The Bluesky platform, developed by Jack Dorsey as an alternative to Twitter, has already surpassed 100,000 users, although an invitation is still needed to gain access. More than 57,000 registered users have shared on the network and users have already signed 3.1 million posts. For a social network that is still not open to the public, we can say that these numbers are not bad at all. According to Bluesky’s website, the service will “soon” become available to the public.
Instead of being centrally controlled like Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook or Elon Musk’s Twitter, Bluesky is described as a decentralized micro-blogging platform that works like Twitter. The platform is built on AT Protocol, the decentralized technology that Bluesky really focuses on.
The purpose of the AT Protocol is to allow modern social media and online public chat platforms to work like the early days of the web, where anyone could start a blog or use RSS to subscribe to a few blogs. It is believed that this will unlock the era of innovation in social media. Researchers and communities will have the ability to help solve the problems social networks are currently facing, and developers will be able to experiment with many new forms of interaction.
While Bluesky prepares to go public, other decentralized networks such as Mastodon are already in existence. It will be interesting to see how these decentralized networks compete with each other and whether they can distract viewers from the centralized networks we’ve all been used to for the past decade.
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