Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has left the board of open-source social network Bluesky.
Bluesky is a social media app that was started by Mr. Dorsey when he was still the CEO of Twitter, now X. He was one of the three board members at Bluesky. The company recently confirmed that Mr. Dorsey has exited the Bluesky board. “With Jack’s departure, we are searching for a new board member for the Bluesky public benefit company who shares our commitment to building a social network that puts people in control of their experience,” Bluesky said in a social media post on May 6.
“We sincerely thank Jack for his help funding and initiating the bluesky project. Today, Bluesky is thriving as an open source social network running on atproto, the decentralized protocol we have built.” With Mr. Dorsey’s exit, only two board members remain at Bluesky: co-founder and CEO Jay Graber, and Jeremie Miller, the inventor of universal messaging standard Jabber/XMPP.
Earlier, Mr. Dorsey backed X as a platform supporting free speech. “Don’t depend on corporations to grant you rights. Defend them yourself using freedom technology. (you’re on one),” he said in a May 4 post on X.
“We haven’t forgotten your PROMINENT role in helping lay the foundation for all this corruption. We look at YOU and laugh when you try to be righteous, when YOU lead the charge in shutting down the spread of info, and shutting up folks who believed something different,” former NFL athlete Chris Manno said in an X post on May 4 X.
New York Times bestselling author Roger Stone also slammed Mr. Dorsey. “You violated antitrust laws. You need to be prosecuted. Enough of the two-tiered justice system,” he stated.
“My followers still don’t see my posts after your army of government-funded censorship happened,” said author and podcaster Douglas Karr.
The industrialist’s remarks came after a series of internal communications at Twitter were unveiled which showed the steps taken by the social media platform’s staff to suppress, for example, the Hunter Biden laptop story.
Decentralized Social Media to Counter Censorship
Traditional social media platforms are closed networks with a central authority. Bluesky is decentralized, meaning users can switch between social media platforms without losing their data.Twitter had initially financially backed Bluesky after it was formed in 2019. Three years later, the two platforms ended this relationship. As of May 2024, Bluesky has more than 5.5 million users.
“As a developer, if you try to build a new app (at centralized social media platforms), you have to overcome network effects to rebuild the social graph from scratch, and if you try to build on the APIs [application programming interfaces] of these companies they can cut you off and kill your company in the blink of an eye,” Bluesky explained.
“As a creator, you might spend years building an audience only to lose access to it when the platform changes the rules on you.”
“What needs to exist is a system that just makes it really easy for the average user to push out their social media content from a place that they own, like a blog, and then make it available on all these different platforms so it doesn’t matter which platform you use,” he said.
“So this places the locus of control back in the hands of the average person, the end user.”
However, decentralized social media apps may become the target of authoritarian regimes who do not like the fact they have no control over content shared over the networks.
“We are writing to notify you that your application, per demand from the Cyberspace Administration of China, will be removed from the China App Store because it includes content that is illegal in China, which is not in compliance with the App Store review guidelines,” Apple said in a notification to Damus.
The app was only approved for listing in the Apple app store two days earlier.
