Jack Dorsey weighed in on people leaving one platform he founded (X, formerly Twitter) to join another he helped create (BlueSky).
“I think people are running away from X, rather than running to something on Bluesky,” the Twitter cofounder said in a recent episode of the “In Good Company” podcast when asked why Bluesky is growing so fast.
“That’s not a great way to build a product, unfortunately. We want people that are running to us for a particular thing that they couldn’t do before,” he added.
Bluesky was originally formed in 2019 as an internal project at Twitter, where Dorsey was still CEO, but launched as a stand-alone public benefit corporation in 2021.
Dorsey stepped down as Twitter’s CEO in 2021, and his tenure on its board of directors ended the following year.
“Bluesky has built something that I wanted it to build and I’m excited about, which is this algorithm store, being able to choose your own algorithms,” Dorsey said.
“That is a reason why people will run to it eventually, and I think why people run to these services eventually because they get more agency and more control — but it’s not something that people care about right now,” he added. “What they care about right now is not being in X for whatever personal reason.”
Elon Musk famously bought Twitter for $44 billion in 2022 and has since made a number of changes. He renamed it X, ousted several executives and laid off around 80% of its staff, brought back previously banned users, and started selling blue-check verification.
Bluesky saw a surge in user signups in November amid droves of users leaving X following the election of President Trump, whom Musk financially backed.
BlueSky officially launched in February 2024 with around 3 million users and grew to 25.9 million users by the end of the year, the company said.
Dorsey resigned from Bluesky’s board of directors last year and criticized the company for “literally repeating all the mistakes” that Twitter made.
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told CNBC in November that the platform is “billionaire-proof.”
“What happened to Twitter couldn’t happen to us in the same ways, because you would always have the option to immediately move without having to start over,” she said. “We’re building an open-source social network that anyone can take into their own hands and build on, and it’s something that is radically different from anything that’s been done in social media before.”
Graber also told CNBC that Bluesky won’t let advertisers show users algorithmically recommended ads.
The company published a blog post in May outlining its product road map that mentioned it was working on improving its custom feeds with ideas like in-app feed creation and the ability for users to submit posts to feeds, curate submissions, and manually moderate what they see.
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