Bluesky, a decentralized social media protocol, gets 30,000+ signups for the waitlist for its beta version. What does it offer?
Bluesky announced the waitlist through their official Twitter account on Tuesday. The social media app will be built on The Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol. Jack Dorsey, the co-founder and former CEO of Twitter, later quote retweeted the announcement. Due to overwhelming interest from the community, the signups reached a temporary limit on the mailing list. Users were not able to signup until there was a fix.
The birth of Bluesky
Jack Dorsey tweeted in Dec 2019 that they are funding a small independent team to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. He further said that the goal of Twitter is to be a client of this protocol.
Jay Graber, a crypto developer, announced that she would lead Bluesky in Aug 2021. The Bluesky entity then started operating independently from Twitter.
What is AT Protocol?
Bluesky is building the AT Protocol, a new foundation for social networking which gives creators independence from platforms, developers the freedom to build, and users a choice in their experience. Large-scale distributed social applications can be built using the protocol.
Jack Dorsey mentioned that anyone, even the competitor DeSo, could use the protocol.
What does Bluesky offer?
Bluesky’s mission is to drive evolution from platforms to protocols. They offer portability, scale, and trust.
- Portability
Bluesky wants to build a protocol that allows users to switch between apps without losing their data or the connection they built there. If someone wants to stop using YouTube and switch to TikTok, they cannot take all their YouTube videos or any other data to TikTok without manually uploading them. Bluesky wants to offer this portability for identity, data, payments, and other services. - Scale
Apps built on Web3 struggle to give the scale at par with Web2. Even some Web2 applications crash when there is high traffic. Web2 Social networking platform like Twitter offers a global experience currently. However, Web3 struggles to bring that scale. Bluesky wants to bring that scale to decentralized architecture. - Trust
Every social media platforms have its algorithm to decide what comes up in a user’s feed. The platforms also need to manage spam and abuses. The centralized algorithm may have biases on how a particular type of content is propagated on the platform. As social media platforms significantly influence individuals’ lives, users need to know how the algorithms perform.
Bluesky wants to work towards a transparent and verifiable system through which users can know how the algorithm works or what is going on under the hood. They will allow the users to adjust their experience.
The community believes that Bluesky can make the predatory machine-learning algorithms at Meta suffer.
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