Co-founder and former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Twitter, Jack Dorsey has launched a new application called ‘Bluesky’ on Android, a few hours after losing his verification badge on the microblogging platform.
According to the app’s website, the “social internet” of the future will give users more options and creators “independence from platforms”. However, the app is still under development and may only be accessed with an invite code.
“We’re building the AT Protocol, a new foundation for social networking which gives creators independence from platforms, developers the freedom to build, and users a choice in their experience,” the website stated.
Using financing from Twitter, Mr Dorsey started developing Bluesky as a side project in 2019. In late February, it was first rolled out to iOS users.
As per TechCrunch, the basic features for monitoring likes or bookmarks, modifying tweets, quote-tweeting, direct messages and using hashtags, which are available on Twitter are not present in Bluesky at launch. This will make the app a more streamlined version of Twitter than what it initially appeared to be.
Additionally, it’s incorporating decentralisation into its own protocol, the AT Protocol, rather than adding to the work already done on ActivityPub, the protocol powering Mastodon, an open-source Twitter alternative and a variety of other decentralised apps in the larger “Fediverse”, the term for these connected servers hosting free, open-source web publishing software, as per the outlet.
The demand for the application has been growing and has 20,000 active users currently.
