Bluesky, the strange, mocking rival to Twitter that has a decentralized twist, briefly had lighting in a bottle last year.
While still in closed beta, the app swiftly surpassed two million users and became a popular topic of discussion in newsrooms such as The Verge’s. The discussion of what will happen to the platform that is currently known as X has mostly moved to ActivityPub, the decentralized protocol that powers Mastodon, a developing network of other services, and eventually, Meta’s Threads.
Even with ActivityPub’s success, Bluesky is eager for another chance to steal the show. This week, the app is opening up registration to anyone wishing to join up by doing away with its invite-only approach. Additionally, it intends to start allowing third-party developers to operate their own servers on its rival ActivityPub-rivaling AT Protocol later this month. Users of Bluesky are expected to have the option to choose experiences that aren’t managed by the company and to take their profiles with them to competing apps on the network.
CEO Jay Graber stated in an interview with The Verge that before exiting closed beta, the company needs to stabilize its infrastructure and expand on its moderating tools. Since its inception a year ago, the app has reportedly received over 3 million sign-ups, and “a lot more downloads,” according to her. With the ability to join without an invitation, it is hoped that some of those individuals will become active users and that Bluesky will be able to serve as a platform for debate for a wider range of users.
Bluesky is a for-profit company with under 40 full-time staff members, of whom around half are involved in moderating and user support. According to Graber, the Bluesky app has 1.6 million monthly users and 25,000 bespoke feeds (a special AT Protocol feature) for users to select from. These feeds are quite quirky, and anyone may create them. Graber mentions one that she follows that consists solely of images of moss. Why not?
Anyone will be able to establish a server with their own rules when Bluesky opens up the AT Protocol to third-party developers in the upcoming weeks. Graber believes there would be a gradual transition and refers to this as a “experimental rollout.” “I believe we will implement a gradual rollout at first, set rate limits, and ensure that the network doesn’t undergo drastic changes all at once.”
Although the AT Protocol is about to be made public, the Bluesky firm intends to generate revenue through a number of strategies, including charging users for extra capabilities within its app. Additionally, it intends to take a portion of payments made for items like personalized feeds, which developers will be allowed to charge for. According to Graber, work is also being done on an enterprise branch of Cloudflare that will make it easier for people to operate their own servers using the AT Protocol.
Graber is well aware that Bluesky’s current dominance over the AT Protocol is untenable if numerous other businesses eventually build upon it. Eventually, she believes, control will be turned over to an organization that develops online standards, such as the Internet Engineering Task Force. Regarding whether her team intends to work with ActivityPub in any way, she states that while it’s not in the roadmap, the business is open to the concept.
She states, “I believe this is an experimental period.” While Meta and other companies are adopting decentralization in ways that were unimaginable only a few years ago, Bluesky believes there is still space for alternative approaches to what appears to be the next big thing in social networking, even though ActivityPub currently has the attention of the public.
