When @jack was CEO of Twitter and Trump was president there were many calls to ban Trump from Twitter. There were many people demanding Trump be removed because either he violated the TOS or because they saw Trump’s tweets as dangerous.

While catching up over kombucha at the Square office, Jack mentioned some of these conversations and how there were compelling arguments on both sides. He asked lots of people what they thought twitter should do. So he asked me about Trump and other accounts, like Richard Spencer’s and the alt-right.

I’m very anti-Trump but I said I thought Jack shouldn’t ban him, because he’d face a shareholder revolt. Everyone said that it was Jack deciding things at Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg for the meta empire, but that wasn’t really true. The real power is in the money and that’s shareholders and advertisers.

I can only imagine what a hard and stressful job it would be to decide what can and cannot be said in the public sphere, as twitter effectively was at its height. It was an impossible job, one which shouldn’t exist. Jack did incredibly good at managing to find balance, and everyone hated his decisions because there was no right answer.

The reason for Bluesky, and now Nostr is to make it so no company or person has that kind of control. That the public sphere that is social media shouldn’t owned or controlled by any corporation or government. When something of value is held together without being ultimately owned by a person, organization, or government, the it is held in common.

What we’re building together on Nostr is a commons. By making it a commons that’s held up by our software and contrbution as users, we escape the trap that caught twitter.

A commons where we come together to make and sustain space.

A commons where we can do business freely without someone who can arbitrarily shut us down.

A commons where groups of users can decide the rules for themselves, and everyone doesn’t need to follow some universal set of opaque rules.