In a shocking turn of events, Jack Dorsey has removed himself from Bluesky’s board and also deleted his account on the Twitter alternative, as he praises Elon Musk’s X as “freedom technology.”
Why did Jack Dorsey leave Bluesky?
The Twitter co-founder revealed in an interview with PirateWires that he left Bluesky after it became just “another app.”
“[Bluesky] is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company [at Twitter],” Dorsey said. “This is not a protocol that’s truly decentralized.”
For context, a social media platform is decentralized when it’s operated by various independent networks — as opposed to a singular, top-down approach.
“Everything we wanted around decentralization, everything we wanted in terms of an open source protocol, suddenly became a company with VCs and a board,” he added. “That’s not what I wanted, that’s not what I intended to help create.”
Another point of contention for Dorsey was the state of content moderation on Bluesky. The app received a flood of new users after many grew tired of Musk’s Twitter rebrand to X. Hate speech on X reached unprecedented levels, users were impersonating elected officials, and Musk unbanned a number of alt-right accounts, which have since been running rampant on the platform.
“Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter show up, and it was a very, very common crowd,” he said. “But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately, they followed through with it.”
Dorsey has backed Musk on X, noting that he agreed with some of the changes the CEO was making to the platform, like moving closer to a subscription model.
“I had tried to get Elon on the board for some time,” Dorsey added. “He obviously loves Twitter, and I’ve always loved how he used it, because he used it in a very pure form. And he would be extremely expressive on it.”
