Jack Dorsey says he quit Bluesky because it was becoming another Twitter
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- Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey helped found Bluesky as a Twitter alternative.
- But Dorsey says he left Bluesky because it was "literally repeating all the mistakes" Twitter made.
- Dorsey's back on Twitter, posting up a storm. But he believes the best version of Twitter will be something called Nostr.
Why did Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey leave Bluesky, the Twitter alternative he helped create?
Because — in Dorsey's telling, at least — Bluesky was "literally repeating all the mistakes [Twitter] made as a company."
That's the TLDR from an interview Dorsey conducted with journalist Mike Solana at his Pirate Wires site.
The longer version of that 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 venture-backed, for-profit company. But that didn't happen. And later on, when Dorsey got 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 — in Dorsey's telling — he got frustrated that Bluesky was doing things like the old Twitter. Things like raising money, and moderating what happened on its platform, and having a board. Which Dorsey was on.
And then Dorsey decided what he really wanted to do was help Nostr, another Twitter alternative, which promises to actually be an open-source protocol, instead.
"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."
So there you go. That's the whole mystery, solved.
There's more to the interview. Dorsey, for instance, has some mostly kind words about Elon Musk, who bought Twitter in 2022. And there's a lot of space dedicated to Dorsey's telling around What Went Wrong With Twitter. Though that mostly repeats his idea that Twitter's original sin was becoming a venture-backed, for-profit company that went public with a business model based on advertising, positioned as a Facebook competitor.
But that story/argument isn't a new one — you can find it in this four-episode podcast series I hosted last year, for instance.
And the version of it that Dorsey tells here doesn't touch on any of Dorsey's responsibility for Twitter's problems, which he lays at the feet of Wall Street investors, his board of directors and his advertisers. And not, for instance, the fact that he was running Twitter at the same time he was running Square.
For a more complete version, I'd suggest Kurt Wagner's Battle for the Bird.