The demand for an alternative to Twitter continues to rise and one app is making the right noises — Jack Dorsey-backed Bluesky. The company has said that its community has crossed 50,000 users while app intelligence company data.ai show that the decentralised social networking platform has seen over 375,000 worldwide installs on iOS as of April 26.
What is Bluesky?
Prominent Twitter users Dril, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Christopher McQuarrie and Chrissy Teigen have joined Bluesky, which functions like any other social media site but the process running in the background is different.
First, you sign up with your email, choose a handle and then write your posts or scroll through the timeline. Before we come to the decentralised technology at play, general users need to know that they can enjoy the same core features that Twitter offers, like the ability to post short text and photo updates, reply to each other and share other people’s posts.
The app is still in development but can be downloaded on iOS and Android devices. Bluesky has taken an invite-only approach to ensure its servers don’t get overwhelmed.
Who owns Bluesky?
Twitter founder Jack Dorsey announced plans for Bluesky in a 2019 tweet. At that point he was still the CEO of Twitter. He had said that the goal was for Twitter to ultimately become a client of the Bluesky standard..
“Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open-source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralised standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard,” Dorsey had tweeted.
Bluesky received financial support from Twitter but now it operates separately and created its own LLC in 2022. The name of the app came from Dorsey’s desire of freeing Twitter’s bird mascot to a blue sky.
Chrissy Teigen, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Christopher McQuarrie are some of the famous names using Bluesky
How is it different from Twitter?
Jay Graber, the CEO of Bluesky, said in a blog post that the company “chose a very simple microblogging format to show how Twitter could have been built on atproto (the AT protocol)”. If you go beyond the interface, there are some big differences.
On Twitter users see mostly what the algorithm chooses to show them. Making Bluesky different is the way it creates a system where people can select from a number of recommendation algorithms to control their experience.
Unlike Twitter, Bluesky wants to be a decentralised system. This means that users can build their own apps and communities within it. It has been designed so that no individual could create rules for the entire Bluesky community. “We believe decentralisation is a means to an end. The end goal is to provide choice to users, freedom to developers, and control to creators. The AT Protocol is a fresh start for social because it creates a composable ecosystem where the convenience and scale of centralised services can be combined with the openness and resilience of decentralised protocols,” said Graber.
Operating on an “open protocol” is unusual. At the moment, you tweet and it shows up on Twitter. If you post on Instagram, the pictures appear on Instagram. But these cannot be easily cross-posted across social networks. Bluesky believes that it could someday allow posts to flow between different social media platforms.
Why is it becoming popular?
Twitter owner Elon Musk while trying to save the platform from a financial crisis has brought in several changes, and some of them are unwanted. After he fired more than half of Twitter employees, a lot has changed around content moderation. Further, he played around with the verification system, making it easy for anyone with $8 (upwards of Rs 650 in India) a month to get a blue check mark, leading to confusion as well as chances of an increase in the spread of misinformation and hate speech on the platform.
Equation between Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk
They were once on the same page and when Musk was planning to acquire Twitter, he received Dorsey’s endorsement: “Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.” Recently, on Bluesky, Dorsey had something different to say… that he didn’t think Musk “acted right” after pursuing the site and “it all went south”. Dorsey said: “I think he should have walked away and paid the $1b (to terminate the deal).”
Are there other Twitter alternatives?
Yes, the list includes Hive, CounterSocial and Post but the most popular so far has been Mastodon. Bluesky is on an upward trajectory.
