led Bluesky as CEO since July 2026. “We're at the very beginning of this story, with a decade of exciting work ahead to build an open web that reflects the full richness of how people connect, communicate, and build livelihoods together,” he told TechCrunch. An open web instead of a closed platform is the core of the whole idea.
Leadership carrying the thesis
Bluesky has changed leadership over the past year. Co-founder Jay Graber, who took the network to 43 million registered users, moved in March 2026 to the role of chief innovation officer and chair of the board. Schneider held the CEO role on an interim basis for four months before getting it permanently in July, TechCrunch reported. Previously he was founding CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress and Tumblr, and a partner at the True Ventures fund. Both firms are also investors in Bluesky. Rose Wang has run operations as COO since 2021.
From platforms to protocols
Bluesky sums up its mission in one sentence. “Bluesky is an initiative to transition the social web from platforms to protocols,” states the network's announcement. Instead of one application run by one company, the aim is an open network on which anyone can build their own app, and users take their identity and followers with them between apps. The network calls this ecosystem Bluesky Atmosphere, and it is built on its own AT Protocol. According to the network, almost 200 new apps and over two million people have joined it in the last four months. Schneider expects from it “hundreds of millions of users, hundreds of thousands of apps and communities, and many thousands of thriving businesses.”
The argument against established networks
Rose Wang explained at SXSW London why the newcomer has a chance at all. The large networks are, in her view, locked into their own model. “Facebook and Twitter are huge, and they have tons of users, so for them to turn the shift is really difficult,” she told TechCrunch. “Also, they're basically AI companies at this point.” Bluesky sets against them a network where the draw is the presence of other people, rather than an algorithmically assembled feed that is increasingly AI-driven.
The fediverse as a second route
Bluesky is not alone in the idea of an open network. The rival camp is the so-called fediverse, built on the ActivityPub protocol from the W3C consortium, which includes Mastodon and Meta's Threads. Threads joined the fediverse in 2024, and its users can follow accounts on Mastodon. Bluesky goes its own way through the AT Protocol, so the two networks do not yet understand each other. For a European brand or creator, however, one thing matters for both. An open protocol promises that their audience will stay with them across apps, beyond the reach of a single algorithm, which can turn into something else overnight, as happened with Twitter.
Whether this works will only become clear once it is seen how many people and brands actually settle on open networks. Bluesky so far offers more of a promise than a finished market. It does, however, show the direction in which attention can move if established platforms keep changing into a set of algorithms and advertising. An open protocol shifts leverage away from the platform owner and towards whoever brings the audience to it. That is exactly what matters for creators and brands in the whole idea.
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