The Weekend #181—An open protocol was the only solution

Jack Dorsey on Twitter's dilemma

Earlier this week, Bluesky, the decentralized social media platform that spun out of Twitter, confirmed that Jack Dorsey was no longer on the board. (Notably, he also deleted his account.) Soon after, Mike Solana published an in-depth chat with Jack on Pirate Wires (via Jun Hiraga).

Here are some highlights (w/select curation from Jun):

On why he started Bluesky in the first place

We were doing something similar to what we did at Square at the time, which was fund a bunch of open source developers to work on the Bitcoin protocol, because it directly benefited everything Square was doing in terms of money movement.

I wanted to do something similar with Twitter, because it was the only way to get out of a lot of the issues we were seeing around the decisions we had to make on accounts, and the pressures we had as a public company based entirely on a brand advertising model. The only way to do it was to remove the protocol layer from Twitter and make it something we didn't control.

So what if we created a team that was independent to us, that built a protocol that Twitter could use, and then build on top of? Then we wouldn’t have the same liabilities, because the protocol would be an open standard, like HTTP or SMTP. Twitter would become the interface, and we could build a valuable business by competing to be the best view on top of this massive corpus of conversation that's happening in real time.

Where things started to go wrong

It was, we're going to set this money aside, and whoever we hire can determine how best to build this protocol. In Square's case — Square Crypto, which became Spiral — Steve [Lee] decided he wanted to stay within the company, but he and his team would make all the decisions around what they work on.

In Jay's case, she decided she wanted to set up a completely different entity, a B Corp. That accelerated even more when Elon made the acquisition offer, and it very quickly turned into more of a survival thing, where she felt she needed to build a company, and build a model around it, get VCs into it, get a board, issue stock, and all these things. That was the first time I felt like, whoa, this isn’t going in a direction I'm really happy with, or that wasn’t the intention. This was supposed to be an open source protocol that Twitter could eventually utilize.

…

This tool was designed such that it had, you know, it was a base level protocol. It had a reference app on top. It was designed to be controlled by the people. I think the greatest idea — which we need — is an algorithm store, where you choose how you see all the conversations. But little by little, they started asking Jay and the team for moderation tools, and to kick people off. And unfortunately they followed through with it.

That was the second moment I thought, uh, nope. This is literally repeating all the mistakes we made as a company. This is not a protocol that's truly decentralized. It’s another app. It's another app that's just kind of following in Twitter's footsteps, but for a different part of the population.

Everything we wanted around decentralization, everything we wanted in terms of an open source protocol, suddenly became a company with VCs and a board. That's not what I wanted, that's not what I intended to help create.

Why a protocol and ultimately going private was Twitter’s only defense

Yeah, and we had an activist come in, by the way. And he sat on our board for a year and a half. We didn't have dual-class voting shares, we had no defense whatsoever. So my only path out that I could see was: we have to be on a protocol that we can't remove content from. We have to move away from this dependency on brand advertisement. We were moving into commerce, direct response, and payments. You can see all those experiments were going on before the company was sold. And we must move to a position where our policies are actually matching the fact that from a technology standpoint, we can't take the same actions that we did in the past, pure and simple.

As a public company, that's very hard to do, because every move you make is scrutinized and it reflects in your stock price. So a big part of it was our model. A big part of it was the company was much bigger than it should have been. I was extremely challenged by my board. The board has always been a problem at that company, and I was happy to see it end. But there was only one way for it to end, which is going private. And I think that's the greatest act.

On a future built on identity

I hate to sound like a broken record, but one of the beauties of Nostr is you have these public-private key pairs, so it confirms identity. I think a confirmed identity that you own, that is not given to you by a government or corporation, that you truly own, is the way through this, because you can verify authenticity.

No one knows my secret key on Nostr. They know my public key, we know the math equations to match the two, but I can digitally sign my messages so people can know that these things are coming from me.

Now, videos created by third parties are another thing, another problem space I don't have an answer to, but I think it has to start with your own identity, and who owns your identity. Right now, all the companies own our identities. To me, that's super scary because again, can they be compromised? Can a government hold them to account? And the answer is absolutely yes, and you're seeing how that has played out over the years, and certainly in the present, and that will continue into the future.

As you’d expect, he also talks a bit about Elon’s takeover and approach to free speech and X.

Definitely worth a read.

Enjoy the weekend!