Jack Dorsey Leaves BlueSky Board, Calls X ‘Freedom Technology’

J.ack Dorsey has stepped down from the board of social networking service Bluesky, which he helped fund and popularize a year ago, after regretting the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk.

The Twitter co-founder turned to the Musk-owned platform, now renamed X, to publicize his new philanthropic donations to open internet protocols, which he described as “freedom technology.” He too added X to this class of technology, elaborating only to say that companies can also develop open protocols.

Dorsey has narrowed the list of people he follows on X to just three: Musk, Edward Snowden and Stella Assange, wife of the jailed WikiLeaks editor. This suggested an apparent warming in relations between the X owner and Dorsey, who had posted on Bluesky a year ago that “everything went wrong” following Musk’s acquisition and radical transformation of Twitter.

Bluesky is a network and protocol launched to pursue Dorsey’s Platonic ideal for Twitter as a service without central control, and it was opened to all interested users in February. The social service was successful in its early days as a way to escape the Twitter turmoil following Musk’s acquisition, though it has since been overshadowed by the launch of Meta Platforms Inc.’s Threads as the more viable alternative. Dorsey responded to a question about X about whether he was still on the Bluesky board with a “no.”