“It is a new social network and there are many things that are still in their infancy. It is in the process of growth. This is neither the panacea nor the idyllic place. The thing is that it is very easy to feel better than on Twitter.” It’s the summary of Ugo sin Hache, a disability content creator, about Bluesky, a platform that has gained more than two million users since the victory of Donald Trump and Elon Musk. The last one, in the last 24 hours.
Bluesky is a microblogging network that looks very similar to Twitter (renamed to X by Elon Musk), and functions almost identical to Twitter. In fact, it was born in 2019 as an experiment within Twitter itself: how that same platform would work if it were built on a decentralized and open source protocol.
These features mean that any user or company could build different applications, such as custom algorithms, stronger-encrypted messaging systems, content filters, or different moderation policies on the same core network. All of this without the control or authorization of the company that launched and manages that main network.
The trial was launched when Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, was still at the helm of that platform. Dorsey had been complaining for years about the power that investors had gained in decision-making over Twitter’s usability and had become increasingly supportive of decentralized-based technologies, such as that underpinning cryptocurrencies.
The proof of concept was successful 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 Bluesky cut all ties with it. The young initiative had to work in the shadows for several more months until it could put a product on the market, which finally arrived in February 2023.
Even then, registration on Bluesky was limited to users with an invitation, which prevented it from taking advantage of the waves of flight of Twitter users that Elon Musk’s decisions were causing. “We didn’t use invitations to try to be exclusive. “We used them to manage growth while we were building what is essentially a foundation, the rails of this new type of distributed network,” he explained in Wired Jay Graber, the 32-year-old engineer who serves as CEO of Bluesky.
“We had to build the application protocol under Bluesky, the AT protocolwhich 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 join, we give you tracking by default and the feeds algorithmic. But then there are more than 25,000 feeds custom ones to choose from, most created by independent developers. One of them is a feed of 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 to the general public in February 2024. Since then it has almost 16 million users, including the last two who registered in the last week. It is approximately double that of Mastodon, the other great alternative to Twitter with which it shares many characteristics and with which it has expressed interest in federating in the future.
Bluesky’s value proposition is a network almost identical to Twitter but based on that decentralized protocol, which among other things offers it an anti-tycoon shield. The AT Protocol allows Bluesky users to easily take their data to other platforms if an Elon Musk appears trying to take control of the company and put the algorithms at his service.
This is one of the most powerful features of the platform. The system allows for “sovereign identity,” which means that people can maintain their network of contacts and interactions even if they change servers. It is a type of independence that is impossible in centralized networks like X (or Facebook, or Instagram, or TikTok) where data and contacts are trapped in the platform and are the property of the companies that manage it.
I share with you a Google Chrome extension that allows you to identify your Twitter followers who are already on Bluesky and follow them. The extension, Sky Follower Bridge, marks in blue in your Twitter “Following” column the profiles that you follow and that have a BlueSky account.
— Carmela Ríos (@carmelarios.bsky.social) November 14, 2024, 10:40
The AT Protocol is open source and any company or organization can replicate it on its servers. In turn, all users who use it can take their data to those replicas.
The shield is completed with the legal form that Bluesky has adopted. It is a Public Benefit Corporation, a public benefit company that, in addition to seeking profitability, is legally obliged to work for the common good. It is a figure that does not have a direct equivalent in the European context that puts the public benefit at the same level as that of the company’s shareholders.
A model without advertising
Bluesky currently has no advertising and has expressed the intention of not including it in its business model in the future. This allows you to not need to collect personal data from your users in bulk. 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, first of all, we are trying to demonstrate that this ecosystem has value for users and developers, and that it can kick off an era of open innovation,” he explains: “We believe that money follows value.”
The CEO of Bluesky has announced that this year they will begin to explore value propositions, such as selling personalized domains. Currently, users have in their profile address the address of the domain in which they registered (username.bsky.social) and through this means, they would charge for modifying the domain to .com, .net or .es.
“We can’t litter this network with ads,” Graber said. “This is where the federation comes into play. The fact that anyone can self-host and build on top of it software It means we can never degrade the user experience in a way that makes people want to leave.”
The 16 million users that Bluesky has surpassed this Thursday are still far from the 420 that Elon Musk claims X has, but they are double what the other great alternative, Mastodon, has achieved since 2016.
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