Welcome to Bluesky, the app backed by Twitter’s former CEO Jack Dorsey
Bluesky was announced back in 2019, originally funded by Twitter as a kind of research project.
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Last Friday, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was asked if he thought current CEO Elon Musk was the right leader for the company. He said, “No.”
He continued: “Nor do I think he acted right after realizing his timing was bad. Nor do I think the board should have forced the sale. It all went south.” He said all of this in response to users prompting him on Bluesky, which seems to be the Next Big Thing.
Since Musk’s Twitter acquisition, there’s been poorly planned layoffs, all of that blue-check verification chaos and outages hitting the platform on a semi-regular basis. And many users want a new platform to take its place.
Bluesky was announced back in 2019, originally funded by Twitter as a kind of research project. After officially starting in 2021, it broke off into its own company in 2022. It’s only now that the platform has started to work itself into the social media conversation.
Similar to Twitter, Bluesky users can make short text and photo posts and reply to other people’s posts. Eventually the app could become decentralized, meaning that users can build their own separate servers within it. There are also plans for it to be “open protocol,” making it easy to share Bluesky posts across different platforms.
“People have been saying for years that it would be great if users could own their data and their relationships; if we could have transparent algorithms and algorithmic choice; if there could be more accountability and user control over how social platforms are moderated,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber published on his blog last month. “We’ve now designed and built a system that we think achieves the goals stated above.”
Bluesky is still invite-only and in its beta-testing phase. But it’s already pulled some big names. Yes, dril is using it. So are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, Jack Dorsey himself, Chrissy Teigan, The New York Times and CNN. Last Thursday, the company said it had experienced the “biggest single-day jump in new users” ever, doubling its number of users from the day before and now having over 300,000 App Store downloads, according to data.ai. And everyone’s trying to get their Bluesky invitations – by asking around on Twitter, of course.
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