People tired of Elon Musk’s Twitter might have found a new alternative social media platform called Bluesky.
It turns out, not many people are a fan of using Elon Musk’s version of Twitter, abandoning the bird app for greener pastures or bluer skies.
Backed by the founder of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, Bluesky is a decentralised social media platform launched in late February. The app was initially released on iOS and has now has been made available on Android as well.
With more people losing faith in Musk’s Twitter, Bluesky has emerged as the newest thing to try and fill the void. It has gained popularity among high-profile Twitter users like Chrissy Teigen and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
But you can’t get on it yet since the app is invite-only. New users can invite a small number of people onto the site, after spending some time on it.
Current users report that the app is a lot like Twitter in the early days, with short, snappy ‘skeets’ in the place of tweets.
Still, the social media platform is missing a lot of key features like the ability to send DMs, upload videos and gifs or block other users.
The first public announcement of Bluesky was made at the end of 2019, when Dorsey said he wanted a ‘small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized [sic] standard for social media.’
The platform is headed by CEO Jay Graber, who was chosen by pre-Musk Twitter thanks to her background as a crypto developer, according to CoinDesk.
‘Decentralised’ applications have been around since Bitcoin was invented over a decade ago.
Unlike a regular app, which is created and owned by an individual or corporation, decentralised apps have no central ownership and often operate on a blockchain.
The blockchain, which is a mutually agreed upon set of rules agreed upon by the community, helps keep control out of a central authority and give each user equal power.
This means that on Bluesky, decisions like how to moderate content wouldn’t be made by billionaire CEOs.
The decentralised app sounds quite similar to Mastodon, the other Twitter alternative that many people jumped to after the Musk acquisition.
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