Mike Masnick, founder and CEO of Floor64 and Techdirt editor, has announced he is joining the board of social media platform Bluesky.

Bluesky is decentralized social media platform that aims to provide a Twitter-like experience, sans the drama. According to Masnick, that’s a big reason for his joining the board.

I am excited to announce that I am joining the board of Bluesky, where I will be providing advice and guidance to the company to help it achieve its vision of a more open, more competitive, more decentralized online world.

Masnick points out how far today’s internet has strayed from the vision of its early founders of a decentralized system.

The early internet had tremendous promise as a decentralized system that enabled anyone to build what they wanted on a global open network, opening up all sorts of possibilities for human empowerment and creativity.

But over the last couple of decades, the internet has moved away from that democratizing promise. Instead, it has been effectively taken over by a small number of giant companies with centralized, proprietary, closed systems that have supplanted the more open network we were promised.

Masnick believes Bluesky is the best option for providing a decentralized social experience, one that is very close to what he wrote about nearly a decade ago.

For me to get involved with Bluesky now, to help its efforts, is a logical next step, given how we got here. Nine years ago, right here on Techdirt, I wrote about a “half-baked” idea of separating out the “protocol” of social media from the companies providing social media services. And, almost exactly five years ago, the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University published my much deeper dive on “Protocols, Not Platforms.”

Bluesky is the service that is coming closest to making the vision I articulated in my paper a reality. And while I’ve offered informal support and advice in the past when asked, I’ve never had any formal or official connection with the company, until now. When the opportunity arose to join the board it seemed, after some thoughtful conversations with Jay and others on the board and at the company, to make sense to make that relationship more formal, allowing me to better help Bluesky make this vision a reality.

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber welcomed Masnick joining the board.

“Mike’s work has been an inspiration to us from the start,” says Graber. “Having him join our board feels like a natural progression of our shared vision for a more open internet. His perspective will help ensure we’re building something that truly serves users as we continue to evolve Bluesky and the AT Protocol.”