“Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey Criticizes Elon Musk as Owner on New Bluesky App”

Is Musk the Right Boss for Twitter? “No,” Jack Dorsey replied to that question on Friday. “It’s all gone the wrong way.” Striking: this conversation did not take place on Twitter, the network that Dorsey came up with in 2006. Because he hasn’t been seen for months. Dorsey wrote this comment on Bluesky, a new app that resembles Twitter like two drops of water and is being developed with support from Dorsey.

For Dorsey, this is quite a turn. He has always been generous with praise for Elon Musk in the past. A year ago, when Musk was just starting his takeover bid, Dorsey wrote that for Twitter, Musk was the only solution he had confidence in. I trust in his mission to expand the light of consciousness. (Dorsey often expresses himself in vague terms.)

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But in the meantime he is clearly disappointed by the events. He regrets, among other things, that when Musk reversed his decision to buy Twitter, the company forced him to go ahead with the deal. “But it happened and all we can do now is build something so it doesn’t happen again,” says Dorsey. “So I’m glad Jay and his team and the Nostr developers are building that.” That is a reference to Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky. (But also one to Nostr, yet another Twitter alternative that Dorsey also supports – it’s complicated.)

Dorsey, 46, stepped down as CEO of Twitter at the end of 2021, probably under pressure from shareholders who pushed for measures to generate more income. He is still the head of the technology company Block.

In 2019, while still CEO of Twitter, Dorsey suddenly announced that a group of engineers would be working on a new, open technology standard for social media. Bluesky would be funded by Twitter, but would be an independent organization. Dorsey predicted that Twitter would follow the new open standard. He wanted to give other competing apps access to the messages on Twitter.

In the meantime, Bluesky has indeed worked on such an open technology, the AT protocol, which allows to set up a decentralized message network. But under his new boss Musk, Twitter is making no move to follow that standard and give competing apps access to all tweets.

However, Bluesky itself has also developed an app that is intended to showcase the capabilities of the AT protocol. That app is available on iOS and Android smartphones, but the network is only accessible by invitation for now. In recent days, a number of favorable reviews have appeared from journalists who have already been granted access.

Some well-known names are now also active on the Bluesky app, including politician Alexandra Ocasio Cortez, celebrity Chrissy Teigen and a number of journalists from, among others. The New York Times (the newspaper that Musk likes to lash out at lately). And so is Dorsey.

The Bluesky technology shares similarities with ActivityPub, an existing social networking standard. ActivityPub is the standard behind Mastodon, an app that since last fall has become home to many users who have felt out of place on Twitter since Musk’s takeover.

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Meanwhile, Musk hinted on Saturday that publishers will soon be able to offer paid-per-piece news articles on Twitter, “with one click.” “This should be a win-win for media organizations and the public,” Musk tweeted. The idea of ​​offering articles per piece has been launched several times in the past, but never with great success. One of the most recent attempts is the newly launched app Post.news – one of many apps positioning itself as an alternative to Twitter.