- Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey helped create Bluesky as an alternative to Twitter.
- But Dorsey says he left Bluesky because it was “literally repeating every mistake” Twitter made.
- Dorsey is back on Twitter, posting up a storm. But he thinks the best version of Twitter will be something called Nostr.
Why did Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey leave Bluesky, the Twitter alternative he helped create?
Because – at least according to Dorsey – Bluesky was “literally repeating every mistake (Twitter) made as a company.”
This is the TLDR of an interview Dorsey conducted with journalist Mike Solana on his site Pirate Wires.
The long version of this explanation: Very early in Twitter’s history, Dorsey imagined that Twitter could be an open source protocol that wasn’t controlled by anyone, instead of a for-profit company funded by venture capital . But that didn’t happen. And later, when Dorsey felt frustrated while running the for-profit version of Twitter, he imagined that Twitter could help start an independent, open source protocol version of itself – Bluesky.
But then – according to Dorsey – he was frustrated that Bluesky was doing things like the old Twitter. Things like fundraising, moderating what happens on your platform, and having a board of directors. Which Dorsey was on.
And then Dorsey decided that what he really wanted to do was help Nostr, another Twitter alternative, which promises to In fact rather be an open source protocol.
“So I just decided to delete my account on Bluesky and really focus on Nostr and fund it to the best of my ability. I also asked to leave the board, because I just don’t think whether a protocol needs a board or wants a board and if it has a board, that’s not the thing I wanted to help build or want. help finance.
So this is it. That’s the whole mystery, solved.
There’s more to the interview. Dorsey, for example, has some pretty kind words about Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022. And there’s plenty of space dedicated to Dorsey’s story about what went wrong with Twitter. Although it mostly repeats his idea that Twitter’s original sin was to become a venture capital-funded, for-profit company that went public with an advertising-based business model, positioned as a competitor to Facebook.
But this story/argument isn’t new – you can find it in this four-episode podcast series I hosted last year, for example.
And the story Dorsey tells here doesn’t address any of Dorsey’s responsibility for Twitter’s problems, which he blames on Wall Street investors, its board of directors and its advertisers. And not, for example, the fact that he ran Twitter at the same time as he ran Square.
For a more complete version, I suggest Battle for the Bird by Kurt Wagner.
businessinsider
