Jack Dorsey has hardly posted anything since January on Twitter, the social media platform he helped create. In two of his last tweetthe billionaire entrepreneur promoted an app for Nostr, a new social network.
“#nostr is now officially on the Apple App Store,” he wrote. “and Google Play Store.”
Since then, Mr. Dorsey posted an average of 59 times a day to Nostr, including messages aimed at Twitter and its new owner, Elon Musk.
“This is weak,” wrote Mr. Dorsey last month on Nostr about Mr. Musk to prevent Twitter users from linking to Substack, a newsletter platform that a Twitter competitor founded.
Mr. Dorsey has also started using another new social network, Bluesky. On Saturday, in response to a Bluesky user’s question whether Mr. Musk was the best steward for Twitter, Mr. Dorsey answered flatly, “No.”
“It all went south,” he said of what Mr. Musk had done on Twitter. “But it happened and all we can do now is build something to prevent this from ever happening again.”
Mr Dorsey, 46, the Bitcoin-loving tech who was Twitter’s most prominent face for many years, seemed to fade from the public eye after Mr Musk bought the social media company for $44 billion last year. But Mr. Dorsey’s recent and abundant activity on Nostr and Bluesky indicates he still has a lot to say.
Much of what Mr. Dorsey posts aligns with his interests in cryptocurrency and open source technology, making code public for people to tinker with and reuse. But he has also openly criticized Musk’s ownership of Twitter, making him the latest in a long line of Silicon Valley founders expressing disappointment at those taking over their companies.
Mr. Dorsey also puts his money where his posts are by supporting Twitter’s new competitors. In 2019, when Mr. Dorsey was the CEO of Twitter, he funded Bluesky as a project to decentralize all social networks by simply sharing posts and users. And in December, he donated 14 Bitcoin, worth about $250,000 at the time, to Nostr’s pseudonymous creator, who goes by the name “fiatjaf.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised if he withholds his vote from Twitter on some principle,” Jason Goldman, a member of Twitter’s founding team and also a board member, said of Mr. Dorsey’s recent actions. He added that in his latest remarks, Mr Dorsey “recognizes how badly things have gone for Twitter under Elon Musk.”
Mr Dorsey and Mr Musk did not respond to requests for comment.
Mr. Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter in 2006, served as the company’s CEO for eight years during two separate periods. And while the social network’s success turned him into a billionaire, he seemed disillusioned with Twitter’s course in recent years.
Mr Dorsey, an advocate of freedom of expression, complained, among other things, that Twitter had become too powerful to dictate what kind of posts should remain online and what should be removed. He also blamed Wall Street for turning Twitter away from its primary role as a communications platform, pressuring it to make money and ultimately sell itself to the highest bidder.
In November 2021, Mr. Dorsey, who also runs payments start-up Block (formerly known as Square), stepped down as CEO of Twitter. He left the board last year after Mr Musk made a bid for the company.
Mr Dorsey has since said Twitter should have been built as a different kind of social network: a decentralized network. Unlike regular social platforms, which use private code that they control, decentralized social networks make their systems public, potentially allowing users to build their own apps and communities. That way, no entity can impose rules on what can or can’t be said on these networks, and users can customize their experiences.
“The problem today is that we have companies that own both” the technology and the algorithms that render messages, leaving “ultimately one person in charge of what is available and seen, or not,” Mr Dorsey wrote in a December blog post he shared on Nostr. “By definition, this is a single point of failure no matter how big the person is, and over time the public conversation will break down and could lead to increased scrutiny by governments and corporations around the world.”
Mike Masnick, the editor of the TechDirt blog and an expert on technology policy, said decentralized networks “allow for a lot more experimentation and trying to do things in a different way.” But he cautioned that they also face challenges in complying with content moderation laws, such as the Digital Services Act in Europe or US copyright law.
Mr. Dorsey has been interested in decentralized social platforms since at least 2019, when he started working on Bluesky, and has a long-standing interest in Bitcoin, a popular cryptocurrency. He joined Nostr in December – the acronym stands for “notes and other things sent by relay”. Nostr also allows users to send each other small cryptocurrency payments called “zaps”.
Fiatjaf, the creator of Nostr, said in an email that Mr. Dorsey’s support “has been a game changer, but much less in terms of funding than in the amount of awareness and enthusiasm he’s generated about Nostr.” He added: “We hope that eventually the financing part will play a bigger role.”
Bluesky, who declined to comment, said in a blog post that Mr Dorsey will remain on the board. (Twitter broke off relations with Bluesky after Mr. Musk took over.)
Mr. Dorsey and Mr. Musk have had an up and down relationship for a long time. When Mr. Musk made a bid on Twitter last year, Mr. Dorsey supported the effort.
“Basically, I don’t believe anyone should own or control Twitter,” Mr. Dorsey continued Twitter at the time. “However, to solve the problem of being a company, Elon is the unique solution that I trust. I trust in his mission to expand the light of consciousness.”
But after Mr. Musk bought Twitter in October, he immediately fired many of Mr. Dorsey’s handpicked executives. Musk has since laid off about 75 percent of Twitter’s workforce, refused to pay rent on some of his offices, and made sweeping and sometimes contradictory changes to content moderation policies.
As Mr. Dorsey posted on Nostr and then Bluesky, his critiques of Mr. Musk and Twitter piled up.
In some posts, Mr Dorsey has rebuked Twitter for its repeated service interruptions. Last month, he suggested on Nostr that Twitter users could leave the platform if they wanted to. He also mocked Mr Musk’s move to charge Twitter users $8 a month for a check mark, a symbol that once denoted a verified identity on the platform.
But Mr. Dorsey’s sharpest assessment of Mr. Musk’s leadership came over the weekend on Bluesky, where Mr. Dorsey has more than 11,000 followers. (He has more than six million followers on Twitter.)
On Saturday, Mr. Dorsey responded to several Bluesky users who asked him about the sale of Twitter and the changes the company has undergone in recent months. He said decentralized social networks were the best defense against corporate raiders and added that Mr Musk “should have walked away” from buying Twitter.
Mr Goldman, one of the Bluesky users who questioned Mr Dorsey over the weekend, said the comments fail to take into account how Mr Dorsey ran Twitter for years and is also responsible for where the company has ended up.
“He blames the inevitability of market forces despite leading the company as executive chairman or CEO for more than a decade,” Mr. Goldman said of Mr. Dorsey.
On Sunday, Mr. Dorsey returned to posting on Nostr, where he has 134,000 followers. He said he regretted taking Twitter public and turning it into a business in the first place.
He also elaborated on his criticism of Mr. Musk by praising the Twitter owner’s efforts to make the site less dependent on brand advertising, which makes up the bulk of the company’s revenue. And he encouraged Mr. Musk to consider making Twitter more open, using decentralized technology or “open protocol.”
“I understand the urgency and hasty action,” Mr Dorsey wrote. “I hope he eventually realizes that relying on an open protocol like this solves a lot of the problems and makes some pretty incredible things possible. We will see.”
