Bluesky, the Twitter clone that launched last year by invitation-only and recently opened its doors to anyone with an Internet connection, has appointed Techdirt founder and editor Mike Masnick to its board of directors.
In a statement posted online Thursday, officials at Bluesky recognized Masnick as the author of the white paper “Protocols, Not Platforms,” which they say helped inspire the Bluesky initiative.
Executives at Bluesky were already leaning on Masnick for advice — he was one of the earliest users of the platform, and counts more than 63,000 followers as of Tuesday afternoon — so adding him to the company’s board was a natural extension of that relationship.
“His deep understanding of our approach — iterating towards widespread adoption while enabling trust & safety in a decentralized system — makes him an invaluable addition to our board,” the company said in a statement.
Officials said they were excited to lean further on Masnick’s “expertise as a reporter, editor and publisher,” though it wasn’t clear how these elements will help Bluesky further its platform or service initiatives.
Masnick has a long history of covering the technology space as a journalist and critic, publishing on his Techdirt blog multiple times a day for nearly three decades.
Last year, his efforts were rewarded by the New York Times with a lengthy profile that included favorable mentions from key individuals involved in tech, media, entertainment and policy, including Senator Ron Wyman and Hollywood actor-director Alex Winter.
The Times also noted that, through his other ventures, Masnick has accepted financial contributions from tech companies like Google and Yelp, despite covering them on his blog.
“The financial entanglement might get him in trouble at a traditional journalism organization, but not at a blog where he is the boss,” the Times reported, adding that Masnick pledged sponsors “never have editorial control” over what appears on Techdirt.
Whether those financial incentives have swayed his coverage is unknown, though it doesn’t appear to be the case. On Tuesday, Masnick said he intends to take the same approach with Bluesky, offloading stories about the social platform to other reporters when he feels it appropriate to do so, though he didn’t elaborate.
When asked by this reporter if his board responsibilities will take priority over his blog, Masnick said he didn’t feel the characterization was a “fair assessment” of the situation.
“TechDirt is still my main focus by far,” Masnick said. “It’s just that I will disclose when necessary and in cases where it’s clear that it’s an issue I should not be writing/editing, someone else will do so.”
It will be immensely difficult for him to proceed in the dual role without at least the appearance of conflict, especially given some of his decisions in the past.
Two years ago, after X (then Twitter) was acquired by tech mogul Elon Musk, Masnick announced Techdirt would stop directly embedding X posts directly into articles, opting instead of screen captures of posts.
“I’m disappointed that we need to do this, as embedding is a nice feature, and a core part of how the internet should work,” Masnick wrote. “And while I’m not expecting Twitter to just disappear overnight…the odds of it happening have jumped up to a degree that we need to plan ahead, and this is how we’ll be doing it going forward.”
Several months later, Masnick said TechDirt was leaving X entirely after the platform began charging for access to its application programming interface (API), which broke certain features associated with WordPress blogs.
“Elon has every right to cut us off from posting our content to Twitter,” Masnick said in a note to readers. “But, really, our Twitter feed drove little to no traffic anyway, and it has limited value. It seems like a bizarre decision to cut off a service that powers 43 percent of the world’s websites, making it way more difficult for those services to put their content on Twitter, but Elon — I’m repeatedly told — is some sort of intergalactic business genius, and I’m just some guy who writes words on the Internet.”
Masnick is no longer “just some guy who writes words on the Internet.” He now has a tremendously influential position at a tech startup that could be the biggest competitor to X (and one that could eventually succeed it, should Musk continue to dismantle X through his erratic behavior).
It is understandable why Masnick would find the opportunity hard to pass up — as he puts it, Bluesky has turned many of his ideas into a reality, and he has been invited to be part of that magic.
But it comes at a cost. Whenever Techdirt covers a social platform — be it Facebook, Instagram, X or anything that spins up in the future — the publication will have to contend with criticism that its founder works for a competitor.
That said, Masnick has proven that if anyone can figure out how to strike a balance between the two, it is him, even if that balance doesn’t follow the conventional rules of journalism.
