Bluesky, the company building a decentralized alternative to Twitter/X, Announce Today, it has 2 million users – an increase of another 1 million users since September, although it remains an invite-only app. She also revealed her timeframe regarding other key goals, noting that she plans to have the public web interface up and running by the end of the month and will launch the consortium by early next year.
The latter is one of the most important differentiators between Bluesky and X, as it will allow Bluesky to function as a more open social network. This means it will work more like Mastodon as users can pick and choose which servers they want to join and transfer their accounts at will. This is what Plosky says today makes him “billionaire-proof” — a criticism of Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter, now called X.
“You will always have the freedom to choose (and exit) rather than being subject to the whims of private companies or black box algorithms.” The company’s blog post explained. “Wherever you go, your friends and relationships will be there too,” she noted.
Similar to the decentralized Mastodon service, Federation allows anyone to run their own service and connect to any other service that also runs the same protocol. In Bluesky’s case, this will be done via AT protocol Which the company is also developing alongside its consumer-facing service and mobile app. However, the other major decentralized social network, Mastodon, uses a well-established protocol, ActivityPub, which has gained a greater amount of attention in the months following Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.
Since then, other companies including Mozilla, Flipboard, Medium, and Automattic (parent company of WordPress.com) have adopted ActivityPub and Mastodon. This could pose a challenge in terms of Bluesky’s ultimate reach unless he makes a move to allow the AT protocol and ActivityPub to interact in some way. Bridging It may be both Technically Possible, but something will likely happen down the road, and not in the near term.
In the meantime, Bluesky is working to make its own service more accessible, which includes launching a public web interface later this month. This will allow anyone to view posts on Bluesky, even if they don’t have an account. This may make the network more promising in terms of being a true competitor to X for breaking news and chat, but it may also expose Bluesky users’ posts to the outside world in ways they are not prepared for. (The app does not currently provide an option to set profiles to private, as Twitter/X does. Some users incorrect happy on this.)
Despite its growth, Bluesky’s reluctance to drop its invitation-only status and open its network to more users has allowed other X competitors to gain a foothold. Last month, for example, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that X’s alternative, Instagram Threads, had fewer than 100 million monthly active users. It is believed that it could reach 1 billion users in the next few years. Threads intends to interact with ActivityPub in the future.
Bluesky’s announcement comes on the heels of the rapid release of Threads features to make its app more competitive with Mastodon also took advantage of the opportunity presented by the Twitter acquisition, launching a more user-friendly version of its service last September. But Mastodon currently has it 1.6 million monthly active usersWhich makes it much smaller than Threads.
Along with today’s news, Bluesky also pointed out other recently launched features, including mobile push notifications, shareable user lists, email verification, advanced feeds and topic preferences for sorting and filtering posts, a media tab on user profiles, And the Likes tab on your user profile, suggested follows, and various accessibility improvements.
Although Bluesky began life as a Twitter project under the leadership of Jack Dorsey, the company spun off from Twitter with… 13 million dollars To start research and development. Dorsey sits on its board of directors. This year, the company raised an $8 million seed round led by Neo to further its development, transitioning from being an LLC to a C Corp.