Bluesky is now open for anyone to join | Top Vip News

Image credits: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch

After almost a year as an invitation-only app, Bluesky is now open to the public. Founded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, Bluesky is one of the most promising microblogging platforms that could offer an alternative to Elon Musk’s X.

Before opening to the public, the platform had around 3 million registrations. Now that anyone can join, the young platform faces a challenge: How can it meaningfully cope with Threads’ 130 million monthly active users, or even Mastodon’s 1.8 million?

Bluesky looks and works like Twitter at first, but the platform stands out for what’s under the hood. The company began as a project within Twitter that sought to build a decentralized infrastructure called AT Protocol for social media. As a decentralized platform, Bluesky’s code is completely open source, giving people outside the company transparency into what is being built and how. Developers can even write their own code on top of the AT protocol, so they can create anything from a custom algorithm to an entirely new social platform.

“What decentralization offers is the ability to test multiple things in parallel, so change in an organization is not hindered,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber told TechCrunch. “The way we built Bluesky allows anyone to insert a change into the product.”

This setting gives users more ability to control and curate their social media experience. On a centralized platform like Instagram, for example, users have rebelled against algorithm changes they don’t like, but there’s not much they can do to reverse or improve an unwanted app update.

He literal elephant In the room is Mastodon, the open source decentralized social network that has been around since 2016, years before Bluesky existed. While the platforms share similar goals, they use different protocols, making it difficult for the platforms to work together. While some communities have found a home on Mastodon, others have been deterred by the network’s confusing onboarding process and technical terminology. That’s where Bluesky’s strategy diverges.

“The whole philosophy has been that this needs to have good UX and be a good experience,” Graber said on a panel last month. “People are not in this just for decentralization and abstract ideas. “They are there to have fun and have a good time here.”

Bluesky’s commitment to an intuitive user experience doesn’t mean it’s slowing down on the technical side. The company also shared today that it will introduce an experimental version of open federation later this month. Developers will be able to build their own separate servers, as Mastodon has thousands of different servers. instances. Just like on Mastodon, Bluesky users will be able to choose which server to use, and if they ever change their mind, they will be able to migrate to a different server without losing all of their posts, followers, and follower lists.

Another upcoming update will allow individual users or organizations to create their own content moderation services, which other users can subscribe to.

“For example, a fact-checking organization may run a labeling service and flag posts as ‘partially false,’ ‘misleading,’ or other categories,” Bluesky wrote in a blog post. “So users who trust this organization can subscribe to their tags. As the user scrolls through the app, any labels posted by the fact-checking organization will be visible in the post itself.”

This all sounds great, but of course the question will inevitably arise: what if a bad actor creates a moderation service or server that has tangibly harmful consequences? That is a big challenge for these decentralized platforms (or “the fediverso”).

“The analogies here are really fair: That’s how the web works,” Graber said. “So what do you do when people build things on the web that could be dangerous? There are different levels of intervention. First of all, don’t promote it, don’t send it to more eyes. And then you can disconnect from it, not attach to it. So make it less detectable.”

It’s more of a hands-off approach, which also relies on users taking advantage of Bluesky’s customizable moderation tools to determine what online safety means to them. But that could put a lot of responsibility on the individual user. In more extreme cases, such as the dissemination of child sexual abuse material (CSAM), the team behind the AT Protocol will intervene to completely remove the offending material.

Bluesky has a long way to go, but he’s already defied the odds: in a slightly altered timeline, he may not even exist right now. In Dorsey’s vision, Twitter would have eventually migrated to the AT Protocol, but he ended up stepping down as CEO, and then Musk stepped in and changed the platform’s priorities and values. Graber couldn’t have anticipated that plot twist, but a year before the acquisition, he casually spun Bluesky out of Twitter and turned it into his own public benefit corporation. So now Bluesky is a project that used to be part of Twitter, which now competes with X, the company that was also Twitter. And if you’re eager to see how it all plays out, then it’s a good thing the platform has opened up to the public.