Jack Dorsey Leaves the Board Of Bluesky: What is Happening To The Decentralised Social?

Jack Dorsey, the best known of Twitter's founders and the man who made the social network of twittering famous by sending the first tweet in history, when Elon Musk was still far from the idea of buying the microblogging service (and renaming it X, as we know), recently left the board of Bluesky: the decentralised social network that he helped to finance since 2019, when he was still CEO of Twitter.

The service, which only launched in beta in March 2023, opened to the public last 7 February. Initial plans for the new platform had been made public by Dorsey himself, back in 2019, when he wrote that he was funding a small independent team of five professionals including architects, engineers and open source designers, in order to develop an open and decentralised standard for social media.

During the beta period, the former Twitter CEO has been quite active on Bluesky, using it on several occasions to criticise Musk's management of the bird social platform. Given the latest developments, one naturally wonders what will now become of the decentralised network.

Jack Dorsey and Bluesky to greetings

Although those who follow the happenings on social platforms were already aware that Dorsey had left, since he had confirmed it himself on his own profile X, where a follower had asked him directly whether he was still on Bluesky's board and had received a loud and clear 'no' in reply, the confirmation from the platform only arriving on 5 May.

On that date, the official account of the network managers wrote:

'We sincerely thank Jack for his help in starting and funding the Bluesky project. Today we are in great shape as an open source social network based on atproto, the decentralised protocol we built ourselves. Following Jack's departure, we are looking for a new board member to share our dedication to building a social that gives people back control of their experience. The future is bright!"

It is possible that these words were written, in her own hand, by Bluesky CEO, engineer Jay Graber. Graber is a brilliant woman with considerable experience in IT and decentralised finance. Indeed, she has worked on both Happening, a rather well-known event planning site, and the cryptocurrency Zcash (ZEC). It remains to be seen whether Bluesky's future is really bright, now that it has lost its main sponsor.

What is Bluesky and how does it work?

Bluesky stands as a direct alternative to Twitter/X and, probably, this is precisely why it had attracted Jack Dorsey so much, at the planning stage. The interface itself is very reminiscent of that of its more famous cousin. Posts exceeding 256 characters in length cannot be created and any user is then free to respond to someone else's point of view, republish it or express appreciation.

The interaction with other users is also related to that of X: it is possible to visit profiles, read their posts and evaluate a series of metrics on the number of impressions they generate within the ecosystem. Bluesky's particularity, i.e. the element that makes it unique in the landscape of social platforms, is its decentralised protocol.

AT Protocol: Bluesky's Federated Protocol

Bluesky aims to be the first blockchain of a decentralised and interoperable social network. Although it does not make use of blockchain, it is easier to explain how it works by taking the blockchain as an example. Let us think of a single block as our entire social presence linked to a particular network. Wouldn't it be convenient to be able to copy that blockchain and move it to another chain, i.e. another social platform?

The basic idea behind Bluesky is just that: to enable the user to migrate from one social to another without losing his or her publishing history. AT Protocol is called federated because it wants to allow cooperation and interaction between different entities and servers. The engineering of the protocol is quite ambitious and aims to make it independent, resilient and portable, so that it will be a cornerstone in the realisation of a more agile and connected social network than today's socials.

The Reasons Behind Jack Dorsey's Farewell

Jack Dorsey has not clarified the reasons why he abandoned a project in which he had believed so much, such as Bluesky. According to some of his posts and statements dating back to the beginning of his adventure within this social network, the former Twitter CEO was elated at the idea of being able to give life to a social network that, in some respects, could be described as revolutionary.

It is likely that we will never know what disagreements or complications emerged between the two counterparts. The exit of such an important player, however, raises doubts about Bluesky's potential success in the near future.

At Spaziocrypto, we hope that the path of this social will continue for a long time, and that it will go in the direction of an ever greater democratisation of the world of social platforms; the entire Web3 landscape, which we recommend you explore in our dedicated guide, could gain a lot from it.