In case there was any doubt about how Jack Dorsey really feels about Bluesky, the former Twitter CEO has offered new details as to why. deleted his board and account and helped start the service. Characteristically With Mike Solana of the Founders Fund, Dorsey received a lot of criticism for Bluesky.
In the interview, Dorsey claimed that Bluesky was “literally repeating all the mistakes” he made while working at Twitter. The whole conversation is long and a bit rambling, but Dorsey’s complaints boil down to two issues:
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It was never intended to be an independent company with Bluesky’s own board, stock, and other remnants of a corporate entity (Bluesky spun off from Twitter. corporation in 2022.) Instead, his plan was for Twitter to be the first client to use the open source protocol. Created by Bluesky.
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Blueksy has and sometimes has some form of content moderation for things like using racial slurs in usernames.
“People started seeing Bluesky as something to run away from Twitter,” Dorsey said. “It’s something Twitter isn’t, and that’s why it’s great. And Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter, and it was a very, very ordinary crowd. … But slowly they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools and kicking people out. Unfortunately, they followed suit. It was the second I thought no. It literally repeats all the mistakes we made as a company.”
Dorsey also confirmed that he is financially backing Nostr, another decentralized Twitter-like service that is popular among some cryptocurrency enthusiasts and is run by an anonymous founder. “I know it’s early and Nostr is weird and hard to use, but if you really believe in anti-censorship and freedom of speech, you need to use the technologies that make it happen and protect your rights,” Dorsey said.
Most of these are not particularly surprising. If you’ve followed Dorsey’s public comments over the past few years, he’s repeatedly said that Twitter’s “real fault” is that it’s a company beholden to advertisers and other corporate interests. That’s why he supported of the company. (Not coincidentally, Dorsey still has it invested his personal fortune in the company now known as X.) He also made it very clear that he did much of Twitter’s most influential work. reluctantly.
Not surprisingly, Dorsey’s comments were not well received at Bluesky. One , Bluesky’s protocol engineer Paul Frazee said that Twitter was supposed to be AT Protocol’s “first customer,” but after taking over the company, “Elon just killed it dead.” “This company was frozen out of a long acquisition process, and the deal quickly ended when Elon took over,” Frazee said. “It was never going to happen. Also: unchecked gaps are a ridiculous idea. We’ve created a shared network for competing moderated spaces to exist. Even if someone wants to create an unmanaged ATProto app, it looks like they can? Good luck to app stores, regulators and users, I guess.”
While Dorsey was careful not to directly criticize Musk, he was a little less enthusiastic than when he said Musk would be welcomed. “Expanding the light of consciousness” by taking over Twitter. Dorsey noted that while he has previously fought government requests to delete accounts, Musk takes a “different path” and generally follows through. “Elon is going to fight the way he fights, and I appreciate that, but he can certainly compromise,” Dorsey said.
