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Former Twitter CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey left the social media giant in May 2022 amid negotiations with Elon Musk. Since then, he has been working on a new decentralized social network called Bluesky, which aims to compete with Twitter.
This week, the Bluesky app was officially made available in the iOS App Store, but with a catch: users still need an invitation to join the network.
Bluesky’s official website doesn’t offer many details about the social network or its availability. Users can enter their email address in a waiting list to receive an invitation. However, thanks to the App Store webpage, we now have an idea of what Bluesky looks like. It’s essentially a simplified version of Twitter.
Bluesky is based on the AT protocol, originally called ADX or Authenticated Transfer Protocol. This protocol is similar to ActivityPub, the decentralized protocol that powers Mastodon, another social network that’s quite similar to Twitter in some ways.
Twitter’s arbitrary decisions since its acquisition by Elon Musk have upset some users and developers. Twitter banned third-party clients from using its API, which killed apps like Tweetbot and Twitterrific. The company has also been pushing paid features through the Twitter Blue subscription. As a result, other social networks like Mastodon have been gaining more attention recently. This has even led the developer of Tweetbot to create a new client for Mastodon. Dorsey hopes to ride the wave of dissatisfied Twitter users to promote his new social network.
It remains unclear when Bluesky will be made available to everyone, but the release of its app on the App Store suggests that it may happen very soon. With Bluesky’s promise of decentralization and its similarity to Twitter, it’s possible that this new social network could be a game-changer in the world of social media.
