Bluesky, the company building a decentralized alternative to Twitter/X, Announced today it has reached 2 million users, another million more since September, despite still being an invitation-only app. It also revealed its timeline regarding other key goals, stating that it planned to have a public web interface operational by the end of the month and would launch the federation early next year.
The latter is one of the most important differentiating factors between Bluesky and X, since it would allow Bluesky to function as a more open social network. This means it will work more like Mastodon, where users can choose which servers to join and move their accounts at will. This is what Bluesky says today that makes him “billionaire-proof”: a blow to Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter, now called X.
“You will always have the freedom to choose (and exit) rather than being subject to the whims of private companies or black-box algorithms.” a company blog post explained. “And wherever you go, your friends and your relationships will be there too,” she noted.
Similar to the Mastodon decentralized service, federation allows anyone to run their own service and connect to any other service that is also running the same protocol. In the case of Bluesky, this would be done through the AT protocol which the company is also developing alongside its consumer-facing service and mobile app. However, the other major decentralized social network, Mastodon, uses a well-established protocol, ActivityPub, which has gained increased traction in the months since Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.
Since then, other companies including Mozilla, Flipboard, Medium, and Automattic (the parent of WordPress.com) have adopted ActivityPub and Mastodon. That could pose a challenge regarding Bluesky’s ultimate scope unless it takes steps to allow the AT Protocol and ActivityPub to interoperate in some way. bridge both can be technically possible, but it is likely to happen later, rather than in the short term.
Meanwhile, Bluesky is working to make its own service more accessible, including launching a public web interface later this month. This will allow anyone to view posts on Bluesky, even if they don’t have an account. That could make the network more promising in terms of being a true X rival for breaking news and conversations, but it could also expose Bluesky users’ posts to the outside world in ways they’re not prepared for. (The app does not currently offer an option to set profiles to “private,” like Twitter/X does. Some users are not happy about this.)
Despite its growth, Bluesky’s hesitance to abandon its invitation-only status and open its network to more users has allowed other X competitors to gain a foothold. Last month, for example, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that his X alternative, Instagram Threads, has just under 100 million monthly active users. He believes it could reach a billion users in the next few years. And Threads intends to interoperate with ActivityPub in the future.
Bluesky’s announcement follows Threads’ rapid release of features to make its app more competitive with X, including things like a chronological feed, support for viewing your likes, search, an edit button (free), a web version , polls and GIF support. , theme tags, and soon an API for developers. Mastodon also took advantage of the opportunity presented by the Twitter acquisition and launched a more user-friendly version of its service in September. But Mastodon currently has 1.6 million monthly active usersmaking it even much smaller than Threads.
In addition to today’s news, Bluesky also highlighted other recently released features, including mobile push notifications, shareable user lists, email verification, advanced feed and thread preferences for sorting and filtering posts, a media tab in user profiles, a Likes tab on your own user profile. , suggestions below, and various accessibility improvements.
Although Bluesky began life as a Twitter project under Jack Dorsey, the company spun off from Twitter with $13 million to get started in R&D. Dorsey sits on her board. This year, the company raised an $8 million seed round led by Neo to further its development and transitioned from a public benefit LLC to a public benefit C Corporation.
