How is Bluesky, the new app from Jack Dorsey that seeks to advance the field of Twitter

At the end of 2021 Jack Dorsey ceased to be the CEO of Twitter, after having been in office for 15 years. The entrepreneur and co-founder of the platform has continued to deal with social networks and this week he has just presented Bluesky, a decentralized network. Bluesky runs to Twitter.

Dorsey’s plans for Bluesky date back to 2019, three years before Musk bought the company. And also, that at first it was not raised as a independent proposal to Twitter, but as an internal test protocol.

Since last month Blueskay has been available on the App Store, but it was necessary to have an invitation to access its grid. From this Monday it is also in the Android app store, although it remains the invitation requirement.

Dorsey’s first mention of Bluesky came just months after she left her Twitter duties. In an interview he described it as “an open decentralized standard for social media”.

This network is based on four pillars: portability, which allows users to move their identity to any other provider; algorithmic choice, which promises “open algorithms”; interop, which includes a schema-based framework called Lexicon, and performance, so that section isn’t optional.

The curious thing is that many of these changes have appeared in the Elon Musk’s plans at the time of your purchase. And in conversations that she’s had with Dorsey that have come to light because of the process of the buying process, she’s let him know.

In this virtual exchange, Dorsey explained to Musk that “you need a new platform to do this. It can’t be a company. That’s exactly why I left [Twitter]”.

The original discussion gained strength after Donald Trump’s veto. Dorsey saw Bluesky in a sense as a tool to avoid large centralized platforms and that these had so much power to decide which users and communities could participate in the discourse and who would be responsible for moderating that content.

How is the new social network

Entering the social network, from an aesthetic point of view, everything is quite similar to Twitter. While creating a post, the app displays the text “What’s up?” instead of the traditional “What’s up?”.

In turn, it has “Like” options, allows you to edit publications, quote other messages, send DMs and use hashtags, among other possibilities.

Responsible for this project is Jay Graber, who underlined the importance of the moderation tools developed by the Bluesky Social team. According to Graber, “they are essential to broaden adoption” of the application and allow users to have more control over content moderation and curation.

The creators of Bluesky have added their own protocol in the application: AT Protocol, “is a new federated social network. It integrates the ideas of the latest decentralized technologies into a simple, fast and open network.”

Being federated means that “servers talk to each other, just like email”. Therefore, it powers the open source alternative Mastodon, as well as a variety of decentralized applications on Fediverse.