Elon Musk’s social media platform has a similar appearance and functionality to Jack Dorsey’s decentralized alternative to Twitter, known as Bluesky.
Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, is making progress with his decentralized Twitter alternative, Bluesky, as its mobile app enters private beta testing. The app is currently available on the Apple App Store as an invite-only app, with certain people able to try it out by creating an account via an invite code. As of February 28th, the app had about 2,000 installs and is not yet available for Android testers on Google Play.
The interface of Bluesky’s iOS app looks very similar to Twitter, with handles, followers, posts, and replies presented in a similar style to the social media giant. Users can create posts of up to 265 characters and share, mute, and block accounts.
The app also has likes, comments, and reposts. However, Bluesky aims to provide a decentralized social network protocol, making user data free from influence by any government or corporation.
Bluesky is built on the AT protocol, a new federated social network that integrates ideas from the latest decentralized technologies. The AT protocol is Bluesky’s main effort to enable a new way for servers to communicate with each other, allowing individuals and businesses to self-host and have multiple websites instead of one. The platform aims to have some technical features that make it very different from Elon Musk’s social media giant.
Bluesky released its first batch of code in May 2022 and officially introduced the social app and the AT protocol in October of the same year, nearly three years after Dorsey launched the project with support from Twitter in 2019.
While Bluesky moves forward with beta testing, Twitter has encountered some issues recently. On March 1st, Twitter suffered another notable outage as thousands of users flagged issues with Musk’s social media platform. The issue was resolved over a five-hour period.
Dorsey recently revealed that Bitcoin Lightning Network payment was set to be integrated before Elon Musk’s take over in July. He previously responded to a customer’s request to integrate the Lightning Network into BlueSky with the statement “Only a matter of time.”