“It’s a new social network and there are a lot of things that are still in their infancy. It is growing. It is neither a panacea nor an idyllic place. The fact is, it’s very easy to feel better than on Twitter. » This is the summary of Ugo sin Hache, creator of content for people with disabilities, about Bluesky, a platform which has gained more than two million users since the victory of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. The latest, in the last 24 hours.
Bluesky is a microblogging network that looks a lot like Twitter (renamed X by Elon Musk) and works almost the same as Twitter. In fact, it was born in 2019 as an experiment within Twitter itself: how this same platform would work if it were built on a decentralized and open source protocol.
These features mean that any user or company can create different applications, such as custom algorithms, highly encrypted messaging systems, content filters or different moderation policies on the same core network. All this without the control or authorization of the company that launched and runs this mainnet.
The lawsuit was launched when Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, was still at the head of this platform. Dorsey had complained for years about the power investors had gained in making decisions about Twitter’s usability and increasingly supported decentralized technologies, such as those underpinning cryptocurrencies.
The proof of concept was a success and Bluesky was born as an independent project in 2021. The company continued to receive financial support from Twitter for another year, until in 2022 it bought the company and that Bluesky cuts all ties with her. The young initiative had to work in the shadows for several more months until it was able to bring a product to market, which finally arrived in February 2023.
Even then, registration on Bluesky was limited to users with an invitation, preventing it from taking advantage of the waves of Twitter users sparked by Elon Musk’s decisions. “We didn’t use invitations to try to be exclusive. “We used them to manage growth as we built what is essentially a foundation, the rails of this new type of distributed network,” Jay Graber, the 32-year-old engineer who is CEO of Bluesky, explained to Wired .
“We had to build the application protocol under Bluesky, the AT protocol, which allows different developers, companies or people to come in and modify their experiences. Some of them will be launched soon. An example of this is your feeds. When you sign up, we offer you tracking by default and the feeds algorithmic. But there are more than 25,000 feeds custom templates to choose from, many created by independent developers. One of them is a food moss, which I find very relaxing and fun: it only shows images of moss and green things,” he explained.
A social network with a shield against billionaires
Bluesky was able to open up to the general public in February 2024. Since then, it has nearly 16 million users, including the last two registered last week. This is approximately double that of Mastodon, the other major alternative to Twitter with which it shares many characteristics and with which it has expressed its interest in federating in the future.
Bluesky’s value proposition is a network almost identical to Twitter but based on this decentralized protocol, which offers it, among other things, an anti-tycoon shield. The AT protocol allows Bluesky users to easily transfer their data to other platforms if an Elon Musk appears trying to take control of the company and put the algorithms to work for him.
This is one of the most powerful features of the platform. The system allows for “sovereign identity,” meaning that people can maintain their network of contacts and interactions even if they change servers. This is a type of independence not possible in centralized networks like X (or Facebook, or Instagram or TikTok) where data and contacts are trapped in the platform and are owned by the companies that manage it.
I’m sharing with you a Google Chrome extension that allows you to identify your Twitter followers already on Bluesky and follow them. The extension, Sky Follower Bridge, marks in blue in your Twitter “Followers” column the profiles you follow and who have a BlueSky account.
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– Carmela Ríos (@carmelarios.bsky.social) November 14, 2024, 10:40 a.m.
The AT protocol is open source and any company or organization can replicate it on their servers. In turn, all users using it can transfer their data to these replicas.
The shield is completed by the legal form adopted by Bluesky. It is a public utility company, a public utility enterprise which, in addition to seeking profitability, is legally obliged to work for the common good. This is a figure which has no direct equivalent in the European context and which places the public interest on the same level as that of the company’s shareholders.
An ad-free model
Bluesky currently has no advertising and has expressed its intention to no longer include it in its business model in the future. This allows you to avoid the need to mass collect your users’ personal data. It is currently funded through grants and support from investors interested in decentralized technology and open source principles.
“There is skepticism about whether this social model can work,” Graber acknowledged. “People even wonder what it is. So we are first trying to demonstrate that this ecosystem has value for users and developers, and that it can launch an era of open innovation,” he explains: “We believe that money follows the value.”
Bluesky’s CEO announced that this year it will begin exploring value propositions, such as selling custom domains. Currently, users have in their profile address the address of the domain in which they registered (username.bsky.social) and through this they would charge for changing the domain to .com, .net or . es.
“We can’t clutter this network with ads,” Graber said. “That’s where the federation comes in. The fact that anyone can self-host and build on it software This means we can never degrade the user experience to the point where people want to leave. »
The 16 million users that Bluesky surpassed this Thursday are still far from the 420 that Elon Musk claims to have for X, but they are double what the other big alternative, Mastodon, has achieved since 2016.
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