Jack Dorsey to take on Elon Musk’s Twitter with new app Bluesky
Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, is apparently testing another social networking application Bluesky to compete with Twitter.
Just as Elon Musk wraps up his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter, a small tech company created by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has revealed the creation of a new social media app. Earlier this month, Bluesky announced that it would soon release a beta version of its Bluesky Social app.
Dorsey’s latest social media platform aims to be “a competitor to any company trying to own the underlying fundamentals for social media or the data of the people using it.” According to the press release, the new app will make use of the federated social network known as the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (AT Protocol), which is hosted by numerous sites instead of just one.
Bluesky announced, “The next step is to start testing the protocol. Distributed protocol development is a tricky process. It requires coordination from many parties once a network is deployed, so we’re going to start in private beta to iron out issues. As we beta test, we’ll continue to iterate on the protocol specs and share details about how it works. When it’s ready, we’ll move to the open beta.”
The company stated in its press release, “The word ‘Bluesky’ evokes a wide-open space of possibility. It was the original name for this project before it took shape, and continues to be the name of our company. We’re calling the application we’re building Bluesky because it will be a portal to the world of possibility on top of the AT Protocol.”
Jack Dorsey originally introduced Bluesky in December 2019, as Silicon Valley was bracing for a global “techlash” and a wave of disinformation and election meddling around the 2020 US election. Twitter, like all other big social networks, was battling a conundrum on how to control the voice of millions of users without running the danger of overreaching.
In order to build “an open and decentralized standard for social media,” Dorsey claimed Twitter would sponsor a “small independent team” of five software developers, with the eventual objective of transforming Twitter itself to this standard. Importantly, Twitter does not hold a majority stake in BlueSky. It has reportedly gotten $13 m in financing from Twitter as of April of this year, with the sole stipulation that its research is continued.
In a Q&A at the time, Dorsey stated that the primary and long-term objective is to create a sustainable and open framework for public conversation. Without any involvement from Twitter, Bluesky is controlled by its team itself. Bluesky aims to create a decentralized social network protocol so that various social media networks, each with its own systems of moderation and curation, can communicate with one another using an open standard.
Bluesky has been in the research stage since 2021, with 40–50 members of the decentralized technology community working to evaluate choices and putting together protocol ideas.
In 2006, Dorsey co-founded Twitter. He served as CEO of Twitter for a number of years after which he resigned. He was replaced by Parag Agrawal, the company’s CTO at the time. Recently, Agrawal was fired from the company along with the chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde, CFO Ned Segal, and the general counsel Sean Edgett shortly after Musk took over Twitter.
I am a law graduate from NLU Lucknow. I have a flair for creative writing and hence in my free time work as a freelance content writer.
