Social media platform Bluesky is often touted as an alternative to X and is XEM as a competitor to the tech giant.
However, its underlying structure is very different – while X is a single company with a closed ecosystem, Bluesky is based on a decentralized infrastructure.
Here's how Bluesky works.
Bluesky is a Decentralized Social Media platform based on the authenticated transport protocol (AT protocol).
The core idea of Decentralized Social Media platforms is to empower users to own their own data and move it freely between different servers, and Bluesky is just one of many options available.
Although described as a competitor to X, Bluesky actually originated from the social media platform itself. In December 2019, X announced that it was funding an independent team to develop an open, decentralized social media standard.
At that time, X founder Jack Dorsey expressed his desire for X to become a client (user) of the standard that Bluesky was developing.
In August 2021, Jay Graber, a former developer of privacy cryptocurrency project Zcash, was appointed as the head of the Bluesky team and leads the platform's initiatives. By February 2022, Bluesky became a fully independent organization after forming its own company Public Benefit LLC.
In October 2022, the Bluesky iOS app was announced to much fanfare, attracting around 30,000 registrations within two days.
After launching in beta in February 2023, Bluesky released an Android version in April 2023 before officially opening it to the public in February 2024. Since its beta launch, the platform has attracted around 3 million users. Within 24 hours of its public launch, Graber said 550,000 new users signed up for the platform.
Notably, in September 2024, a significant surge in users occurred when around 2.6 million people joined the platform within a week, after X was banned in Brazil . As of September 2024, Bluesky had over 9.7 million users.
Bluesky, as an app, is largely modeled after X, with features like comments, likes, and Chia . The way posts, responses, and feeds are displayed to Bluesky users is also similar. While there are some differences, they are mostly minor (for example, the character limit for a post is 265 instead of 280).
This similarity becomes more apparent with each new update, as Bluesky adds features like direct messages, GIFs, and videos.
New features include the ability to create custom feeds and “starter packs”—personalized invitations that allow users to suggest other feeds and users.
Bluesky also allows users to block other users, hide their posts, and limit their ability to interact with you. In August 2024, Bluesky introduced a series of anti-toxicity features, including the ability to separate posts from quotes and hide replies.
While the user experience (UX) on Bluesky is quite familiar to X users, many point out that it is necessary to XEM deeper below the UX surface to understand why this platform could be a game changer in the social networking space.
While Bluesky’s user experience (UX) and features are similar to X to a significant extent, Bluesky’s primary goal is not aesthetics, features, or UX. In fact, the primary goal is not to create a decentralized competitor to X; the overriding goal is to create a Decentralized Social Media protocol that anyone can use. This protocol is called the authenticated transport protocol (AT Protocol), and it is the foundation on which Bluesky is built.
While Bluesky is the first major product on the AT Protocol, the technology is open and available for any user, developer, or company to use (similar to how anyone can build on a public blockchain like Ethereum). This means that others could create their own social networking platforms using the AT Protocol technology. Even X could operate on the AT Protocol, as Jack Dorsey once hoped, although with the change in ownership of X, this scenario may be less likely.
“AT Protocol enables new ways for users to communicate with each other transparently.”
Because of these features, many consider the AT Protocol, rather than the Bluesky application, to be the main innovation. While Bluesky has received the attention of the community, the AT Protocol has the potential to fundamentally change the social networking landscape in ways that are not merely technical or abstract. The AT Protocol is a combination of decentralized technologies (but not a full-blown blockchain). In essence, the AT Protocol will enable the creation of not just a single social network, but a consortium of social networks that can interact with each other.
Technically, this protocol allows you to host your own company servers, profiles or social media platforms. This is completely different from current social media platforms where self-hosting of servers and data is not possible.
The goal of this design is to protect user data and make the platform experience untouched by corporations, governments, or other centralized entities. AT Protocol has the potential to put users in control of their data and how it is used (or not used). While users can host their own servers, those who do not want to run their own servers can proxy to a server of their choice and use Bluesky like any other social networking app.
In the current landscape, major social media platforms like X, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube are largely closed ecosystems that don’t interact with each other. If you use multiple social media platforms, you likely have different Watcher, friends, and content—and XEM different types of content. And if you don’t like a particular social network, you don’t have many good options. While you can cut back, stop, or find an alternative, making these decisions is often not easy.
When you decide to leave a platform, you often find yourself in a smaller ecosystem than the one you left. You have to start over, creating new accounts, making friends, and finding Watcher. Furthermore, many of the people you want to engage with may not be on these alternative social networks. Whatever your reasons for not liking a platform (too little/too much moderation, algorithms, data privacy, censorship, etc.), users often continue to use them due to the lack of viable alternatives and the inconvenience of having to start over on a new social network.
With AT Protocol, an important feature is the ability to transfer your social network account to another network without losing your important data and social contacts.
For example, let's say you have a Bluesky account with a username, hundreds of contacts, message history, etc. If for some reason you don't like the way Bluesky works, you can migrate your entire account to another alternative social network built on the AT Protocol and continue using it as if nothing has changed. This solves one of the biggest problems with leaving and joining social networks.
That doesn't mean you'll want to leave Bluesky, though, as the platform allows a level of user customization and control that other social networks don't. One of Bluesky's goals is to restore open and transparent conversations on social media by reducing the misinformation and authoritarian manipulation that often plague the digital space.
Just as the internet is a public infrastructure available to everyone, the Bluesky development team wants the social networking layer to also become a public infrastructure through their AT Protocol framework.
“We want this to be the last social identity you have to create, because you can move it between apps and services. You can take your identity, your relationships, your data with you. That’s the underlying protocol layer,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber Chia in a March 2024 interview.
Bluesky aims to promote “the evolution from platforms to protocols.” Just as Satoshi Nakamoto designed Bitcoin as a standalone blockchain protocol—Bitcoin (BTC) cannot be sent through traditional methods like bank transfers or credit card networks—it requires an entirely new technological framework. Similarly, the Bluesky team wants to decentralize and revolutionize social media.
With built-in interoperability, users’ social media connections and interactions will remain intact. Just like you can change cryptocurrency wallets without losing your assets, AT Protocol will allow users to switch between social media platforms without losing their relationships and contacts.
Bluesky has three core goals: trust, scale, and portability. Portability here refers to the ability for users to transfer their entire social media profile and username to another platform without losing any important data. If you want to leave a social network (or if it goes out of business due to bankruptcy or technical issues), you won’t have to worry about losing all your data and connectivity. Just like changing mobile service providers while keeping your phone number, Bluesky envisions the same for users’ social media profiles.
While keeping your phone number when switching providers has become a given today, it was not possible in the US before 2003. Back then, you lost your phone number every time you switched providers, unless the Federal Communications Commission intervened. Bluesky, through the AT protocol, brings similar portability to social media, allowing users to easily move between platforms while keeping their data and digital identity intact.
“We want this to be the last social identity you ever have to create,” Jay Graber
Bluesky also wants to facilitate conversations at a global scale. While some decentralized networks do a good job of giving users control and transparency, many of them can only operate as smoothly and reliably as small online communities. They envision a social network that can handle global conversations like centralized social networks, while maintaining the freedom and choice that an open protocol offers.
What social media users want most is that Bluesky wants to reestablish trust. Using encryption, Bluesky users can verify the authenticity of content created by other users—ensuring that they created it themselves. Another feature is the ability to use your domain name (website address) as your username. This is another way for you to build trust and authenticate yourself to other users—and vice versa.
One of the points of contention, leading to distrust on today's large and centralized social media platforms, is how their proprietary algorithms shape public opinion and control users' social media feeds.
One of Bluesky’s most appreciated features is its “algorithm preferences.” This allows you to see how an algorithm works, tweak it, or simply choose to use a different one. The open-source nature of the project allows developers and users to create their own algorithms; a variety of algorithmically generated feeds are now available, including everything from posts from your followers to posts from accounts that follow you.
While algorithms are often seen as tools for social media manipulation, Bluesky doesn't think the algorithms themselves are the problem, but rather the lack of transparency and control over these algorithms that is the major drawback of centralized social media platforms.
If you want to use a simple chronological timeline algorithm, that would be an option. For those who want something different, an open “algorithm marketplace” would allow users to choose the algorithms they want to use and change them at will (just like you can freely change your phone service provider). These algorithms would be searchable, allowing you to find new algorithms, Chia them, or even publish your own algorithms for others to use.
While the algorithmic option lets you decide what you want to see, Bluesky’s vision of moderation determines what you don’t see. Bluesky sees “composable moderation” as a key feature of their social app. While there is a basic default moderation filter, users can also change it or apply custom filters that can work together. Ultimately, moderation will have automated components, as well as manual ones implemented by network administrators or by the community itself.
Bluesky is among several other Decentralized Social Media platforms that have gained attention following Elon Musk's acquisition of X in 2022, including Nostr, Mastodon, and Threads. Each platform takes a different approach to decentralization; for example, Mastodon and Threads support the rival ActivityPub protocol.
Other social media platforms have leveraged blockchain, including Farcaster and Lens Protocol.
Bluesky and its AT protocol appear to be a promising solution, with two main parts (decentralized application and protocol), that could help overcome the criticisms aimed at centralized social media giants.
However, with 9.8 million users, Bluesky is still a small number compared to the social media giant X, which has more than 353 million users. Nevertheless, Bluesky has attracted investment; in mid-2023, the platform raised $8 million in a venture Capital round.
While it is too early to determine whether most Decentralized Social Media will be primarily blockchain-based or will only use elements of decentralized technology, many predict that the social media landscape will become increasingly transparent, flexible, and scalable as we move from the Web2 model to Web3.
Join Telegram: https://t.me/tapchibitcoinvn
Follow Twitter (X): https://twitter.com/tapchibtc_io
Follow Tiktok: https://www.tiktok.com/@tapchibitcoin
Mr. Teacher
According to DeCrypt
