• by Colin Kirkland , February 6, 2024

The general public can now join Bluesky, the decentralized microblogging app, after a year of operating as invite-only.

Funded by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, the platform will now be in direct competition with Elon Musk’s X app, as well as Meta’s Threads app and fellow decentralized app Mastodon.

In 2019, when he was still Twitter CEO, Dorsey tweeted that Twitter was funding a team to “develop an open and decentralized standard for social media.” Bluesky emerged from this experiment, with software engineer Jay Graber, now Bluesky's CEO, helping the app amass over 2 million users in closed beta.

Similar to Twitter and Meta’s Threads, Bluesky users see a main feed made up of text posts and images from people they follow.

A host of features allow users to embed links from other leading music and video platforms and share content with fellow users, as well as options to view feeds garnered to a user's specific areas of interest.

Users also have the option to set their own moderation settings in order to “hide,” “warn” or “show” certain categories of content like violence, spam, nudity etc.

What truly sets the platform apart, however, is that it is built on a decentralized protocol called the AT Protocol, which invites an added layer of transparency into what the company is building and how. Developers, too, can write their own code over the protocol, effectively creating new social platforms within Bluesky itself.

Later this month, Bluesky says it will begin allowing outside developers to host their own servers on its AT Protocol, which is designed to rival ActivityPub, the open protocol being used by Mastodon and eventually Threads.

Bluesky currently has about 3 million users, compared to X’s 500 million monthly active users, Threads’ 130 million monthly active users and Mastodon’s 1.8 million users. Opening up its gates to public use will prove whether or not the app can survive in the evolving microblogging landscape.