Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter, users of the social media platform who chaffed under the brash billionaire’s management have sought an alternative. The latest contender to emerge is Bluesky, a lookalike backed by one of Twitter’s own co-founders, Jack Dorsey.
Over the past month, Bluesky – an independent project that was initially funded by Twitter when Dorsey was chief executive – has rapidly gained traction among journalists and some famous names, billing itself as a fresh alternative to the chaos of Musk’s Twitter.
Dorsey sits on Bluesky’s board along with two others. The company has said it is “owned by the team itself”, and Twitter no longer has a stake.
The platform, which is still invite-only and in beta mode, remains a minnow with about 50,000 users, compared with giants such as Twitter and Meta. Still, visits to both the desktop and mobile app rose to nearly 1.5 million globally in April, up from less than 300,000 in March and about 15,000 in February, according to data from digital intelligence group Similarweb.
The platform said on Thursday that new users had doubled on the previous day, prompting it to upgrade its database, while the term Bluesky began trending on Twitter itself. US politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ford chief executive Jim Farley and model Chrissy Teigen are among those who have joined the platform, which is in the top 10 social networking apps in the Apple app store.
The momentum around Bluesky comes as Musk, who bought Twitter in October, continues to alienate some users over his changes to the platform, which include charging $8 (€7.30) for the blue ticks that used to denote status and celebrity, and relaxing of its moderation rules. The platform has also suffered from increased outages and glitches.
Over the weekend, Dorsey criticised Musk, marking an apparent end to the billionaire bromance that helped facilitate the sale of the company.
Asked whether he still thought Musk – who he once described as the “singular solution I trust” to “extend the light of consciousness” at Twitter – was the best steward for the platform, Dorsey replied on Bluesky: “No.
“Nor do I think he acted right after realising his timing was bad. Nor do I think the board should have forced the sale. It all went south. But it happened and all we can do now is build something to avoid that ever happening again,” he said.
Dorsey added he was “happy” that the Bluesky team, as well as the developers at Nostr, another social media initiative he has been involved with, were building something new. In October, Dorsey rolled his entire stake of Twitter shares, worth nearly $1 billion at the buyout price of $54.20, into the privately held Twitter, making him one of its biggest shareholders.
Bluesky looks much like Twitter – users can post short messages and images, and build up followings. So far it has a playful tone, with users celebrating moving away from Twitter and also creating their own lexicon. Posts, for example, have been dubbed “skeets” – a portmanteau of sky and tweet.
Some Bluesky users have been inundated with requests for coveted invitations to the platform, with existing users granted one a week.
But there are still technical issues being worked out. Over the weekend, a bug emerged that resulted in every person replying to popular threads receiving a notification when others also posted, dubbed a “hell thread”. Soon, droves of users began adding to one such thread, blowing it up with jokes, memes and explicit pictures.
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Bluesky was unveiled by Dorsey in 2019 with the aim of developing a single standard, or protocol, upon which social platforms and other developers could build more tailored offerings. Twitter, he said at the time, would be one of its clients, though it is unclear if this remains the case.
Like other initiatives that have sought to replace Twitter, such as Mastodon and Hive, it is unclear if Bluesky will scale successfully
The idea behind this so-called decentralised social media model is to build an interoperable system where no central authority is in control, in response to complex debates over how platforms should be moderated. In a recent blog post, Bluesky’s chief executive Jay Graber described its underlying technology as “a foundation for next generation social apps that can bring back the openness and creativity of the early web”.
In the longer term, the Bluesky team hopes to introduce what is known as “composable moderation”, according to Tim Bray, a former Amazon executive who was previously one of the early collaborators on Bluesky.
That feature envisages users curating their own experiences based on a menu of custom algorithms made by third parties, such as one that might filter out offensive speech or focus on a particular topic. However, it has not shipped yet, and it is unclear who exactly would develop these algorithms, he noted.
Like other initiatives that have sought to replace Twitter, such as Mastodon and Hive, it is unclear if Bluesky will scale successfully without running into more severe moderation issues or technical difficulties. Graber said last week that her team “were already stretching the server” due to high usage.
Another challenge is the economics for the team as well as those building on top of it. Bluesky said last year it had received $13 million in funding and it had set up as an independent LLC, but it was unclear how it would be financed or monetised. Graber has written about ensuring users own their data, suggesting that it would avoid having to rely on advertising.
“Is there a business model there?” Bray asked. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2023
