Bluesky is a company building a decentralized alternative to Twitter/X. announced It now has 2 million users, an increase of another 1 million since September, despite still being an invite-only app. It also revealed deadlines for other important goals, saying it plans to have a public web interface up and running by the end of this month and start federation by early next year.
The latter is one of the most important differentiators between Bluesky and X, as it allows Bluesky to function as a more open social network. This means it works more like Mastodon, where users can choose which servers to join and move their accounts around freely. This is what Bluesky today claims is “billionaire-proof” and criticizes Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter, now known as X.
“Rather than being bound to the whims and black-box algorithms of private companies, you have the freedom to choose (and exit) at any time.” Explained in company blog post. “And wherever you go, your friends and relationships will be there too,” it states.
Similar to Mastodon, a decentralized service, federation allows anyone to run their own service and connect to other services running the same protocol. For Bluesky, this is done like this: AT protocol The company is also developing consumer services and mobile apps in parallel. But his other major decentralized social network, Mastodon, uses an established protocol, his ActivityPub, which has grown significantly in the months since Musk’s acquisition of Twitter. It is attracting attention.
Since then, other companies have adopted ActivityPub and Mastodon, including Mozilla, Flipboard, Medium, and Automattic (WordPress.com’s parent company). Unless Bluesky makes the AT protocol and ActivityPub interoperable in some way, there could be challenges regarding Bluesky’s ultimate reach. Bridging Maybe the two of you Technically It’s possible, but it’s more likely to be in the future, not in the near future.
Meanwhile, Bluesky is working to make its services more accessible, including launching a public web interface later this month. This will allow anyone to view his Bluesky posts, even if they don’t have an account. This could make the network more promising in terms of being a true competitor to X in breaking news and conversation, but it could expose Bluesky users’ posts to the outside world in ways they are not ready for. There is also. (This app currently does not have an option to set your profile to “private” like Twitter/X does. some users is not Happy about this. )
Despite its growth, Bluesky’s reluctance to drop its invite-only status and open its network to more users has allowed other competitors of X to gain a foothold. Last month, for example, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Instagram Threads, an alternative to X, had just under 100 million monthly active users. He believes he can reach 1 billion users in the next few years. Threads also plans to interoperate with ActivityPub in the future.
Bluesky’s announcement follows Threads’ rapid release of features to make the app more competitive with X, including a chronological feed, support for displaying likes, search, and (free) Includes an edit button, web version, voting, GIF support, and more. , topic tags, and soon a developer API. Mastodon also took advantage of the opportunity presented by the Twitter acquisition and launched an easier-to-use version of its service in September of this year. However, Mastodon currently has 1.6 million monthly active usersHowever, it is much smaller than a thread.
In addition to today’s news, Mr. Bluesky also provides mobile push notifications, shareable user lists, email verification, advanced feed and thread settings for sorting and filtering posts, a media tab in user profiles, and a user profile for your own users. We also mentioned other recently released features, such as a Likes tab for profiles. , the suggestions below, and various accessibility improvements.
Bluesky started life as a Twitter project under Jack Dorsey, but the company was spun off from Twitter. $13 million How to start research and development. Mr. Dorsey sits on its board of directors. This year, the company raised an $8 million seed round led by Neo to further its development and transformed from a public benefit LLC to a public benefit C Corp.
Source: techcrunch.com
