Just in case there was any doubt about how Jack Dorsey actually feels about Bluesky, the former Twitter CEO gave new details on why from the forum and deleted his account on the service he helped start. In a characteristic way Along with Mike Solana of Founders Fund, Dorsey had many criticisms of Bluesky.
In the interview, Dorsey claimed that Bluesky was “literally repeating every mistake” he made while running Twitter. The entire conversation is long and a bit rambling, but Dorsey's complaints seem to boil down to two issues:
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He never intended for Bluesky to be an independent company with its own board of directors, shares, and other vestiges of a corporate entity (Bluesky spun off from Twitter as a company). company 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 for things like using racial slurs in their usernames.
“People started to see Bluesky as something to escape to, away from Twitter,” Dorsey said. “It's something that's not Twitter, and so it's great. And Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter pop up, and it was a very, very common crowd. …But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and kicking people out. And unfortunately, they followed through. This is the second moment I thought, uh, no. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we've made as a company.
Dorsey also confirmed that he is financially backing Nostr, another Twitter-like decentralized service popular among some crypto enthusiasts and run by an anonymous founder. “I know it's early, and Nostr is weird and difficult to use, but if you truly believe in censorship resistance and free speech, you need to use the technologies that actually enable that and stand up for your rights ” Dorsey said.
Much of this is not particularly surprising. If you've followed Dorsey's public comments over the past two years, he has repeatedly said that Twitter's “original sin” was being a company beholden to advertisers and other commercial interests. This is why he supported the company. (It's no coincidence that Dorsey still has about of his personal wealth invested in the company now known as X.) He has also been very clear that he has made many of Twitter's most prominent criticisms. unwillingly.
Unsurprisingly, Dorsey's comments were not well received on Bluesky. In a , Bluesky protocol engineer Paul Frazee said that Twitter was supposed to be the “first customer” of the AT protocol, but that “Elon killed it right away” after taking over the company. “This entire company was frozen by the protracted acquisition, and the deal quickly ended when Elon took over,” Frazee said. “That was never going to happen. Also: unmoderated spaces are a ridiculous idea. We created a shared network so that competing moderated spaces could exist. Even if someone wanted to create an unmoderated ATProto app, I guess he could? Good luck with app stores, regulators and users, I guess.
Although Dorsey was careful not to criticize Musk directly, he was slightly less enthusiastic than when he said Musk would be “expand the light of consciousness” by taking over Twitter. Dorsey noted that while he has fought government demands to remove accounts, Musk takes the “other path” and generally complies. “Elon will fight the way he fights, and I appreciate that, but he could definitely be compromised,” Dorsey said.