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Bluesky, a Twitter-like social network championed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, has come out of its cocoon and now allows anyone to create an account and join the service.
Until Tuesday, anyone who wanted to join Bluesky needed an invitation, which usually meant finding an existing member and begging them for an invite. That invitation-only period gave the site time to develop moderation tools and other features, Bluesky said.
Bluesky is similar to Twitter (now known as X after Tesla billionaire Elon Musk paid $44 billion for the company) in many ways, although it still doesn’t offer direct messaging between users. It offers more customization options, although it is not yet clear whether they will appeal to users.
By default, Bluesky displays posts from accounts you follow on a linear timeline, although it’s also possible to switch to algorithm-based timelines created by other users. The service does its own moderation, but also plans to allow its users to combine alternative moderation schemes. That feature has not yet been enabled.
And once things really work, Bluesky plans to free up users by allowing them to move their collections of friends, followers, and other data to competing social networks. As the company says in a whimsical cartoon page included in Tuesday’s announcement, Bluesky is intended to be “the last social account you’ll ever need to create.”
In practice, it probably won’t be so easy. The technical term for making social networks interoperable in this way is “federation,” and it turns out there are multiple ways sites can federate. For example, Mastodon and similar microblogging sites, including Meta’s Threads service, use a federation algorithm called ActivityPub that should allow users to move between them.
In fact, Threads has already started experimenting with sharing posts on Mastodon and other services using ActivityPub. “Making Threads interoperable will give people more choices about how they interact and help content reach more people,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a Threads post in December. “I’m pretty optimistic about this.”
In contrast, Bluesky adopted a federation algorithm called Authenticated Transfer Protocol and is so far the only service of its kind to use it. A “FAQ” page about the protocol maintains that ActivityPub makes it cumbersome to transfer accounts and lacks other important features.
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