The Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has left the board of Bluesky, the decentralised social network he helped start, and encouraged users to remain on his first site, now owned by Elon Musk and called X.
Dorsey confirmed he had cut ties with Bluesky on Sunday, telling a user on X that he was no longer on the social network’s board. The announcement was apparently unexpected, since Bluesky still listed him 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 Dorsey in 2019, Bluesky began as an internal Twitter team tasked with developing an open source infrastructure on which the entire platform could shift. By 2022, however, the goal had changed and Bluesky was spun off as an independent team.
Dorsey was initially an active user and after Musk’s acquisition of Twitter a wave of users joined Bluesky. In September, Dorsey deleted his Bluesky account entirely. On Saturday, he announced a donation of $5m (£4m) to the crypto-adjacent social network Nostr, as part of a $21m donation from his #startsmall charity.
Dorsey’s bio on X only contains his “public key” for Nostr, the unreadable string of characters that allows the social network to operate in a fully decentralised manner. Earlier on Saturday, he unfollowed all but three accounts on X: Edward Snowden, Stella Assange, the wife of the WikiLeaks founder Julian, and Musk.
“Don’t depend on corporations to grant you rights,” Dorsey tweeted. “Defend them yourself using freedom technology. (you’re on one).”
Despite his promotion of alternatives to the site he founded, Dorsey has publicly shared his admiration for Musk. In 2022, he called the multibillionaire the “singular solution I trust” for the future of Twitter, though a year later he criticised Musk for his “fairly reckless” moves after taking control of the site.
Since leaving Twitter, Dorsey’s focus has been at his other company, the payments outfit Block, where his attention is split between its conventional fintech arm Square and the bitcoin-focused wing that the company is now named after.
