Jack Dorsey is No Longer on Bluesky’s Board of Directors (wedistribute.org)

Former Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey briefly confirmed yesterday that he is no longer part of Bluesky’s board of directors. While he had distanced himself from the platform over the course of the last year, opting for Nostr instead, it was still a somewhat surprising announcement.

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.

— Bluesky (@bsky.app) May 5, 2024 at 1:11 PM

Jack Dorsey was instrumental in kickstarting Bluesky in late 2019, as an initiative within Twitter to explore open, decentralized protocols. His involvement helped steer the very early days of the project, from talking to potential first hires to securing dedicated funding from Twitter.

There are MANY challenges to make this work that Twitter would feel right becoming a client of this standard. Which is why the work must be done transparently in the open, not owned by any single private corporation, furthering the open & decentralized principles of the internet.

Jack Dorsey, Twitter thread announcing and explaining Bluesky

Ironically, the purchase of Twitter by Elon Musk has almost certainly ensured that the platform is unlikely to embrace Bluesky’s technologies. Instead, Twitter only seems to lean further into centralization, in pursuit of Musk’s “Super App” dreams.

Dorsey was something of an anomaly to Bluesky’s user community, embracing free speech maximalism and Bitcoin as extensions of his techo-libertarian values, which didn’t always mesh well with other groups on the network. He seems to be much more at home on Nostr, and his Start Small initiative recently dispersed $21,000,000 to OpenSats, a 501c3 charity dedicated to the Bitcoin ecosystem.