🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

Schneider’s background fits the work of growing open platforms

• Interim CEO Toni Schneider matches Bluesky’s call for a leader who can ship product and handle growth.
• As CEO of Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com (a hosted version of the WordPress publishing platform), he helped turn WordPress.com into a top-10 global internet destination with nearly 1 billion monthly visitors, a useful model for building out a decentralized ecosystem 1.
• At Automattic, he also dealt with the business realities of an open-source company, which parallels Bluesky’s AT Protocol (the open standard Bluesky is built on) 2.
• He also led companies through acquisitions, including Yahoo buying his webmail startup Oddpost and AOL buying his blog search engine Sphere, which speaks to his experience turning early tech into durable products and revenue 1.

Patchwork state laws quietly raise the bar for smaller platforms

• State age-assurance laws create more than a compliance task. They also raise a competitive wall that tilts toward incumbents.
• Bluesky blocked all access from Mississippi because it lacked the staff and time for the technical work needed to meet the state’s law 3.
• These state-by-state rules pull Bluesky’s engineering time away from product work, which makes compliance a cost smaller services feel first 3.
• Meta has not rolled out Mississippi’s required age checks and said it is still weighing options as the case moves through court, while Bluesky added an adults-only access option in Mississippi plus age verification in Ohio, South Dakota, and Wyoming 4.
• The result strengthens entrenched giants, which slows the competition that new protocols aim to unlock 4.