Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has left the board of Bluesky, the decentralized social network he helped start, and encouraged users to stay on his first site, now owned by Elon Musk and called X.
Dorsey confirmed that he had cut ties with Bluesky on Sunday and told an X user that he was no longer on the social network’s forum. The announcement was apparently unexpected, as Bluesky still listed him as a member of the board of directors as of Sunday evening.
“We sincerely thank Jack for his help in funding and starting the Bluesky project,” he posted. “Today, Bluesky is thriving as an open source social network running on atproto, the decentralized protocol we created.”
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 run. By 2022, however, the goal had changed and Bluesky 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 $5m (£4m) donation to crypto-adjacent social network Nostras part of a $21 million donation from his #start small charity.
Dorsey’s bio on Earlier on Saturday, she unfollowed all but three of X’s accounts: Edward Snowden, Stella Assange, the wife of WikiLeaks founder Julian, and Musk.
“Don’t depend on corporations to give you rights” Dorsey tweeted. “Defend them yourself using the technology of freedom. (you are in one).” Despite promoting alternatives to the site he founded, Dorsey has publicly shared his admiration for Musk. In 2022, he called the billionaire the “single solution I trust” for Twitter’s future, although a year later he criticized Musk for his “pretty reckless” moves after taking control of the site.
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Since leaving Twitter, Dorsey has focused on his other company, payments company Block, where his attention is divided between its mainstream fintech arm Square and the bitcoin-focused wing that now bears the company’s name.