Dorsey calls for ‘decentralised protocol’ for X
Co-founder and former CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey has spoekn about his departure from microblogging patform Bluesky.
Dorsey admitted he had stepped down from the board and deleted his account on the X competitor. In an interview by Mike Solana of Founders Fund, he explained: “We were doing something similar to what we did at (payments company) Square at the time, which was to fund a bunch of open source developers to work on the Bitcoin protocol. I wanted to do something similar with Twitter because it was the only way to solve a lot of the problems around censorship and the constant pressure of advertising.”
Dorsey had hoped to develop a decentralised protocol, like HTTP or SMTP, that would make Twitter less dependent on large advertisers. “I think the Internet needs a decentralised protocol for social media. I think Elon (Musk) needs it. I think X needs it. I think it removes corporate liability by separating layers.”
It took Dorsey two years to find the right people to develop the protocol. “We eventually landed on Jay (Graber). Around that time, I was also planning my departure from Twitter, and Parag (Agarwal) would take over my duties.”
But soon Graber decided that Bluesky needed to become a company. Dorey said: “That was the first time I felt like, wow this is not going in a direction I’m really happy with. It had to be an open source protocol that Twitter could eventually use.”
Bluesky, after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, developed as an anti-Twitter, according to Dorsey. “People literally ran from Twitter to Bluesky, and that’s no way to build something successful. There had to be moderation tools to block users. So I decided to delete my [Bluesky] account, and focus on the already existing Nostr model, and fund that as best I could.”
Nostr is an abbreviation which stands for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays. Like HTTP or TCP-IP, Nostr is a protocol; an open standard that anyone can build with. So Nostr is not an app, platform or service where you have to register.
Designed for simplicity, Nostr enables censorship-resistant, globally decentralised publishing on the Web. It uses standard public-key cryptography to encrypt and sign these messages.
“The advantage is that X is no longer a publicly traded company with a profit incentive based on an advertising model,” Dorsey continued. “So Elon has made the right choice is. I just think he bought it at the wrong time in the market. You have to build a lot more than advertising to make that model work. You have to roll out subscriptions, which is what Elon is doing.”
That Musk laid off half his employees need not be a problem as AI tools emerge, Dorsey said. ‘It was a brand advertising company, and a brand advertising company needs a huge sales force. More than 50-60% of Twitter employees were in sales. These are people who talk to big brands all the time. Brands that ultimately set policy.”
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