Bluesky, the Twitter volitional backed by Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey, has hit the App Store and increasingly testers are gaining access. Though the app is still only misogynist as an invite-only beta, its App Store inrush signals that a public launch could be nearing.
We haven’t heard much from Bluesky since October 2022, when the team overdue the project shared an update on the Bluesky blog, detailing the status of the social protocol that powers its new Twitter-like app, moreover tabbed Bluesky.
AT (originally tabbed ADX, or “Authenticated Transfer Protocol,”) is Bluesky’s main effort while the Bluesky mobile app serves to showcase the protocol in action. Similar to the ActivityPub protocol that powers Mastodon, AT offers the ways of creating a federated and decentralized social network. However, there’s been some criticism of the project, notably from Mastodon and other developers, who pointed out that ActivityPub — a recommended W3C standard — once powers a large and growing “Fediverse” of interconnected servers.
And that Fediverse has been gaining traction pursuit Musk’s Twitter acquisition, as users left the microblogging network to try the unshut source, decentralized alternative, Mastodon. The latter has moreover benefited from the work of former Twitter third-party app developers who have since rolled out polished Mastodon clients like Ivory and Mammoth, most recently.
Other companies have moreover single-minded to or at least discussed embracing the ActivityPub standard, including Flipboard, which spoken its plans today, as well as Medium, Tumblr and possibly Flickr. Where that leaves Bluesky’s future is unclear.
Image Credits: Bluesky on App Store
The Bluesky project, now a public goody company, had originally been incubated within Twitter starting in 2019 when Jack Dorsey served as CEO. Twitter moreover provided its financial valuables for years. Though its founding was well superiority of the company’s sale to current owner Elon Musk, the two execs increasingly recently had discussed the idea of an unshut source protocol over text messages superiority of Musk’s Twitter acquisition.
In texts, Dorsey explained to Musk that a “new platform is needed. It can’t be a company. This is why I left [Twitter].” (Dorsey exited the CEO role at the social network in November 2021 but remained on Twitter’s workbench through May 2022.)
Shortly without giving up his CEO duties, Dorsey took to Twitter to publicly talk well-nigh Bluesky, describing it as “an unshut decentralized standard for social media.” That discussion had taken place virtually the time when Dorsey was sharing his thoughts about Twitter’s visualization to ban President Trump from its platform. Bluesky, he believed, would reduce the worthiness for large, internal platforms — like Twitter — to have so much power in terms of deciding which users and communities could engage in speech and who would be responsible for moderating that content.
But with Musk now at the helm of Twitter, it’s not clear if or how the two projects may remain intertwined. Bluesky last year said it had received $13 million to ensure it had the self-rule and independence to get started on R&D and noted Jack Dorsey was on its board. It moreover said Twitter’s funding of Bluesky was “not subject to any conditions except one: that Bluesky was to research and develop technologies that enable unshut and decentralized public conversation.”
Today, however, Twitter has been drastically wearing its costs, including through layoffs, auctions, office closures and plane not paying its bills. It would be surprising if a side project like Bluesky would remain a priority.
Now the Bluesky app is out publicly and some users are stuff invited to try it. According to app intelligence firm data.ai, the Bluesky iOS app debuted on February 17, 2023 and has somewhere north of 2,000 installs. Given its invite-only status, this likely represents only the newly widow beta testers at this time. The app isn’t yet ranking on any Top Charts in the U.S., and it’s not misogynist on Google Play.
We received an invite to the service and found it to be a functional, if still rather bare-bones, Twitter-like experience.
Users create a handle which is then represented as @username.bsky.social as well as the exhibit name that appears increasingly prominently in unvigilant text, as on Twitter.
Image Credits: Bluesky screenshot; who took my handle?
As a brand-new app, Bluesky’s suggested user list didn’t immediately impress with big names of public figures during onboarding. Mastodon, meanwhile, has managed to vamp increasingly high-profile individuals in the wake of the Musk-prompted Twitter exodus, by comparison.
The app itself presents a simplified user interface where you can click a plus sawed-off to create a post of 256 characters, which can include photos. (Though, unlike Mastodon, it doesn’t prompt you for alt text for accessibility’s sake).
Where Twitter asks “What’s happening?,” Bluesky asks “What’s up?”
You can search for and follow other individuals, much like on Twitter, then view their updates in a Home timeline. User profiles contain the same sort of features you’d expect: a profile pic, background, bio and metrics, like the number of followers and posts a user has, as well as how many people they’re following. Profile feeds are moreover divided into two sections, like Twitter: posts and posts & replies.
Image Credits: Bluesky screenshot
Bluesky users can share, mute and woodcut accounts, but wide tools, like subtracting them to lists, are not yet available.
The discover tab in the marrow part-way of the app’s navigation is useful, offering increasingly “who to follow” suggestions and a running feed of recently posted Bluesky updates. The latter gives you the opportunity to find increasingly people who you might like to follow, based on their posts rather than just a bio.
Posts themselves can be replied to, retweeted, liked and, from a three-dot menu, reported, shared via the iOS Share Sheet to other apps, or copied as text.
Another tab lets you trammels on your Notifications, including likes, reposts, follows and replies, moreover much like Twitter. There are no DMs.
Image Credits: Bluesky screenshot
The app was experiencing a bug when we tested, showing errors when you try to click into various sections at times, but a Bluesky developer replied to our post that a fix was coming in an hour. (As Bluesky is not unshut to the public, this is hands forgivable.)
There’s something ironic well-nigh leaving Twitter to use an app that looks and feels so much like Twitter, right lanugo to posts from Jack Dorsey as he muses over product concerns like “density of info,” weft count or in-app navigation. Bluesky’s larger promise is the new underpinning technology of the AT protocol, but the app itself feels like a stripped-down Twitter.
In a way, it’s nice to be yonder from Twitter’s midpoint tweets, crypto scams and clout-chasing posts (including from its new owner). But there are once so many Twitter clones now in the works, including the yet-to-launch-publicly projects like T2, Spill and Post; it’s nonflexible to imagine scarification out time to use flipside app, as well. (Of course, if Twitter unexplored AT, things could get increasingly interesting. But who knows what Musk is up to these days.)
Image Credits: Bluesky screenshot of @Jack
Arguably, some are not sold on the promise that the web needed flipside decentralized protocol that serves the same purpose as ActivityPub, either. Without all, a million little Fediverses is not the decentralized web of our dreams.
Bluesky’s plans to run a beta were first spoken in October, but the app itself was not publicly misogynist at the time.
Bluesky declined to scuttlebutt or wordplay remoter questions well-nigh the project, app or beta, noting it’s not doing printing at this time as it’s focused on working through bugs.
Updated 2/28/23 2:44 PM with spare preliminaries well-nigh Bluesky’s financial backing.
Jack Dorsey-backed Twitter volitional Bluesky hits the App Store as an invite-only app by Sarah Perez originally published on TechCrunch