Just in case there was any doubt about how Jack Dorsey really feels about Bluesky, the former Twitter CEO has revealed new details about why the board deleted his account on the service he helped launch. In typical Mike Solana fashion from Founders Fund, Dorsey offered plenty of criticism of Bluesky.
In the interview, Dorsey claimed that Bluesky “literally repeated all the mistakes” he made while running Twitter. The entire conversation is long and somewhat rambling, but Dorsey’s complaints seem to boil down to two topics:
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He never intended for Bluesky to be an independent company with its own board, shares, and other remnants of a corporate entity (Bluesky spun off from Twitter as a public company in 2022). Instead, he planned for Twitter to be the first customer to benefit from the open source protocol. Bluesky created.
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The fact that Blueksy engages in some form of content moderation and occasionally uses racial slurs in their usernames, for example.
“People started seeing Bluesky as something they could run away to, away from Twitter,” Dorsey said. “It’s something that’s not Twitter, and that’s why it’s great. And Bluesky saw this exodus of Twitter people, and it was a very, very communal crowd. …But little by little they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools and to fire people up. And unfortunately they went through with it. That was the second moment I thought, uh, no. In doing so, we are literally repeating all the mistakes we have 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 still 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 make it possible and defend your rights,” Dorsey said.
A lot of this isn’t particularly surprising. If you’ve followed Dorsey’s public statements over the past few years, he has repeatedly said that Twitter’s “original sin” is being a company beholden to advertisers and other corporate interests. That’s why he supported the company. (It’s no coincidence that Dorsey still has about a portion of his personal fortune invested in the company now known as
Unsurprisingly, Dorsey’s comments were not well received at Bluesky. In a blog post, Bluesky protocol engineer Paul Frazee said that Twitter was supposed to be the “first customer” of the AT protocol, but that “Elon took care of that immediately” after he took over the company. “The entire company was frozen out by the protracted acquisition, and the agreement quickly ended when Elon took over,” Frazee said. “This could never have happened. Also: Unmoderated rooms are a ridiculous idea. We have created a shared network in which competing moderated spaces can exist. Even if someone wanted to create an unmoderated ATProto app, could they? Good luck with the app stores, the regulators and the users, I think.”
While Dorsey was careful not to directly criticize Musk, he was a little less enthusiastic than when he said that Musk would “expand the light of consciousness” by taking over Twitter. Dorsey pointed out that although Musk previously resisted government requests to block accounts, he is taking “the other route” and generally complying. “Elon will fight the way he fights, and I appreciate that, but he certainly could be compromised,” Dorsey said.