After publicly exiting the board of Twitter/X rival Bluesky on Saturday, and taking to X to announce it, Jack Dorsey explained his thinking in a Thursday interview with Founders Fund’s Mike Solana.
Dorsey stated that Bluesky was “supposed to be an open source protocol that Twitter could eventually utilize” — not become its own platform with a board and external funding.
Bluesky started as a small research project within then-Twitter in 2019 to create a common operating standard for social media platforms so that apps could work between them. It became its own company in 2022. The platform received $8 million in venture capital funding in July 2023.
After Bluesky became a separate entity, “that was the first time I felt like, whoa, this isn’t going in a direction I’m really happy with, or that wasn’t the intention,” Dorsey said.
Dorsey notably claimed that Bluesky, the X alternative he helped fund and create, was “literally repeating” the mistakes he saw at Twitter. Dorsey has deleted his Bluesky account, per the interview.
Twitter/X founder Jack Dorsey. Photo Credit: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
Dorsey also called out Bluesky for providing moderation tools and blocking certain users.
“That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope,” Dorsey said. “This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made [at Twitter/X]. This is not a protocol that’s truly decentralized. It’s another app.”
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Bluesky announced in December that it was releasing automated content moderation tools after controversies earlier in the year over whether the platform was safe for all communities. In March, Bluesky decided to open-source its content moderation tool so that users could personalize their feeds.
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber responded directly to Dorsey’s comments late Thursday. In a series of Bluesky posts, Graber wrote that “Bluesky is structurally open in a way Twitter has never been.”
With all due respect to Jack for having the vision to invest in decentralized protocols, we’ve carried out the work in a way I don’t think he fully understands. Bluesky is structurally open in a way Twitter has never been, but the design of atproto allows it to feel familiar and easy to use.
— Jay ? (@jay.bsky.team) May 9, 2024 at 8:32 PM
Graber elaborated: “You don’t have to care about or even understand decentralization to use Bluesky, and that’s on purpose. Keeping things simple on the surface creates a good user experience. But if you want to customize your experience, there are endless options under the hood because we built an open system.”
Bluesky’s protocol engineer Paul Frazee called unmoderated spaces “a ridiculous idea,” bringing attention to app store rules, users, and regulators.
Also: unmoderated spaces are a ridiculous idea. We created a shared network for competing moderated spaces to exist. Even if somebody wanted to make an unmoderated ATProto app, I guess they could? Good luck with the app stores and regulators and users, I guess.
Checks and balances, not anarchy
— Paul “Frazee” ? (@pfrazee.com) May 9, 2024 at 5:24 PM
Dorsey’s most recent post on X at the time of writing was simply: “Show don’t tell.”
