• Bluesky was launched to become the open source protocol layer for social media platforms, but the team ended up “literally repeating all the mistakes we made” at Twitter

• Jack’s challenges at Twitter: a hostile board with an activist member, the “core, critical sin” of basing Twitter's model on brand advertising, and his plan for never having to ban an account after Trump

• Taking Twitter private was the only way the much less censorious version of the platform would survive

• There’s “absolutely no way” social media companies remain censorship resistant without moving to open protocols. “We need to change the foundation everything is built on”

• Jack’s prediction for the price of Bitcoin in 2030

There is perhaps no leader in technology more misunderstood than Jack Dorsey, the enigmatic founder and (twice) former CEO of Twitter, now X. Through Covid, and America’s first real era of broad, highly-politicized social media thought policing, he became the face of censorship for large swaths of the country. But from his second appearance before Congress, where he made enemies of both the left and right in one of the more inspiring displays of disrespect for would-be tyrants I’ve ever seen, and in light of his committed, years-long focus on anti-authoritarian technologies, that simple story of free speech villainy never made sense.

Jack recently deleted his account on Bluesky, once pitched — by him — as social media’s decentralized solution to censorship, and left the company’s board. I reached out and asked him why, which is where our call began. In a rare, far-reaching interview, what follows is a missing chapter of internet history that sheds light not only on Bluesky, but Twitter, X, and the past five years of censorship and backlash. Because of vulnerabilities designed into the technology, social media, in its current, centralized form, can’t survive the global war on speech. The future will be decentralized, or it won’t be free.

-Solana