Jack Dorsey-backed Bluesky: All you need to know about Twitter’s hottest rival

Bluesky is one among many rivals looking to capitalise on the chaos reigning over the social media platform Twitter under the new owner Elon Musk.

When you want to send an email to someone through, say, Gmail, you can just communicate with them irrespective of whether they are using the same email service or some other service such as Microsoft Outlook or Apple iCloud and they can reply to you with the same ease. There are even third-party email apps that allow users to send and receive emails.

Similarly, about 15 years ago, you could communicate with your friends on (now-defunct) instant messenger services such as Google Talk or MSN Messenger through various third-party apps such as Pidgin, Adium, and Trillian.

Bluesky, the decentralised service which has its origins in Twitter, aims to bring a similar cross-platform communication ethos to social networking.

To be sure, Bluesky is one among many rivals such as Mastodon looking to capitalise on the chaos reigning over the social media platform Twitter under the new owner Elon Musk. The tech billionaire is dramatically reshaping how the platform works with various product and policy decisions, leading to several people looking to migrate to alternative platforms.

That said, Bluesky seems to be attracting a lot of new people including influential Twitter users and celebrities such as United States Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and television personality Chrissy Teigen. The service's current invite-only model is also helping in its popularity surge among people in recent weeks.

Bluesky witnessed its biggest single-day jump in new users on April 27, up 2X from the day before, the company said, without disclosing any specific numbers. Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told Bloomberg that over 40,000 people have received access to the service as of April 28, doubling in nearly a fortnight.

Over the past weekend, the decentralised service gained further prominence after Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey criticised Musk's leadership and blamed Twitter's board for forcing the company's sale in a series of replies to user posts on Bluesky.

What is Bluesky? How does it work? And how is it different from social media companies such as Twitter? Moneycontrol takes a closer look.

Bluesky is a social networking platform that offers many of the features that Twitter already provides. However, the functionality is quite barebones at present, since it is still in development.

Users can post short messages of up to 300 characters or photos onto their profiles as well as reply to other users. They can also toggle between a chronological feed comprising updates from the people the user follows and an algorithmic 'What's hot' feed.

One cannot direct message anyone or upload videos as of now. The application recently added the ability to block people, although the block list is public.

The platform, which is still in private beta, launched its iOS app in February 2023 and its Android app in April 2023. However, the only way people can access this platform currently is through an invite code. One can sign up on the website and wait for an invite code or get a code from select users who are already on the platform.

In a blogpost, Graber mentioned that the app is currently invite-only to regulate growth as they build moderation tools. "We want to enable people to have a safe, enjoyable experience... so we're building moderation tooling as a first-order feature and not as an afterthought," he said.

Bluesky's origins date back to December 2019 when Dorsey, who was Twitter CEO at the time, announced that they are funding an independent team to develop an "open and decentralised" standard for social media. Twitter would eventually become a client of this standard, he said at the time.

Twitter's then-CTO Parag Agrawal was tasked with overseeing Bluesky until it found a leader. In August 2021, Jay Graber was appointed as the leader of Bluesky.

In early 2022, Bluesky was spun out as a public benefit limited liability company (PBLLC) focused on research and development of decentralised social network protocols, with $13 million in funding from Twitter. Dorsey continues to remain on Bluesky's board of directors.

It's worth noting that Dorsey has also backed another decentralised social media protocol called Nostr, which seems to have found appeal among bitcoin enthusiasts. “There will be many implementations of the same idea, and that’s a good thing” he recently said on Bluesky.

Bluesky will be a decentralised system, which is expected to give users more control over their social media experience, including how their data is stored and used and what content is served to them. The idea is that people can create or join a server that caters to a specific interest or a community with its own moderation rules.

This is quite the opposite to 'centralised' social media firms such as Twitter and Facebook that make product and policy decisions, with users having no control over their experience on the platform. This phenomenon was particularly evident in Twitter's recent policy changes around user verification and account suspensions.

"People have been saying for years that it would be great if users could own their data and their relationships; if we could have transparent algorithms and algorithmic choice; if there could be more accountability and user control over how social platforms are moderated. We’ve now designed and built a system that we think achieves the goals stated above," Graber said in a blogpost last month.

Graber said the current application, which allows users to access the service on Bluesky's main server, will serve as a reference application for developers to build on the AT (Authenticated Transfer) Protocol, or atproto, a social networking technology created by Bluesky. The open-source protocol aims to power the next generation of social apps and is a "few months away from being ready", he said.

"We built an app to drive protocol development through product learnings, and chose a very simple microblogging format to show how Twitter could have been built on atproto (the AT protocol)" Graber said.

The protocol will enable account portability, which will allow users to move their accounts from one provider to another without losing any of their data or social graph. It will have an open market of algorithms that users can choose to have more control over their experience, as well as the ability to communicate with anyone on any service that's using the AT Protocol.

"Our goal isn't to create every algorithm in-house but to enable the developer community to bring new algorithms to users swiftly and effortlessly," Graber said. This will also enable developers to experiment with new ways of structuring content, he said.

ActivityPub, which powers services such as Mastodon (social networking), Pixelfed (photo sharing), and PeerTube (video sharing) is another such decentralised social networking protocol. In March, Moneycontrol had exclusively reported that Instagram parent Meta is exploring a text-based social networking app that will support ActivityPub.

Bluesky notes that account portability is the major reason why they chose to build a separate protocol, rather than using ActivityPub which currently has limited migration tools.

"We consider portability to be crucial because it protects users from sudden bans, server shutdowns, and policy disagreements," the company said on its website.

"The AT Protocol is a fresh start for social because it creates a composable ecosystem where the convenience and scale of centralised services can be combined with the openness and resilience of decentralised protocols," Graber said in a blogpost.

The ability to set custom domain names as handles for identity and verification purposes and a different approach for large-scale discoverability are among other reasons for building a separate protocol, the company said.

Now, whether Bluesky will take off or not will depend on whether the service can sustain the early momentum it has generated among people and is able to create a large ecosystem of developers building applications on its social networking protocol.

After all, third-party Twitter applications such as Twitterific and Echofon played a key role in making Twitter the platform we know today, often innovating on new features which were lacking on the platform. Many of these features were later adopted by Twitter on its official apps.

In January 2023, these applications, however, faced a sudden demise, after Twitter silently updated its developer rules to ban third-party clients while also ending free access to its APIs.