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Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey on Friday (August 18) said that he had deleted his Instagram account.
Dorsey made the announcement about quitting Instagram in a post on decentralised social media Nostr. Dorsey said that he was deleting the account after years of non-use.
“Don’t know why it took me so long,” he wrote. “I think I was in the first 10 accounts on the platform, and one of the first angel investors. [Instagram co-founder] Kevin [Systrom] was our intern at Odeo,” noted Dorsey in his post. (Odeo was the organisation founded in 2005 by Noah Glass and Evan Williams, that later reformed as the Obvious Corporation which ended up becoming the birthplace of Twitter.)
He also said that he stopped using the app after it was acquired by Facebook (now Meta).
Dorsey and Systrom had been friends since they were working together at Odeo. At one point, Twitter even tried acquiring Instagram. But the attempt was rejected. Dorsey found out later that Instagram was being sold to Facebook for USD 1 billion. He then stopped using Instagram reportedly because he was hurt that Systrom didn’t tell him directly.
Dorsey hasn’t posted anything on Instagram since April 9, 2012. It has been reported in media that it was on that day that Dorsey found out that Instagram was acquired by Facebook.
Dorsey quitting Instagram has come at a time when the photo-sharing app is competing with Twitter through its own app Threads.
The former Twitter CEO has been backing other social media networks after and even during he was at Twitter. He incubated Bluesky while serving as Twitter’s CEO. Bluesky said last year that it received USD 13 million from Twitter to kickstart its research and development (R&D).
Dorsey has also put his weight behind Nostr, the decentralised network protocol. He donated about USD 245,000 in bitcoin. He regularly posts on Nostr.
Twitter is now owned by billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk who has chosen to rebrand it as ‘X’. The huge changes, including massive job cuts, Musk made in Twitter had initially scared the markets as well as advertisers. Questions on stability and even future of the platform were raised.