It takes a lot of willpower to break away from the cyclonic storms unleashed by Generative AI and GPT and write something else for a change. However, in this column, I’ve turned my gaze to blue skies, or more accurately bluesky, a social networking Twitter wannabe that’s causing ripples of its own. This is largely because it is strongly supported by the man who created Twitter, Jack Dorsey. There are several contenders for the Twitter throne, the most famous of which is the near-extinct mastodon, which despite some fiercely loyal anti-Musk followers, hasn’t managed to gain traction. There is also another Dorsey-endorsed app, Nostra, created by an anonymous creator who goes by the pseudonym ‘Fiatjaf’. Then there is Desi Ku, which has gained a fair amount of traction in India, especially among people who follow a certain ideology. Speaking of thinkers, one cannot forget the Truth Social in America, created by Donald Trump, who uses it as a public megaphone for his incessant boasting.
This column focuses on BlueSky, not only because it is being pushed by Jack Dorsey, but because of its remarkably interesting decentralized nature, which could become a model for more democratic, data protective social networks and perhaps AI models. Interestingly, the BlueSky project started within Twitter itself in 2019, and focuses on R&D around the decentralized social network. After Twitter sold itself to Elon Musk, BlueSky was spun out as a public benefit limited liability company. It raised $13 million in investment, got an ex-AWS CEO, and Dorsey became a member of its board. Bluesky is still a small fish with some 50,000 users, though it includes prominent names such as US Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ford CEO Jim Farley and model Chrissy Teigen. However, it is growing rapidly even though it is still invite-only, from just 15,000 in February to 1.5 million on its app in April 2023.
The app looks a lot like Twitter and has similar features, and its posts are called ‘skeets’ – a combination of sky and tweets. Where it differs significantly is its holding structure. The company is organized by the founding team, and as it tweeted last year: “The ‘public benefit’ part of our structure gives us the freedom to devote our resources to our mission without the obligation to return money to shareholders. Bluesky The funding is not subject to any conditions except one: Bluesky has to research and develop technologies that enable open and decentralized networks.”
This decentralized nature is the other big and potentially disruptive difference. The Bluesky project aimed to create a single protocol or universal standard on which existing social network and software developers could build more customized offerings—indeed, Twitter itself could be a client on this ‘platform of platforms’. The idea was to make this protocol interoperable, with no central authority. BlueSky CEO Jay Graber describes it as “a foundation for the next generation of social apps that can bring back the openness and creativity of the early web.” Hence, the idea was to break out of the ‘walled garden’ approach that all social networks follow. —If you post a picture on Instagram or Facebook, you must do it again on Twitter, and again on LinkedIn, thus preventing ‘cross-posting’. The idea behind an open network like Bluesky is that posts can flow between your different platforms. An additional feature is that there will be no advertisers on Bluesky, as it is not a traditional profit making corporation. How it sustains itself is still unclear, perhaps it could seek subscriptions or crowdfunding. Bray also talks about a new social concept of ‘composable moderation’ where “users [curate] Their own experiences based on a menu of custom algorithms created by third parties, such as filter out offensive speech or focus on a particular topic.bit.ly/3MbSII1,
I’ve written often about decentralized social media platforms with user-controlled data and moderation before, and it’s exciting to see one take shape. In a world where technology is increasingly controlled by a small number of big tech companies, this is a necessary step in giving the power back to the people—something Web3 evangelists have been trying to do for some time. Dorsey is one of them, a believer in the power of blockchain and decentralization (he renamed his company Square to Block). He is also quite clear on the centralized platform that he is trying to remove from here. When a BlueSky user wondered whether he had named the app to make Twitter an open protocol, thus releasing the Twitter bird logo in a wide blue sky, Dorsey replied, “Yes.”
Jaspreet Bindra is a technology expert, writer The Tech Whisperer, and is currently pursuing a Masters in AI and Ethics from Cambridge University.
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