to be a company, because you have corporate incentives when it wants to be a protocol,” Dorsey says. He notes that Twitter was at the mercy of its advertisers — something Musk also faces despite taking Twitter, now called X, private. Musk has even threatened advertisers with lawsuits over ad boycotts driven by their concerns over X’s lack of moderation and controversial comments Musk has made.
While Dorsey understands that catering to advertisers was correct for the business and for Twitter’s stock price, it was the “wrong thing for the internet.”
“They can just remove the money — your money — and your revenue goes down completely,” Dorsey says of advertisers’ power. “So if [Twitter] were an open protocol, if it were truly an open project, you could build a business on top of it, and you could build a very healthy business on top of it.”
Dorsey eventually funded an effort to build an open protocol inside Twitter, which later spun out to become Bluesky. But Dorsey believes Bluesky faces the same challenges as traditional social media because of its structure — it’s funded by VCs, like other startups. Already, it has had to bow to government requests and faced moderation challenges, he points out.
“I think [Bluesky CEO] Jay [Graber] is great. I think the team is great,” Dorsey told Henshaw-Plath, “but the structure is what I disagree with … I want to push the energy in a different direction, which is more like Bitcoin, which is completely open and not owned by anyone from a protocol layer. That’s what I see in Nostr as well,” he says. “That’s where I want to push my energy … into the more corporate direction, even if it is a public benefit corporation,” Dorsey adds.
In later episodes, Henshaw-Plath will interview others who have insight into how social media and tech have evolved, including journalists like Kara Swisher and Taylor Lorenz; former Twitter head of Trust and Safety Yoel Roth; Substack co-founder Chris Best; Medium CEO Tony Stubblebine; Cory Doctorow (who coined the term “enshittification” to describe the state of much of the current web); and renowned misinformation researcher Renée DiResta.
The team at “andOtherStuff” is also working on a social media “Bill of Rights,” says Henshaw-Plath, which spells out what social media platforms need to provide in areas like privacy, security, interoperability, transparency, identity, self-governance, and portability.
This, they believe, will help platforms, including Bluesky and others, remain accountable to their users despite any outside pressure.
Dorsey’s initial investment has gotten the new nonprofit up and running, and he worked on some of its initial iOS apps. Meanwhile, others are contributing their time to build Android versions, developer tools, and different social media experiments.
More is still in the works, says Henshaw-Plath.
“There are things that we’re not ready to talk about yet that’ll be very exciting,” he teases.
