Social media platform Bluesky is soaring in popularity as people abandon Elon Musk’s X in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election victory.There have been concerns about the spread of hate speech, bots and weak moderation since Elon Musk took over Twitter and rebranded it as X.But that accelerated amid the billionaire’s support for Donald Trump’s victorious election campaign, landing the world’s richest man the job of leading the incoming president’s new Department of Government Efficiency.
With 9,000,000 people joining rival Bluesky since September – a million of them in the last week – it seems a wave of users searching for an alternative has been unleashed.Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu said: ‘We’re excited to welcome all of these new people, ranging from Swifties to wrestlers to city planners.’ What is Bluesky? Appearance-wise, Bluesky is very similar to X, with a direct messaging function recently introduced, which is hardly surprising given its origin.Modelled on Bitcoin, the ‘decentralised’ social media platform was created by Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey as an internal project in 2019, before splitting from the parent company in 2022.
The latest influx of users, mostly in North America and the UK, has brought its user base to nearly 15million.It’s a far cry from the 586million monthly active users on X, but it’s starting to emerge as a leading alternative social media platform – behind Meta’s Threads, with 275million active users each month.That’s particularly true for a certain strand of X users, social media researcher Axel Bruns told The Guardian.
Bruns said: ‘[Bluesky has] become a refuge for people who want to have the kind of social media experience that Twitter used to provide, but without all the far-right activism, the misinformation, the hate speech, the bots and everything else.‘The more liberal kind of Twitter community has really now escaped from there and seems to have moved en masse to Bluesky.’ Bluesky aims to address the shortcomings of Twitter in the wake of hate speech, real-world violence from the platform, and the spread of automated accounts.Posting on the platform this week, New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said: ‘Good GOD it’s nice to be in a digital space with other real human beings.’ The first public announcement of it came at the end of 2019, when Dorsey said he wanted a ‘small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized [sic] standard for social media.’ It’s previously experienced surges in use, including a 60% rise in activity from UK users during the riots in August.
How is Bluesky based on Bitcoin? ‘Decentralised’ applications have been around since Bitcoin was invented a 15 years ago.Unlike a regular app, which is created and owned by an individual or corporation, decentralised apps have no central ownership and often operate on a blockchain.The blockchain, which is a mutually agreed upon set of rules, helps keep control out of a central authority and give each user equal power.
In Bitcoin’s case, this means that no one financial authority, like a bank or government, controls the currency.For Bluesky, this means decisions like which content to moderate isn’t taken by social media executives or its owner Jay Graber.In effect, Dorsey relinquishes control of his company’s standards in place of rules agreed upon by the community.
Many in the decentralised application (Dapps) community were sceptical when Bluesky was first announced.There were already similar projects out there, including Mastodon, a social network founded in 2016.After Dorsey mentioned the app this time round, he gave more recognition to the pre-exisiting standards of decentralised social media, saying his team would look at ‘contributing to something that already exists.
Dorsey added: ‘No matter the ultimate direction, we will do this work completely through public transparency.’ The Twitter CEO isn’t the only party interested in the potential for social networks with less central power.In the wake of Trump-friendly social network Parler being banned from the internet and privacy concerns with Silicon Valley giants, many more obscure apps have been rocketing up the App Store and Google Play charts.On Tuesday, even before Dorsey’s announcement, Mastodon was the top trending project on Github, a platform for developers to collaborate on software projects.
After criticism following the announcement in 2019 of slotting into a Silicon Valley cliche where big tech companies ‘discover’ technology that has already existed, Twitter walked back their plans of building an entirely new system from scratch.Bluesky said at the time that ‘the team will have complete freedom to identify and consider all the great work already done, and if they believe it’s best to work on a pre-existing standard 100 percent, they will.’ But from yesterday’s update, it appears Dorsey and his team are still keen on the project.Developers in the open-source, Dapp community are suspicious of Big Tech getting involved in their community.
After 2019’s announcement, Mastodon wrote: ‘This is not an announcement of reinventing the wheel.This is announcing the building of a protocol that Twitter gets to control, like Google controls Android.’ More Trending Hospice nurse reveals what happens to you moments after you die Sky Broadband goes down leaving hundreds without the internet Uranus's wind problem could be good for humanity Why is Pluto no longer a planet? Read More StoriesMastodon founder Eugen Rochko has also warned of the ‘Embrace, Extend, Extinguish’ phenomenon, where a large accompany adopts an open standard and then privatises the system to profit.And one of Twitter’s most central problems, hate speech, wouldn’t necessarily even be solved by a ‘decentralised approach’ either.
Much is still unknown about Bluesky and the progress they’ve made.Though observers and former Twitter employees predicted the project would work at a ‘glacial’ pace, the outfit did appear to have a collaborative brainstorming session in February last year.Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at [email protected].
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