• by Colin Kirkland , May 6, 2024

As Bluesky continues to build out its platform, its most prominent backer Jack Dorsey has left the board.

The Twitter co-founder was largely responsible for co-funding and popularizing the decentralized microblogging app after Elon Musk bought Twitter and rebranded it to X. On Saturday, however, Dorsey said he was no longer a part of Bluesky after posting on X about philanthropic grants for open protocols.

On X, Dorsey also warned people to defend their own rights by “using freedom technology,” which includes Musk's X platform.

Bluesky responded to the news by the end of day, stating that it thanks Dorsey for “funding and initiating the Bluesky project” and is now “searching for a new board member…who shares our commitment to building a social network that puts people in control of their experience.”

In 2019, when he was still Twitter CEO, Dorsey tweeted that Twitter was funding a team to “develop an open and decentralized standard for social media.” Bluesky emerged from this experiment, with software engineer Jay Graber, now Bluesky's CEO, helping the app amass over 2 million users in closed beta.

After a year of operating as invite-only, Bluesky launched publicly in February. The network has since begun allowing any user to run their own server on the platform's AT Protocol, a concept referred to as federation. Developers, too, can write their own code over the protocol, effectively creating new social platforms within Bluesky itself.