There's a lot of misinformation circulating that obscures or softens Jack Dorsey's relationship to #Bluesky, Bluesky to Twitter, &/or Dorsey to Musk/Twitter.
On Dec 11, 2019, Dorsey announced on Twitter that he'd started Bluesky as part of Twitter, to serve Twitter, & funded by Twitter $, "to develop an open & decentralized standard for social media." (One already existed. Clearly the goal was one he controlled.)
"The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this [Bluesky] standard."
"The goal was to build a decentralized social network protocol that could eventually hook into Twitter — making it interoperable with other networks unrelated to the company...#Bluesky was set up as an independent entity producing nonproprietary open-source work — even as it was funded by Twitter"
Serving Musk's Twitter as a client remains a goal. Jack remains.
"[Q]:Dorsey is on your board and helped dream this all up....Has there been a change with his involvement in Bluesky?
Graber: Nope..."
"Bluesky was launched under Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s leadership back in 2019, & its initial manager was Parag Agrawal, then Twitter’s CTO and later Dorsey’s replacement."
It took Jack 2 years to "hand select" someone he wanted to put in charge of Twitter's #Bluesky project. That was Jay Graber, a cryptocurrency developer.
"Bluesky was formally organized as a public benefit LLC led by software engineer Jay Graber in late 2021, and as of April, it had received $13 million from Twitter."
(For two years, Jay Graber gave no interviews to the public. Zero transparency. So much for Dorsey's "out in the open" promises.)
During that time, Dorsey privately (later, publicly) lobbied for Musk, "the singular solution I trust" to take over Twitter.
Dorsey helped fund Musk's takeover to the tune of $1 billion, making him one of Musk's top backers (after Qatar).
"Musk reportedly ended the company’s ties with #Bluesky [sometime after] he took over Twitter."
But why decentralization?
Here's where Jack's longstanding "moral flexibility" towards anti-Semites & fascists comes in. He never watned to ban/moderate them.
"Dorsey imagined decentralization as a way to sidestep increasingly bitter content moderation debates among law- & policy-makers. Decentralized social networking protocols like ActivityPub (which powers Mastodon) already existed, and to the extent #Bluesky has a unique vision, it reflects ideas like Dorsey’s love of “algorithmic choice”
Dorsey will be happy with one arm of #Bluesky being used by his advisor Ali Alexander to plan the next armed Proud Boys/GOP attack on the Capitol building - and the other arm being used by you to fruitlessly bemoan SCOTUS corruption & the New Jim Crow voting restrictions, & what he & Musk undoubtedly delight, behind closed doors, in referring to as "woke nonsense." The $ & power asymmetry makes this work for the GOP.
No content moderation means no pesky Congressional hearings for him & Musk.
I have run out of spoons. I will try to clean up quotes etc. but probably won't be able to respond until tomorrow.
I'm tired of fighting the same battles against the same people only to have our allies resurrect the same villains. Aren't you tired?
Anyway, TL;DR
Yes, #Bluesky was a Twitter project & funded by Twitter, to serve Twitter as a client.
Yes, it's Jack Dorsey's project, yes he is still its funder/founder & Board Member.
Yes, he hand picked its CEO (a cryptocurrency dev).
Yes, it can still operate hand in glove with Twitter, & Dorsey & Musk are tied by bonds of $ & affinity.
No, Jack did not make sure Jay & the project operated with transparency out in the open.
Let's use strategic intelligence in advance, for once.
Thanks for your kind words. That is my prediction. Recall that Jack still holds $1billion investment in Musk's Twitter. As I understand it that would be the smart business case because it would maximize "Bluesky Services"/Dorsey's user base and therefore access to & ability to monetize users, either by accessing & selling data, or by showing them ads. IDK if it would also expose BS user data to Musk?
MAJOR diff from ActivityPub, surely part of why it was rejected.
@mempko @davetroy @heliomass
These two threads by Patrick (@raccoon) attempt to address in technical terms what Dorsey is doing with Bluesky's AT Protocol, & I think they are quite helpful & important.
He sees a battle by Jack to become (again) the default microblog indexer. This seems connected to the points about control made by Platypush founder re Jack walking away b/c he couldn't get control over ActivityPub specs/fediverse.
https://progressives.social/@raccoon@home.social/110305641135636105
https://progressives.social/@raccoon@home.social/110300577267176634
🧵 [4 / 7] detailing where a user's PDS (Personal Data Server) is hosted and how to cryptographically verify that the content inside really belongs to that user. When you dig through the source code, you'll find the DID resolver to be hardcoded(!) as "https;//plc.directory" in [3] . So, whoever controls that domain, also controls Bluesky. In other words, Bluesky is not decentralized, only distributed with a single point of failure, buried under several layers of marketing flimflam.
Very good thread, thank you.
No matter where you look, there are too many of these synergies.
If you only see the surface, you don't see anything.
Personally, I find it scary sometimes to look below the surface....
Too often, far too often, abysses open up.
In general, however, we should all learn more about exactly these abysses and be aware of them.
So thank you again for your work.
Thank you 💕@chargrille And let's treat #BlueSky as the #HostileActor it is and #defederate it like it should be - among with all the other reactionary shitheads and garbage...
https://github.com/greyhat-academy/lists.d/blob/main/mastodon.domains.block.list.tsv
Very enlightening, thank you. I knew Dorsey had screwed Glass over but I had no idea it was such a very personal betrayal. That is really fucked up. In my experience, people who show their character to be this bad usually get worse unless they hold themselves accountable to the person they screwed over.
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