after going public board of Twitter/X rival Bluesky on Saturday, and going to X to announce it, Jack Dorsey explained his thinking in a Thursday's interview with Mike Solana of the Founding Fund.
Dorsey stated that Bluesky “was supposed to be an open source protocol that Twitter could eventually use” — not to become its own platform with a board and external funding.
Blue sky began as a small research project within Twitter at the time 2019 to create a common operating standard for social media platforms so that applications can work between them. It became its own company in 2022. The platform received $8 million venture capital financing in July 2023.
After Bluesky became its own entity, “it was the first time I felt like, ah, this isn't going in a direction that I'm really happy with, or that wasn't the intention,” Dorsey said.
Dorsey specifically claimed that Bluesky, the X alternative he helped fund and create, was “repeating verbatim” the mistakes he saw on Twitter. Dorsey has deleted his Bluesky account, according to 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 I thought, oh, no,” Dorsey said. “This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made (at Twitter/X). This is not a protocol that is truly decentralized. It's a different application.”
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Blue sky announced in December that was publishing automated content moderation tools after polemic earlier in the year if the platform it was safe for all communities. In March, Bluesky decided open source its content moderation tool so users can personalize their feeds.
CEO of Bluesky Jay Graber responded directly to Dorsey's comments late Thursday. In one SERIES of Bluesky's posts, Graber wrote that “Bluesky is structurally open in a way that Twitter never has been.”
With all due respect to Jack for having the vision to invest in decentralized protocols, we've done the work in a way that I don't think he fully understands. Bluesky is structurally open in a way that Twitter never was, but atproto's design allows it to feel familiar and easy to use.
– Jay? (@jay.bsky.team) May 9, 2024 at 8:32 p.m
Grabber processed: “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 makes for a good user experience. But if you want to customize your experience, there are endless possibilities under the hood because we built an open system.”
Bluesky protocol engineer Paul Frazee CALLED unmoderated spaces “a ridiculous idea,” drawing attention to app store rules, users, and regulators.
Also: unmoderated spaces are a funny idea. We created a shared network for moderated competitive spaces to exist. Even if someone wanted to create an unmoderated ATProto app, I guess they could? Good luck with app stores, regulators and users, I guess.
Checks and balances, not anarchy
– Paul “Frazee”? (@pfrazee.com) May 9, 2024 at 5:24 p.m
Dorsey's most recent post on X at the time of writing was JUST: “Tell don't tell.”