Former Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey is promoting Bluesky as a rival to Elon Musk’s platform. The social media platform is only presently available on Android handsets.
The Jack Dorsey-founded company Bluesky, which boasts a progressive “social internet” that provides users more options and frees them from platforms, claims to do just that on its website. But access to the software, which is still in development, requires a special invite code.
Bluesky aims to provide users with an algorithmic choice, ultimately letting them choose from a marketplace of algorithms that let them take control of what appears in their feeds instead of having it dictated to them by a centralized authority.
The app first became accessible to iOS users in late February and remained in closed beta until the end of March. It promises a future of decentralized social networking and choose-your-own algorithms.
According to users, Bluesky’s current beta is pretty similar to a simplified version of Twitter. Many people view Bluesky as a metaphor for the potential for a Twitter reimagining, one in which the fundamental concepts of brief messages and a shared timeline are preserved but the problems with moderation and centralised control are resolved.
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The Bluesky project had originally been incubated since 2019
However, at launch, Bluesky is a stripped-down version of Twitter that lacks many of the features that make the social network what it is today, such as basic tools for monitoring likes or bookmarks, editing tweets, quote-tweeting, DM’s, hashtag use, and more.
It’s also implementing decentralization with its own protocol, the AT Protocol, rather than contributing to the existing workaround ActivityPub, which powers the open-source Twitter alternative Mastodon and a variety of other decentralized apps in the larger “Fediverse” — the term for these interconnected servers running open software used for web publishing.
The Bluesky initiative, which is now a public benefit corporation, was first developed within Twitter beginning in 2019 while Jack Dorsey was CEO. Twitter has also supplied financial support for years.
Though it was founded long before the firm was sold to current owner Elon Musk, the two executives had recently explored the notion of an open-source protocol over text messaging prior to Musk’s Twitter takeover.
Dorsey went to Twitter shortly after stepping down as CEO to openly discuss Bluesky, calling it “an open decentralized standard for social media.” Bluesky, he argued, would limit the capacity of huge, centralized platforms — such as Twitter — to have so much influence over which users and communities might participate in speech and who would be accountable for filtering such content.
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What to know about Bluesky
Bluesky is an initiative to create a decentralized social network protocol that allows various social networks, each with its own curation and moderation processes, to connect through an open standard. An “application” is any social network that uses the protocol. The protocol does not make use of blockchain technology.
Bluesky’s first early protocol release was the Authenticated Data Experiment (ADX), which was released in mid-2022. It makes use of personal data repositories maintained by individual users, which social networks may or may not support.
It is intended to allow users to exchange messages or engagement features across networks without compromising the user’s home network moderation since the data is kept in the personal data repository, and networks may limit which communications they permit. In October 2022, Bluesky published a simplified version of the AT Protocol together with technical documentation.