Social media platform Bluesky takes aim at Elon Musk’s X
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The social media platform Bluesky has opened to the public and could compete with X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, and Meta’s Threads.
Bluesky offers users a place to post texts and images that show up on a feed — similar to the interface of X and Threads.
The difference is that Bluesky will offer a software system allowing developers and users to create their own versions of the social network, complete with their own rules and algorithms, as reported by The Washington Post. CEO of Bluesky Jay Graber calls the tool “an open, decentralized protocol,” similar to apps like Gmail or Outlook.
The company hopes to be “the last social account you’ll ever have to create.” After almost a year of invitation-only use, Bluesky opened to the public on Tuesday.
Here’s a list of some of Bluesky’s features:
- Users can subscribe to feeds where algorithms prioritize the most popular posts or the posts most popular among people they follow.
- Feeds can be geared toward specific areas of interest like writing, science or art.
- Users can choose to “hide,” “warn” or “show” content that includes nudity, violence, spam and hate speech.
Bluesky could offer a feature where a fact-checking organization denotes “false” or “misleading” labels to various posts disseminated to users, the Post reported.
“When you log in to Bluesky, it might look and feel familiar — the user experience should be straightforward,” Bluesky wrote on its blog. “But under the hood, we’ve designed the app in a way that puts control back in your hands. Here, your experience online isn’t controlled by a single company. Whether it’s your timeline or content filters, on Bluesky, you can easily customize your social experience.”
Graber was chosen to lead the Bluesky project in August 2021, a venture that was originally tied to the Twitter platform, the Post said. Her involvement came after Jack Dorsey, then-CEO of Twitter, tweeted in 2019 that he planned to create a new “decentralized” form of social media.
Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. ????
— jack (@jack) December 11, 2019
The Post said Graber convinced Twitter that Bluesky would succeed as an independent entity — so it wouldn’t have to rely on Dorsey.
“I didn’t see the future,” Graber said to the Post, referring to the subsequent ouster of Dorsey as Twitter’s CEO and sale of the company to Elon Musk. “But as I like to say, the captain can always sink the ship.”
Dorsey, a founder of Twitter, now sits on Bluesky’s board of directors.
Bluesky began with a little over 3 million users, according to the Post.
“It’s mounting a long-shot bid to take on the company that spawned it,” the Post reported, “and to set social media on a course that no single captain can control.”
However, taking on X or Threads could be an “uphill battle,” the Post said, as some of the early enthusiasm surrounding Bluesky has waned, and some high-profile users are no longer active or have left the platform.
Bluesky was so exclusive during its beta launch period that even President Joe Biden couldn’t get an invitation code, according to Business Insider. As of now, no codes are needed to sign up.
The number of users posting each day has decreased slightly over the past month as well, according to a page that tracks Bluesky statistics.
“Safety is core to social media,” Bluesky wrote on its blog. “Bluesky moderates the app according to our community guidelines, and our vision for composable moderation allows users to stack more moderation services together, such as subscribable moderation lists.”
Here is a link for user questions and answers.