Jack Dorsey has left the board of social networking service Bluesky, which he helped fund and popularise a year ago in the wake of regret over the sale of Twitter to Elon Musk.

The Twitter co-founder took to the Musk-owned platform, now rebranded X, to tout his new philanthropic grants to open internet protocols, which he described as “freedom technology”. He also added X to that class of tech, elaborating only to say that corporations can build upon open protocols, too.

Dorsey whittled down the list of people he follows on X to just three: Musk, Edward Snowden and Stella Assange, wife of the imprisoned WikiLeaks publisher. It suggested an apparent warming of relations between X’s owner and Dorsey, who had posted on Bluesky a year ago that “it all went south” after Musk’s takeover and radical transformation of Twitter.

Bluesky is a network and protocol launched to pursue Dorsey’s platonic ideal for Twitter as a service without central control, and it opened to all interested users in February.

The social service made a splash in its early days as a way to escape the upheaval at Twitter in Musk’s early days, though it has since been overshadowed by the launch of Meta Platforms’ Threads as the most viable alternative. Dorsey responded to a question on X as to whether he was still on the Bluesky board with a “no”. — (c) 2024 Bloomberg LP