Bluesky is back

It has been the better part of the year since Bluesky had its big moment. 

In May 2023, when the company invited its first batch of users, social networks were in a state of flux. The decline of Twitter had given rise to a handful of startups that challenged it, including Post, T2, Artifact, and Mastodon. 

But none galvanized a segment of former Twitter users in quite the same way that Bluesky did. From the moment its doors opened, it seemed to capture the anarchic spirit of Twitter’s strangest corners. Posts were christened skeets, and the “What’s Hot” feed filled up with butts. Within days, Bluesky was home to both Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Dril. It wasn’t clear what Bluesky was for exactly, but most people there seemed to be having a good time, and that was enough to convince more than 3 million people to at least try it. 

Nine months later, social networks have entered their post-Twitter shakeout. T2 and Artifact are gone. So is Twitter, which has since rebranded to X. And in the meantime, a genuinely popular alternative to X has emerged with Meta’s Threads, which launched last July and now has 130 million users a month.

For all that tumult, though, Bluesky has remained much the same. Unlike other pop-up social networks that come and go, Bluesky’s community has remained active and growing, while preserving the essential weirdness that has always distinguished it. 

It has also remained invite-only, limiting its growth prospects — until today.

Here’s Will Oremus at the Washington Post:

Today, Bluesky is opening to the public after nearly a year as an invitation-only app, with [Jay] Graber as its CEO. With a little over 3 million users, it’s mounting a long-shot bid to take on the company that spawned it — and to set social media on a course that no single captain can control.

On the surface, Bluesky looks familiar to anyone who has used Twitter or Meta’s Threads, with a feed full of text posts and images from people you follow. Underneath, however, the company is building what Graber calls “an open, decentralized protocol” — a software system that allows developers and users to create their own versions of the social network, with their own rules and algorithms. She compared the idea to email, where users of different apps like Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo Mail can interact freely because they all run on the same underlying technology.

Over the past year, Graber told me this week in an interview, Bluesky’s roughly 40 employees have worked to build out the app’s infrastructure, the AT protocol that powers the network it, and the content moderation team and tools necessary to support the community. Now, she said, it’s time to see whether Bluesky can prove out a vision for what Twitter might have become: a decentralized service that anyone could build on, over time creating a more open and democratic network.

“We’re about to just see where this ecosystem goes,” Graber said.

That Bluesky made it even this far feels like a notable achievement. First conceived as a potential alternate path for Twitter by then-CEO Jack Dorsey in 2019, the project languished for two years before Graber was selected to lead it. Bluesky had barely been spun out as an independent public benefit corporation before Musk bought Twitter; had it not, it seems all but certain that Musk would have killed it.

Insulating social networks from this kind of corporate upheaval is, happily enough, one of the goals Bluesky set out to accomplish. Like Mastodon and its underlying ActivityHub protocol, Bluesky is built to devolve control back to its user base. 

Already, there are at least 25 apps you can use to browse Bluesky, and users have created more than 25,000 customized feeds of content. (Graber enjoys one that shows her only photos of moss.) Soon, users unhappy with how Bluesky is run will be able to leave the default server with their username and followers intact, and can set up or join a new server with its own rules.

“We really wanted to let users control their scroll, and say, here’s a marketplace of algorithms,” Graber said. “And once you can choose, and you have the right to leave, then you can pick something good for you. We'll leave it up to you, the user, to choose.