BlueSky app new competitor to Twitter

BlueSky app Everything you need to know about the new competitor to Twitter.

The coming period is expected to see a special competition between Elon Musk, who recently acquired Twitter, and Jack Dorsey, founder of the Blue Sparrow.

The competition will be via the Bluesky social media app created by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and will be launched for users for beta testing soon.

On October 18, 2022, Jack Dorsey announced that his new decentralized social app was looking for two experimental labs, and just two days later the app got 30,000 applications on the waiting list for people eager to try the app.

Blue Sky is promoted as a decentralized social media app competing with or replacing Twitter, and is believed to pose a major challenge to other social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat.

Blue Sky works with a decentralized distributed protocol called AT Protocol that allows users to control its algorithms and fully control their data.

BlueSky

This means that user data will be far from government influence and control of the companies that exploit it in marketing activities, a move that could revolutionize the personal data economy.

The app will allow the transfer of user account data from one platform to another, where Bluesky users will be able to use their accounts to log in to any social media app that adopts the new protocol.

So a single account will give them access to all their favorite social media platforms. Moreover, the owners of these apps will not control the data of Blue Sky users.

Decentralized applications are open-source applications that rely in their work on blockchain or the P2P network, do not have centralized ownership and are intended to give all users equal control, so they are unlike ordinary communication applications created by an individual or company and become their property and under their full control.

Decentralized applications offer a lot of features such as: protecting users' privacy, lack of control from a single authority, and flexibility of development. But of course it has some drawbacks such as: inability to expand, challenges in UI development, and difficulties in making modifications to the code.
Twitter, a centralized app, works for a large number of users around the world at the same time, but in the background it is an app owned by only one central entity and managed at will.

Similar applications

Examples of decentralized applications now include: BitTorrent, Tor, and Popcorn Time are multi-user applications from both ends, some users consume content and others produce and add to it, while some do both functions simultaneously.

Blue Sky is not a recent project but Dorsey first talked about it in December 2019, as a nonprofit initiative to develop a decentralized open protocol for social media, and launched the Blue Sky Twitter account before that in November 2019.

"The new protocol will allow Twitter to access and contribute to a much larger range of public conversations, and focus our efforts on building open recommendation algorithms that promote healthy conversation, and will force us to be more creative than we have been in the past," Dorsey said at the time, according to the Arab Portal for Technical News.

In 2021, Dorsey said, "Blockchain is a means by which decentralized social networks can implement open and permanent hosting, governance, as well as monetization."

In November 2021, Dorsey left his position as CEO of the platform he co-founded in 2006, announcing in February 2022 the establishment of the independent public benefit company Bluesky PBLLC, and listed Dorsey among its board members.

"Blue Sky will be a competitor to any company that tries to have the initial basics of social media or the data of the people who use it, and Twitter can also use the infrastructure of the protocol being designed," Dorsey said.