Jack Dorsey Says He Will Give $1 Million Per Year To Signal App

Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey said in a blog post on Tuesday that he will give a grant of $1 million per year to encrypted messaging app Signal, the first in a series of grants he plans to make to support 'open internet development.' Reuters reports: Social media should not be 'owned by a single company or group of companies,' and needs to be 'resilient to corporate and government influence,' Dorsey wrote in a post on Revue, a newsletter service owned by Twitter. [Editor's note: The post has been moved to Pastebin since Revue is shutting down early next year.] TechCrunch adds: Dorsey said that his hope to build a Twitter according to his wishes died in 2020 with the entrance of an unnamed activist investor. 'I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company,' he wrote. The principles he had hoped to build on -- resilience to corporate and government control, user-controlled content with no exceptions and algorithmic moderation -- are not present in today's Twitter, nor in the one he led, he admitted. Even so, he wrote that, contrary to the insinuations accompanying the so-called Twitter Files, 'there was no ill intent or hidden agendas, and everyone acted according to the best information we had at the time.'

As to actual solutions, Dorsey is of course hard at work (or at least present) at Bluesky, but he calls out Mastodon and Matrix as other worthwhile avenues for development: 'There will be many more. One will have a chance at becoming a standard like HTTP or SMTP. This isn't about a 'decentralized Twitter.' This is a focused and urgent push for a foundational core technology standard to make social media a native part of the internet.'

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