Bluesky’s most prominent backer has left its board. On Saturday, Jack Dorsey posted on X about grants for open protocols from his philanthropic Start Small initiative.
This prompted someone to ask Dorsey if he was still on the Bluesky board, and he responded with a terse “no.” Dorsey did not answer any of the follow-up posts asking hime to explain his departure TechCrunch reported.
It is not clear when Dorsey left the board; as of Sunday morning, Bluesky’s corporate FAQ still identified him as a board member. Later that afternoon, the company published the following statement:
“We sincerely thank Jack for his help funding and initiating that Bluesky project. Bluesky is thriving as an open source social network running on atproto, the decentralized protocol we have built.
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. More to come!”
Dorsey first announced Bluesky in 2019, back when he was still CEO of Twitter. He wrote that Twitter (now X) was “funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media.”
The Verge reported that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is no longer on the board of Bluesky, the decentralized social media platform he helped start.
Neither Bluesky nor Dorsey himself seem to have said how or what he left the board. For now, two board members remain: CEO, Jay Graeber, and Jabber / XMPP inventor Jeremie Miller. Dorsey originally backed Bluesky in 2019 as a project to develop an open-source social media standard that he wanted Twitter to move to. He later joined its board of directors when it split from Twitter in 2022.
But Dorsey hadn’t seemingly been a particularly active participant at the company. In March, when The Verge’s Nilay Patel asked Graeber for Decoder, about his level of involvement with Bluesky, she said she gets “some feedback occasionally,” but implied he’s otherwise “being Jack Dorsey on a cloud,” as Nilay put it. Months after that interview, Dorsey had closed his Bluesky account.
Engadget reported Jack Dorsey has apparently exited the Bluesky board. The former Twitter CEO who was previously Bluesky’s highest-profile proponent shared the life update this weekend on X, where he’s been posting a lot lately.
The decentralized social network started as a project by a team at then-Twitter back in 2019, but it eventually split off on its own. It only opened to the public this March after being invite-only for almost year.
Dorsey has said mixed things about X since Elon Musk’s takeover, but it seems he’s now swung back around. On Saturday, he posted on X “don’t depend on corporations to grant you rights. Defend them yourself using freedom technology (you’re on one).”
In my opinion, Jack Dorsey appears to be someone who puts a lot of himself into a social media site, and then leaves it in favor of the next big thing.
Dorsey’s exit from the Bluesky board leaves room for speculation on the platform’s future direction. As Bluesky seeks a new board member, it’s clear that the journey towards decentralized social networking continues to evolve in intriguing ways.