Jack Dorsey, co-founder and former chief executive of Twitter, announced that his social media platform, Bluesky Social, is accepting beta users as it prepares for a global launch.
The announcement made on Tuesday, 18 October 2022 coincides with Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, which Dorsey co-founded and ran for several years.
Bluesky Social was conceived in 2019. Dorsey had tweeted that Twitter was funding a team of “architects, engineers, and designers to develop a decentralized standard for social media”.
Bluesky Social is a “social internet” that aims to create a standard protocol for social media platforms.
Once fully developed, it would allow separate social media networks to interact with each other via an open standard, despite each network having its own curation and moderation systems. It’s like how email works; you can send a mail to someone who uses a different email service and still be sure your message and attachment will get through.
The soon-to-be-released app is built on a ‘decentralised’ social media protocol called the Authenticated Transport Protocol, or ‘AT Protocol’, which is aimed at making social media open source and interoperable, allowing users to interact with different applications, all within one ecosystem.
According to a tweet on Bluesky Social’s Twitter page, 30,000 people signed up for its beta testing 48 hours after the announcement, which indicates that “there’s a lot of interest in a new approach to social media.”
Though there is no set date for when the social media platform will launch, the project is already being touted as an alternative and perhaps even a replacement for the Musk-owned Twitter.
