Jack Dorsey resigned from the board of his social networking startup, Bluesky — even as he gave an impromptu endorsement Elon Musk’s X, calling it “freedom technology”.
Dorsey revealed his resignation from Bluesky — which he had championed in the wake of selling the other social network he co-founded, Twitter, to Elon Musk — in an X post, where he responded to a question about whether he was on the board of Bluesky with a simple “no.”
Dorsey went on to share a cryptic message about the necessity of “open protocols,” a term that refers to open-source software coding that allows anyone to view it and suggest changes to the system, similar to how blockchains operates.
“Don’t depend on corporations to grant you rights,” Dorsey posted to the site on Saturday. “Defend them yourself using freedom technology. (you’re on one)”.
The X post, earlier reported on by Bloomberg, suggested that Dorsey is mending his relationship with Musk after claiming last year that the billionaire Tesla chief hadn’t proven himself to be the best possible owner of the social media site.
When asked about it, Dorsey said: “No. Nor do I think he acted right after realizing his timing was bad. Nor do I think the board should have forced the sale,” referring to Musk’s $44 billion acquisition of then-Twitter, according to Bloomberg.
He had also posted on Bluesky a year ago that “it all went south,” after Musk’s radical transformation of Twitter — which is now set to expand into an app “identical” to YouTube’s TV offering for smart televisions as part of Musk’s quest to create “the everything app.”
Musk is now just one of three people Dorsey follows on X — which touts roughly 550 million monthly active users.
The other two accounts belong to Edward Snowden, the American computer contractor who fled to Russia after leaking highly classified information, and Stella Assange, wife of the imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher facing criminal charges over espionage.
While still at the helm of Twitter in 2019, Dorsey began working on Bluesky as a side project using funding from Twitter.
The new app promises a future-thinking “social internet” that allows users more choices and frees people from platforms, according to its website.
It wasn’t until February 2023 that it was first rolled out to iOS users.
A version for Andriod launched in April that same year.
Many users have said Bluesky is similar to a pared-down copy of Twitter. One big difference, however, is that the app’s developers aim to give users “algorithmic choice,” which would allow them to choose how content is fed onto their screens, instead of a one-fits-all algorithm controlled by the app developers.
Bluesky is just one of several alternatives to Twitter that began popping up after Musk purchased the social media giant and began making changes to both the site and the company.
While it made a splash in its early days, when its beta version was available via invite-only, it has since been largely overshadowed by the launch of Meta’s Threads as the most viable X alternative, Bloomberg reported.
