Bluesky is seeking a replacement board member in the wake of Dorsey’s departure.
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey is no longer on the board of Bluesky, the decentralized social media platform he helped start. In two posts today, Bluesky thanked Dorsey while confirming his departure and adding that it’s searching for a new board member “who shares our commitment to building a social network that puts people in control of their experience.”
The posts come a day after an X user asked Dorsey if he was still on the company’s board, and Dorsey responded, without further elaboration, “no.” As TechCrunch points out, Dorsey was on a tear yesterday, unfollowing all but three accounts on X while referring to Elon Musk’s platform as “freedom technology.”
Neither Bluesky nor Dorsey himself seem to have said how or why he left the board. For now, two board members remain: CEO, Jay Graeber, and Jabber / XMPP inventor Jeremie Miller. Dorsey originally backed Bluesky in 2019 as a project to develop an open-source social media standard that he wanted Twitter to move to. He later joined its board of directors when it split from Twitter in 2022.
But Dorsey hadn’t seemingly been a particularly active participant at the company. In March, when The Verge’s Nilay Patel asked Graeber for Decoder about his level of involvement with Bluesky, she said she gets “some feedback occasionally,” but implied he’s otherwise “being Jack Dorsey on a cloud,” as Nilay put it. Months before that interview, Dorsey had closed his Bluesky account.
Bluesky did not immediately respond to The Verge’s request for comment.
Update May 5th, 2024, 4:37PM ET: Updated with Bluesky’s confirmation of Dorsey’s departure from its board.
