Jack Dorsey parts ways with Bluesky, leaves board of directors

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Jack Dorsey’s journey with Bluesky has come to an end. The team behind the social network announced in a Bluesky post today that Dorsey is no longer on the board of directors. At the moment of this report, no public rationale has been offered by either Dorsey or Bluesky for the departure.

“We sincerely thank Jack for his help [in] funding and initiating the [Bluesky] project. Today, Bluesky is thriving as an open-source social network running on atproto, the decentralized protocol we have built,” the Bluesky team noted.

With Dorsey’s departure, the team is now looking for a new board member who shares its “commitment to building a social network that puts people in control of their experience.”

Dorsey introduced Bluesky in 2019 as a decentralized social network with similar functionality to Twitter (now X). The platform’s mission is to offer users more control over their personal information, interactions, and content online.

Bluesky encourages less promotional content and more meaningful conversations, offering brands and individuals the opportunity to engage authentically and build loyal communities around shared values and insights.

In 2021, former Zcash developer Jay Graber joined Bluesky as its leader. The following year, the project team announced the launch of a social media app called Bluesky Social and unveiled an invitation-only beta for iOS, available only to those with invitation codes in February 2023.

The team kicked off its public launch in February this year and quickly attracted over 800,000 new users in one day. As of May 2024, Bluesky has more than 5.5 million users, according to the platform’s public data.

Dorsey’s departure follows his response on X where he expressed strong support for X. Notably, Dorsey unfollowed nearly all X accounts but three accounts.

🚫 @jack has unfollowed well over 2000 people, so this bot won't send an alert for each.

These are the 3 remaining accounts: @stella_assange, @elonmusk and @Snowden pic.twitter.com/N28DlDv4Qt

— Big Tech Alert (@BigTechAlert) May 5, 2024

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