Jack Dorsey claims Bluesky is “repeating all the mistakes” he made on Twitter

Just in case there was any doubt about how Jack Dorsey really feels about Bluesky, the former Twitter CEO offered new details about why the board deleted his account on the service he helped launch. In a characteristic with Founders Fund’s Mike Solana, Dorsey had plenty of criticism for Blusky.

In the interview, Dorsey claimed Bluesky was “literally repeating all the mistakes” he made while running Twitter. The whole conversation is long and a bit rambling, but Dorsey’s complaints seem to boil down to two issues:

1. He never intended for Bluesky to be an independent company with its own board and stock and other vestiges of a corporate entity (Bluesky exited Twitter as corporation in 2022) Instead, his plan was for Twitter to be the first customer to take advantage of the open source protocol. Bluesky created.

2. The fact that Blueksy has some form of content moderation and occasionally for things like using racial slurs in their usernames.

“People started to see Bluesky as something to escape to, away from Twitter,” Dorsey said. “It’s something that Twitter isn’t, and that’s why it’s great. And Bluesky saw this exodus of people from Twitter emerge, and it was a very, very common crowd. … But little by little they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools and pushing people away. And unfortunately they followed. That was the second moment I thought, uh, no. It literally repeats all the mistakes we made as a company.”

Dorsey also confirmed that he is financially backing Nostr, another Twitter-like decentralized service popular among some crypto enthusiasts and run by an anonymous founder. “I know it’s early and that Nostr is weird and hard to use, but if you really believe in resisting censorship and free speech, you need to use the technologies that actually enable it and protect your rights,” Dorsey said.

Much of this is not particularly surprising. If you’ve followed Dorsey’s public comments over the past few years, he’s repeatedly said that Twitter’s “original sin” was to be a company beholden to advertisers and other corporate interests. That’s why he supported the company. (Not coincidentally, Dorsey still has approx of his personal wealth invested in the company, now known as X.) He was also very clear that he did many of the most significant things on Twitter reluctantly.

Not surprisingly, Dorsey’s comments were not well received by Bluesky. IN , Bluesky protocol engineer Paul Frazee said that Twitter was supposed to be the “first customer” of the AT protocol, but that “Elon killed it dead right” after taking over the company. “This whole company was frozen out of the protracted acquisition and the deal quickly ended when Elon took over,” Frazee said. “It was never going to happen. Also: unmoderated spaces are a ridiculous idea. We created a shared network for the existence of competing moderated spaces. Even if someone wants to make an unmoderated ATProto app, I guess they can? Good luck with app stores, regulators and users, I guess.”

While Dorsey was careful not to criticize Musk directly, he was a little less enthusiastic than when he said Musk would “expand the light of consciousness” by taking over Twitter. Dorsey noted that while he has fought government requests to remove accounts, Musk is taking the “other route” and generally complying. “Elon is going to fight the way he fights, and I appreciate that, but he can certainly be compromised,” Dorsey said.