If the dark clouds hanging over Twitter have you in a funk, then you’ll be happy to hear that blue skies are on the way. A social media startup called Bluesky Social has hit the U.S. App Store, and it is backed by Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey.
The foundation of Bluesky is the AT Protocol, which powers a “federated network” of interconnected sites. According to the startup’s website, the AT Protocol provides a “foundation for social networking which gives creators independence from platforms, developers the freedom to build, and users a choice in their experience.”
Translation: Bluesky will aggregate content from across the social web in one convenient location. It will also give users ownership of their accounts, allowing them to port identities from one platform to another without ceding control to corporations.
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In theory, that’s how Bluesky works, but the upstart platform has been on a long journey since its genesis in 2019. Initially, Bluesky was incubated within Twitter. Dorsey, then the Twitter CEO, gave the project his full support. He tapped his CTO, Parag Agarwal, to head Bluesky’s development.
Dorsey stepped down from his lofty role in November 2021. Only a few months later, he joined Bluesky as a board member. Meanwhile, with Agarwal taking over as Twitter CEO, the social company continued to champion its decentralized social media project.
After Elon Musk acquired Twitter, he fired Agarwal and installed himself at the top of the company’s corporate ladder. Musk set out to realize his own vision of Twitter, but Dorsey told the self-styled Chief Twit that a new social platform is needed. “It can’t be a company. This is why I left,” Dorsey wrote in a text to Musk. “I believe it must be an open source protocol, funded by a foundation of sorts that doesn’t own the protocol, only advances it. A bit like what Signal has done. It can’t have an advertising model.”
Dorsey, Agarwal, and the Bluesky team aren’t the only developers who are exploring the potential of decentralized social media. Mastodon, a service built on the ActivityPub protocol, emerged as a popular Twitter alternative during the early days of Musk’s reign of terror.
Mastodon grew quickly, reaching a high-water mark of 2.5 million active users, but its popularity has since waned. It has been criticized for its dull design, and it lost about 700,000 users over a one-month span.
Bluesky will now have a chance to provide a more compelling user experience than its rivals. It can be downloaded for free from the App Store, but since it is still in its private beta phase, users are required to obtain invite codes before they can create their Bluesky accounts.
The Dorsey-backed startup may be one of the most compelling Twitter alternatives in development, but it’s hardly alone. Another startup, tentatively titled T2, raised a $1.1 million funding round at the start of 2023.
