The social network owned by Elon Musk there is a great exodus of users and Blueskywhich we can consider a mixture between Twitter and Mastodonis the candidate to replace x. Although Bluesky does not have as many users as Threadsan initiative created by the team of instagram which takes advantage of its user base, is still a very good alternative due to the lack of ads.
What is Bluesky?
It is a social network microblogging, short messages, very similar to Twitter. He is currently preparing a own protocol so people can create their own instances. This implies that any user or company could build custom algorithms, messaging systems with strict encryption, content filters or different moderation policies on the same social network, and without obtaining authorization from the company that manages it.
Bluesky started as a project within Twitter. It was launched in 2019 by Jack Dorsey, co-founder of the little bird social network. They used it as an experiment to, one day, make a decentralized social network. However, after Musk’s purchase, they decided to continue with the project as an alternative unrelated to the parent company.
Another facility offered is the interfacevery similar to that of Twitter, together with the fact that the sections are very recognizable, makes users migrate to the social network with all the facilities to adapt to the change and network.
Bluesky was born as a independent project in 2021, but continued to receive financial support from Twitter for another year until its purchase by the director of Tesla, when the network cut all ties. Finally, and after several months working in the dark, it went on the market in February 2023. At the time, the network operated exclusively by invitation, which prevented the flight of X users from being exploited by Bluesky to increase its reach.
“We weren’t using invitations to try to be exclusive. We were using them to manage growth while we were building what is essentially a foundation, the rails of this new type of distributed network,” he explained. Jay GraberCEO of Bluesky in Wired.
What is a decentralized network based on?
“The goal is to give developers the freedom to build and users the right to leave. The ability for people to host their own data means that users always have other alternatives, and that their experience doesn’t have to come only from us. For example, if a user wants to try a totally different app, or a totally different experience, or wants to move to a parallel social network,” says Graber.
The fediverso, or decentralized network, has the following characteristics:
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User data is not collected by a single company or organization.
Each instance has its users’ data and manages it separately.
The internal data of one instance is not available to the rest, which improves privacy.
Allow there to be instances, or feedswith different themes and languages. Create greater diversity of content.
If you connect to a specific instance you will have two lines of content: one with the content of the users that are part of it, and another line with the content of the other instances related to the one you are part of. It is like a city with neighborhoods connected to others.
Any user can create their own instance through the source code used by Bluesky, which is open and accessible by anyone.
Bluesky shares the basic interactions and essentials of Twitter, but with a difference, users can create their own algorithms and feeds personalized. They do not impose any algorithm and you can remove them and change them for others at any time. For example, there are feeds about art, news or science that you can install and use and exchange whenever you want.
Even so, it is missing some features such as uploading videos, creating and using hashtags or finding featured posts. In the search section you can see recommended accounts, but not posts like on Twitter or Mastodon.
Data since the US elections from Bluesky show that the platform has become the recipient of the exodus of users from X with an increase of more than 700,000 users, now around 17 million worldwide.
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