Bluesky, Co-founded by Twitter’s Jack Dorsey, Makes Social Network Accessible to All

Bluesky, the decentralized social network created by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, is now opening its app to all users who are interested. This marks a departure from the previous invite-only system that Bluesky had implemented to manage its growth over the past year.

The social network opened to the public last February and now has 3 million users, but Bluesky only allowed new users through an invite code to ensure the technology behind the network can handle the traffic.

Another key part of Bluesky, known as “the alliance,” is also coming at the end of February, said Jay Graber, Bluesky’s CEO. Federation is a key part of Bluesky’s mission, allowing anyone to create their own social network using Bluesky’s technology protocol. These different networks are interoperable, and users of one network can see posts from people on another network or jump between networks, taking their profiles and followers with them. Each network would also be free to set its own rules for speech or create its own algorithms to determine what content users see.

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The idea for Bluesky was born when Dorsey was still at Twitter, now known as X, and was pitched as a way to offer users a new kind of social network that wasn’t controlled by any single company or community. The original idea was for Bluesky to create a social networking protocol that Twitter would then connect to so that people could export their Twitter profiles and messages to other networks that also adopted the protocol.

Bluesky created a protocol called the AT protocol and also developed its own social networking app to prove this theory could work, Graber said. “We didn’t start building the app until later, and then the app was really meant to be a flagship client that shows what we can do with an open protocol like this,” he said. “Since then, we’ve built a community around it and put a lot of work into making it a really good place for people.”

This community has emerged as one of the main alternatives to X, especially for those frustrated by owner Elon Musk. Dorsey left Twitter in late 2021, and while Bluesky work continued as a separate entity, it’s unknown if X will ever adopt the AT protocol, as Dorsey once envisioned. Dorsey is a member of Bluesky’s board of directors.

Bluesky was originally funded by Twitter, but in July announced it had raised $8 million in an outside round to help expand the network. Neo, a startup accelerator and seed fund, led the round.

Graber said there is still a lot of uncertainty about which networks will eventually be able to sign on to a decentralized protocol like the one he and his team built.

“This is quite a lot for change socially,” he said. “It’s just a recognition that there are limits to how one company can decide how our digital social communications work in public conversations for billions of people.”

The idea of decentralizing social media is gaining traction, and it has found its way into Meta Platforms Inc., the parent company behind some of the world’s biggest networks, Facebook and Instagram. Meta’s new competitor to X, called Threads, has been testing integrations with a separate open protocol known as ActivityPub. This would make Threads messages available on other networks using the same protocol, including Mastodon.

“By making threads interoperable, people get more choice about how they interact, which helps content reach more people,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in December. “I’m pretty optimistic about this.”

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