Jack Dorsey has posted very little on Twitter, the social media platform he helped create, since January.in his last two Tweetthe billionaire entrepreneur promoted an app for Nostr, a new social network.
“#nostr is officially on the Apple App Store,” he wrote. “And the Google Play Store.”
Since then, Dorsey has posted to Nostle an average of 59 times a day, including messages aimed at Twitter and its new owner, Elon Musk.
“This is weak,” Dorsey I have written Musk told Nostr last month about trying to stop Twitter users from linking to newsletter platform Substack.
Dorsey has also started using Bluesky, another new social network. On Saturday, when asked by a Bluesky user whether Musk was Twitter’s best steward, Dorsey bluntly said “no.”
“Everything went wrong,” Musk said on Twitter. “But it happened, so all we can do now is build something so that it doesn’t happen again.”
Dorsey, 46, was a bitcoin-loving technologist and Twitter’s most prominent face for years, but he’s stepped out of the public eye after Musk bought the social media company for $44 billion last year. seemed to disappear. But Mr. Dorsey’s recent profusion of activity with Nostr and Bluesky shows that he still has a lot to say.
Much of what Dorsey posts aligns with his interest in cryptocurrencies and open source technology. Open source technology exposes code so that people can tinker with it and reuse it. But he’s also openly criticized Musk’s ownership of Twitter, the latest in a long line of Silicon Valley founders to express their dismay at those who took over the company. rice field.
Dorsey also puts money into his posts by backing Twitter’s new competitors. In 2019, Dorsey, who was the CEO of Twitter, funded Bluesky as a project to decentralize all social networks by easily sharing posts and users. And in December, he donated 14 bitcoins (worth about $250,000 at the time) to the creator of his Nostr pseudonym, whose handle is “fiatjaf.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if he withheld his comments on Twitter for any reason,” said Jason Goldman, a member of Twitter’s founding team and a board member. talked about the actions of In his recent comments, Dorsey added that he “acknowledges how Twitter didn’t fare well under Elon Musk.”
Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Dorsey, who helped found Twitter in 2006, served as the company’s CEO for eight years in two different roles. Social The success of his network has made him a millionaire, but he seemed disenchanted with the direction Twitter was taking in recent years.
In particular, Dorsey, a free speech advocate, lamented that Twitter has too much power to decide what posts should remain online and what should be taken down. He also accused Wall Street of pushing Twitter away from its primary role as a communications platform, turning it profitable and ultimately selling it to the highest bidder.
In November 2021, Dorsey, who also led payments startup Block (formerly Square), stepped down as CEO of Twitter. After Mr. Musk made a bid for the company last year, he stepped down from the board.
Dorsey has since said Twitter should have been built as a different kind of social network, a decentralized social network. Unlike mainstream social he platforms that run private code that they manage, decentralized social networks expose their systems to the public, allowing users to potentially build their own apps and communities. That way, no single entity can impose rules on what can and cannot be said in these networks, and users can customize their experience.
Dorsey wrote in a December blog, “The problem today is that there are companies that own both the technology and the algorithms that display posts. Ultimately, what is available and what can be seen? , one person will be in charge of what you don’t see.” director What he shared in Nostr. “This is by definition a single point of failure no matter how good the person is, and over time the public discourse can collapse, increasing control by governments and corporations around the world.”
Mike Masnick, editor of the TechDirt blog and tech policy expert, says decentralized networks “enable more experimentation and trying in different ways.” But he warned that he also faces challenges in complying with moderation laws, such as European Digital Services Act and U.S. copyright law.
Dorsey has had an interest in decentralized social platforms since at least 2019, when he started working on Bluesky, and has long had an interest in the popular cryptocurrency Bitcoin. In his December he joined Nostr. Nostr also allows users to send small cryptocurrency payments to each other called ‘zaps’.
Fiatjaf, creator of Nostr, said in an email that Dorsey’s backing was “a game-changer, but far less in terms of funding than the amount of awareness and enthusiasm he has generated for Nostr.” said. “Eventually, we hope the fundraising part starts to play a bigger role.”
Bluesky, who declined to comment, said: blog post Dorsey to remain on the board. (Twitter cut his ties with Blue Sky after Mr. Musk took over.)
Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Musk have long had a hierarchical relationship. When Musk bid Twitter last year, Dorsey backed the effort.
“In principle, I don’t think anyone should own or operate Twitter,” Dorsey wrote. twitter at the time. “But to solve the problem that it is a company, Elon is the only solution I trust. I trust in his mission to extend the light of consciousness.”
But after Mr. Musk bought Twitter in October, Mr. Musk quickly fired many of Mr. Dorsey’s handpicked executives. Musk has since laid off about 75% of Twitter’s employees, refused to pay rent for some offices, and made sweeping and sometimes conflicting changes to its content moderation policy.
As Dorsey posted on Nostle and then Bluesky, his criticisms of Musk and Twitter are building up.
In several posts, Dorsey blamed Twitter for repeated outages. Last month, he hinted to his Nostr: Twitter users may leave the platform if they want. He also dismissed Musk’s move to charge Twitter users $8 a month.
But Dorsey’s most astute assessment of Musk’s leadership came over the weekend on Blue Sky, where Dorsey has more than 11,000 followers. (His Twitter follower count exceeds his 6 million.)
Dorsey was asked by several Bluesky users on Saturday about the sale of Twitter and the changes the company has experienced in recent months. Musk added that he “should have stopped” buying Twitter.
Goldman, one of the Blue Sky users who questioned Dorsey over the weekend, said the comments didn’t take into account the way Dorsey has led Twitter over the years and where the company ended up. He also said he was accountable.
“Despite more than a decade of leading the company as chairman or CEO, he denounces the inevitability of market forces,” Goldman said of Dorsey.
Dorsey resumed posting on Sunday to Nostr, which has 134,000 followers. He said he regretted making Twitter public and a company in the first place.
He also left his criticism of Mr. Musk by praising the efforts of Twitter’s owners to reduce the site’s reliance on branded advertising, which makes up the majority of the company’s revenue. And Musk recommended that Twitter consider making Twitter more open, using decentralized technology and “open protocols.”
“I understand urgency and haste,” Dorsey said. I have written“I hope he finally realizes that based on such an open protocol solves a lot of problems and makes very good business possible. We will see.”
