A look at Bluesky, a decentralised social network that has the potential to rival Twitter

On October 27, Elon Musk took the global stage with a sink in hand, completing his takeover of Twitter. The $44 billion transaction had the entire cryptosphere and tech industry buzzing. However, a small Twitter offshoot founded in 2019 is making waves after announcing the upcoming launch of its beta testing app.

Bluesky is a project commissioned by Jack Dorsey while he was still the CEO of Twitter. With over 30,000 signups for its waitlist in less than two days, the project is quickly being positioned as an alternative, if not a replacement, for Musk’s Twitter.

But what exactly is Bluesky?

Bluesky is a non-profit organisation that is attempting to create a new “open and decentralised” form of social media. The platform’s goal is to develop a standard protocol for social media platforms. Once fully developed, it would allow separate social media networks to interact with one another via an open standard, despite the fact that each network has its own curation and moderation systems.

Bluesky was conceived as a solution to Twitter’s failures. It was announced at a time when social media platforms were being accused of data theft, misinformation, and election meddling. In fact, Jack Dorsey announced the project in a Twitter thread justifying the platform’s ban of Donald Trump.

“We are trying to do our part by funding an initiative around an open decentralised standard for social media. Our goal is to be a client of that standard for the public conversation layer of the internet. We call it Bluesky,” read Dorsey’s tweet.

Bluesky was essentially created and funded by its parent company, Twitter, with the intention of eventually adopting the technology. To that end, Twitter provided Bluesky with $13 million in funding with no conditions or commitments other than to keep the research going.

How will Bluesky work?

Twitter was attempting to address a problem that almost every social media platform was experiencing. How does one regulate the speech of millions of users without overreaching, let alone endangering the company’s bottom line? Twitter decided to fund a “small independent team” of up to five software developers tasked to create “an open and decentralised standard for social media.”

Bluesky’s goal is to develop a “decentralised” protocol for social media. Companies and individuals would be able to build apps, services, or recommendation algorithms on the same underlying networks and data. It’s similar to how email works; you can send an email to someone who uses a different email service and be confident that your message and attachment will be delivered.

This is due to the fact that email is built on technical rules like HTTP and TCP/IP, which provide a common standard for how computers should communicate with one another over a network. These “protocols” are open source, which means that anyone can use them or build products on top of them. That is what Bluesky intends to create, but for social media applications.

The upcoming AT Protocol

Bluesky introduced its first working protocol, the Authenticated Data Experiment, or ADX, in early May of this year. Following months of additional research, the public benefit corporation announced the impending release of its improved beta testing app, the Authenticated Transfer Protocol, or AT Protocol.

The project bills itself as a social internet, with the goal of providing a common platform to power the next generation of social applications. The Protocol will offer four distinct features to users: account portability, algorithmic choice, interoperation, and performance. Account portability allows you to switch from one provider to another without losing your data or social graph.

You will have more control over your online experience thanks to the algorithmic selection. For example, if you were dissatisfied with YouTube’s automated recommendations, you could switch to a different platform that uses a different recommendation system for the same videos. Finally, the app will offer you all of these features without sacrificing performance. The AT Protocol is designed for quick loading and performance, even at large scales.

Will Elon Musk support Bluesky?

Bluesky’s most vocal supporter, Jack Dorsey, has left Twitter. Furthermore, Elon Musk recently fired Dorsey’s replacement, Parag Agrawal. As a result, Bluesky has officially lost two of its most ardent Twitter supporters. This means that future assistance from the microblogging website will be limited, if at all.

Leaked conversations between Musk and Dorsey, on the other hand, paint a different picture. According to reports, Tesla CEO Elon Musk called Bluesky a “super interesting idea” and expressed a desire to assist if possible.

When Musk’s Twitter takeover was announced, Dorsey responded positively.”Elon is the singular solution I trust… this is the right path. I believe it with all my heart,” he stated.

This could be an indication of future collaboration between the two. Bluesky, on the other hand, is still a long way from being a finished product, and only time will tell how things turn out.