Twitter co-founder’s decision to quit rival social network he helped start was quite astounding

The Twitter (now called X) co-founder Jack Dorsey has left the board of Bluesky, the decentralized social networking site he helped start, and exhilarated users to remain on his first site, now owned by Elon Musk and rechristened as X.Dorsey confirmed he had severed ties with Bluesky on Sunday, informing a user on X that he was no longer on the social network’s board. The announcement was very astonishing, since Blueskykept him listed as a board member until late on Sunday evening.“We sincerely thank Jack for his help funding and initiating the Bluesky project,” it posted. “Today, Bluesky is thriving as an open source social network running on atproto, the decentralized protocol we have built.”

Founded by Jack in 2019, Bluesky started as an internal Twitter team intrusted with the task of developing an open source infrastructure on which the whole platform could shift. By 2022, nevertheless, the aim had changed and Bluesky was spun off as an independent team.Initially, Dorsey was an active user and post Musk’s acquisition of Twitter a wave of users joined Bluesky. In September, Dorsey deleted his Bluesky account in totality. On Saturday, he made announcement of a donation of $5m (£4m) to the crypto-adjacent social network Nostr, as slice of a $21m donation from his #startsmall charity.

Dorsey’s X bio only contains his “public key” for Nostr, the illegible string of characters that lets the social network to operate in a completely decentralised manner. Earlier on Saturday, he unfollowed all but three accounts on X: Musk, Stella Assange (the wife of the WikiLeaks founder Julian) and Edward Snowden.“Don’t depend on corporations to grant you rights,” Jack tweeted. “Defend them yourself using freedom technology. (you’re on one).”

In spite of his promotion of alternatives to the site he founded, Dorsey has publicly shared his appreciation for Musk. In 2022, he called the tech magnate the “singular solution I trust” for the future of Twitter, though a year later he disparaged Musk for his “fairly reckless” moves after buying control of the site.

Since exiting Twitter, Dorsey’s focus has been at his other company, the payments outfit Block, where his attention is divided between its conventional fintech arm Square and the bitcoin-focused wing that the company is presently named after.