Just in case there was any doubt about how Jack Dorsey really feels about Bluesky, the former Twitter CEO has offered new details on why he left the board and deleted his account on the service he helped kickstart. In a characteristically bizarre interview with Mike Solana of Founders Fund, Dorsey had plenty of criticism for Bluesky.
In the interview, Dorsey claimed that Bluesky was “literally repeating all the mistakes” he made while running Twitter. The entire conversation is long and a bit rambly, but Dorsey’s complaints seem to boil down to two issues:
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He never intended Bluesky to be an independent company with its own board and stock and other vestiges of a corporate entity (Bluesky spun out of Twitter as a public benefit corporation in 2022.) Instead, his plan was for Twitter to be the first client to take advantage of the open source protocol. Bluesky created.
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The fact that Blueksy has some form of content moderation and has occasionally banned users for things like using racial slurs in their usernames.
“People started seeing Bluesky as something to run to, away from Twitter,” Dorsey said. “It’s the thing that’s not Twitter, and therefore it’s great. And Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter show up, and it was a very, very common crowd. … 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. That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company.”
Dorsey also confirmed that he is financially backing Nostr, another decentralized Twitter-like service popular among some crypto enthusiasts and run by an anonymous founder. “I know it’s early, and Nostr is weird and hard to use, but if you truly believe in censorship resistance and free speech, you have to use the technologies that actually enable that, and defend your rights,” Dorsey said.
A lot of this isn’t particularly surprising. If you’ve followed Dorsey’s public comments over the last couple years, he’s repeatedly said that Twitter’s “original sin” was being a company that would be beholden to advertisers and other corporate interests. It’s why he backed Elon Musk’s takeover of the company. (Not coincidentally, Dorsey still has about $1 billion of his personal wealth invested in the company now known as X.) He’s also been very clear that he made many of Twitter’s most consequential moderation decisions reluctantly.
Unsurprisingly, Dorsey’s comments weren’t well-received on Bluesky. In a lengthy thread, Bluesky’s protocol engineer Paul Frazee said that Twitter was supposed to to be the AT Protocol’s “first client” but that “Elon killed that straight dead” after he took over the company. “That entire company was frozen by the prolonged acquisition, and the agreement quickly ended when Elon took over,” Frazee said. “It was never going to happen. 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.”
While Dorsey was careful not to criticize Musk directly, he was slightly less enthusiastic than when he said that Musk would be the one to “extend the light of consciousness” by taking over Twitter. Dorsey noted that, while he used to fight government requests to take down accounts, Musk takes “the other path” and generally complies. “Elon will fight in the way he fights, and I appreciate that, but he could certainly be compromised,” Dorsey said.
