Dorsey Bows Out of Bluesky Due to Fears It’s Turning Into Twitter 2.0

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has exited Bluesky as he said it was “literally repeating all the mistakes [Twitter] made as a company.”

Dorsey founded Bluesky in 2019 as a side project while he was still CEO of Twitter (now X), made it an independent company in 2021, and then rolled it out officially as a platform in 2023. He said, “It was the anti-Twitter. People were literally running from Twitter to Bluesky, and that is not a way to build something successful.”

In Twitter’s early days, Dorsey pictured it as an open-source protocol free from control or profit motives. However, that vision did not come to fruition. Frustrated with Twitter’s commercial trajectory, Dorsey created Bluesky as a way to provide an independent, open-source iteration of the platform.

According to Dorsey, his frustration with Bluesky initiated from it mirroring old Twitter practices such as fundraising, platform moderation, and board governance.

Dorsey said in an interview with Mike Solana for Pirate Wires, “This tool was designed such that it had, you know, it was a base level protocol. It had a reference app on top. It was designed to be controlled by the people. I think the greatest idea — which we need — is an algorithm store, where you choose how you see all the conversations. 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.”

He added, “That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that’s truly decentralized. It’s another app. It’s another app that’s just kind of following in Twitter’s footsteps, but for a different part of the population.”

“Everything we wanted around decentralization, everything we wanted in terms of an open source protocol, suddenly became a company with VCs and a board. That’s not what I wanted, that’s not what I intended to help create,” he said.

Following this, Dorsey opted to support Nostr, a different Twitter alternative that promises to genuinely operate as an open-source protocol.

He told Solana, “So I just decided to delete my account on Bluesky, and really focus on Nostr, and funding that to the best of my ability. I asked to get off the board as well, because I just don’t think a protocol needs a board or wants a board. And if it has a board, that’s not the thing that I wanted to help build or wanted to help fund.”