Twitter’s rival app Bluesky, co-founded by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, is now available on appstore in a beta form to allow the company to test the app.
Reports disclosed that Bluesky is currently available as an invite-only app which allows certain individuals to try out the platform by creating an account via an invite code. The app which debuted on the Apple Play Store on the 17th of February 2022, is reported to have recorded about 2,000 installs as of February 28th.
Bluesky shares similar color (Blue) to Twitter and also has a similar interface with a lot of Twitter-like features such as follows, posts, retweets, comments, etc. According to a report, Bluesky is like a bare-bones version of Twitter, that allows users to create handles with the display name in bold.
While Twitter asks, “What’s happening?”, Bluesky asks “What’s up?”, allowing users to create a post of up to 265 characters a little bit lesser than Twitter which allows users to write more than 280 characters.
Despite having similar features to Twitter, Bluesky plans to create some technical features designed to make it very different from Twitter. The platform aims to provide a decentralized social network protocol, which is expected to make its user data free from influence by any government or corporation.
The app is built on top of the AT protocol, a new federated social network that integrates ideas from the latest decentralized technologies. Originally known as Authenticated Transfer Protocol, or ADX, the AT protocol is Bluesky’s main effort that aims to enable a new way for servers to communicate with each other, allowing individuals and businesses to self-host and have multiple websites instead of one.
Investors King understands that the Bluesky project originated with Twitter in 2019, but the company was established in 2022 as an independent company focused on decentralized social network R&D. $13 million in funding was pumped into Bluesky’s research and development last year.
After his exit from Twitter as CEO, Jack Dorsey last year October disclosed that his creation of Bluesky is for the app to be a competitor to any company trying to own the underlying fundamentals for social media or the data of the people using it.
