Jack Dorsey announced over the weekend that he resigned from the board of social networking startup BlueSky because the company was “repeating literally every single mistake we made.” [Twitter] We created it as a company. ”
in Interview with technology-focused media company Pirate WiresDorsey launched the project in 2019, using funding from Twitter at the time, with the aim of creating an open source protocol where anyone can view its code and suggest changes to the system, similar to how blockchain works. He explained the background behind the establishment of Bluesky.
“I think the Internet needs a decentralized protocol for social media,” Dorsey said.
The 47-year-old technology mogul, who is also the CEO of payment processing giant Square, envisioned Twitter as having the potential to become open source software, not controlled by a single person or entity.
In the end, that didn’t work out, and Dorsey sold the social media company to Elon Musk for $44 billion in October 2022. Musk, now known as X, plans to turn the platform into an “app for everything” and recently introduced an app “identical” to YouTube’s TV service for smart TVs.
In Blue Sky, “little by little, they [the users] I started asking Jay. [Graber, the CEO] And a team for moderation tools, and a team for kicking people out. And unfortunately, they did that,” Dorsey told Pirate Wires.
“That was the second thing I thought,” Dorsey added. “This is literally repeating every mistake we made.” [Twitter] We created it as a company. This is not a truly decentralized protocol. It’s a different app. This is another app that follows in the footsteps of Twitter, but with a different target audience. ”
In a May 4 post on X, Mr. Dorsey answered simply “no” when asked if he was on BlueSki’s board of directors, making it clear that he was no longer on BlueSki’s board of directors.
He went on to share a cryptic message about the need for open protocols, writing: Protect them yourself with Freedom Technology. (You’re on it too)”.
XPost suggested that Dorsey was mending his relationship with Musk after last year claiming that the billionaire Tesla boss had not been able to prove he was the social media site’s top owner.
When talking about the acquisition with Pirate Wires, Dorsey said that Musk “obviously bought Twitter at the wrong time in the market, but the choice was made to maintain that policy in order to maintain the policies that I want.” “We were just suffering from costs,” he said.
“And that primarily means advertisers are going to pull out and business models are going to suffer,” Dorsey added, adding that Musk has made Company X a private company “no longer a public company with a profit incentive.” He praised the way they kept it within the company. This advertising model can be heavily influenced by the whims of advertisers who, if they don’t like what you’re doing, will take their budget elsewhere. ”
“Elon made a choice, and I think it’s the right one,” Dorsey said, according to Pirate Wires.
Musk is currently just one of three people Dorsey follows on X, which has about 550 million monthly active users.
The other two accounts belong to Edward Snowden, an American computer contractor who fled to Russia after leaking top secret information, and Stella Assange, WikiLeaks publisher’s wife, who is imprisoned on criminal charges of espionage. .
Bluesky, on the other hand, only recently rolled out to Android users after debuting for iOS users in February 2023. It reportedly touts 5.6 million monthly active users as of this year.
Many users say Bluesky is similar to a stripped-down copy of Twitter.
However, one major difference is that it aims to provide users with “algorithmic choice” rather than a one-size-fits-all algorithm controlled by app developers. This allows users to choose how content is displayed on screen.
Bluesky is just one of the Twitter alternatives that began to emerge after Musk bought the social media giant and began making changes to both the site and the company.
It made a splash in its early days when the beta version was available on an invite-only basis, but has since been largely overshadowed by the launch of Meta’s Threads as the most viable alternative to X. Ta.
