Bluesky

"Bsky" redirects here. For the broadcasting company formerly known as BSkyB, see Sky UK.

For other uses, see Bluesky (disambiguation).

Bluesky

Current logo introduced December 2023
Screenshot of the Bluesky desktop interface, featuring the official company account, October 2024
Type of site	Social networking service
Available in	19 languages
Founded	2019 (within Twitter) 2021 (independent)
Area served	Worldwide
Owner	Bluesky Social, PBC
CEO	Jay Graber
URL	bsky.app
Registration	Required for interaction (like, comment, repost, etc), not required to view posts and profiles that haven't disabled anonymous access.
Users	21.7 million total registered users (as of November 20, 2024) 1–10 million daily active users worldwide (2024)
Current status	Active

Bluesky is a microblogging social networking service modeled after and inspired by Twitter. Users can share text messages, images, and videos in short posts. The service is primarily operated by Bluesky Social, an American benefit corporation.

Bluesky is chiefly an implementation of the AT Protocol, an open communication protocol for a partially distributed social network.

Bluesky began in 2019 as a research initiative at Twitter, accelerated in 2021 and cut ties with Twitter and Jack Dorsey by May 2024. Bluesky launched as an invite-only service in February 2023 and opened registrations in February 2024.

History

Research initiative

Avatar of jack⚡️

jack⚡️

@jack

Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. 🧵

Dec 11, 2019

Twitter's then-CEO Jack Dorsey first announced the Bluesky initiative in 2019 on Twitter to explore the possibility of decentralizing Twitter. The stated goal was to find or develop an open and decentralized standard for social media that would give users more control over their data and experience.

Twitter collected a working group of experts in decentralized technology in a Matrix group chat to achieve a consensus on the best path towards decentralization. However, this group did not achieve consensus toward these goals. As a result, Twitter decided to field individual proposals from these experts.

In early 2021, Bluesky was in a research phase, with 50 people from the decentralized technology community active in assessing options and assembling proposals for the protocol. This ultimately led to the hiring of Jay Graber in August 2021 to lead the Bluesky project and the development of the "Authenticated Data Experiment" (ADX), a custom-built protocol made for the purpose of decentralization. Twitter provided $13 million in initial funding to the Bluesky project to begin development.

Incorporation and independence from Twitter

In October 2021, Graber incorporated the Bluesky project as an independent company called "Bluesky Social", citing Twitter's "very entrenched existing incentives" as a reason to operate independently. Bluesky Social became a benefit corporation in February 2022, with the mission to "develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation". The company's first three employees were hired in March 2022.

After Elon Musk's acquisition of Twitter, Twitter severed all legal and financial ties with Bluesky Social. Musk's takeover did not immediately affect Bluesky Social's operations as a separate entity, but affected its prospects for further funding. Bluesky Social developed the the AT Protocol, alongside a reference implementation in the form of a social media service, as a minimum viable product. The company began a waitlist for this service in October 2022.

Invite-only open beta

Bluesky launched as an invite-only iOS beta in February 2023. In April 2023, it was released for Android. Soon after the launch of the Android app, the social network claimed about 50,000 users. Code for the app was made open source under the MIT license in May 2023, with some server software being dual-licensed with the Apache license. Bluesky garnered media attention soon after its launch due to its close association with Twitter and Jack Dorsey.

The social service attracted minority communities and subcultures including black, artist, left-wing, transgender, sex worker, and furry communities, who hoped to benefit from the invite system. These early communities are often credited for the platform's historically left-leaning culture and its implementation of robust community management and moderation features. Bluesky Social recognized the influence of these early adopters, with Bluesky COO Rose Wang stating that an early goal during the open beta period was to "develop and nurture a set of power users who can help evangelize and help us really tell [...] and reinforce the culture" established by these communities.

On July 5, 2023, Bluesky Social announced it had raised $8 million in a seed funding round led by Neo. Bluesky Social pledged to use the funds to grow its team, manage operations, pay for infrastructure costs, and further develop the AT Protocol. The company also announced its conversion to a public benefit C corporation.

In July 2023, Bluesky experienced a controversy after users discovered the social app did not prevent users from using racial slurs within their handles, as well as the removal of discriminatory slurs from the platform's list of flagged words. This led to a "posting strike" from users, in which users refused to use the app until Bluesky Social addressed the controversy. The controversy led to a public apology from Bluesky Social, an update to the platform's terms of service specifying a prohibition of conduct that "targets people based on their race, gender, religion, ethnicity, nationality, disability, or sexual orientation", and the establishment of a trust and safety team within the company.

In December 2023, Bluesky Social announced a company logo to replace the previous use of a cloudy sky stock image, which was also used as the icon for the official app and website. This icon was a blue butterfly, inspired by existing users' usage of the butterfly emoji to indicate their handles on the service.

The total number of users on Bluesky increased from approximately 200,000 in July 2023 to over 5.9 million by July 2024, with a marked increase in early 2024.

Bluesky saw rapid growth during its open beta period, reaching 1 million registered users by September 2023 and surpassing 2 million users in November of that same year. By the time of its public launch in February 2024, the social app had reached over 3 million users.

Public launch

Bluesky opened registrations to the general public on February 6, 2024, a year after its release as an invite-required beta. It claimed to "open up federation" through the AT Protocol soon afterwards, allowing users to build apps within the protocol and provided their own storage for content sent to Bluesky Social.

Bluesky has experienced several bursts of expansion and contraction following its public launch, mainly in relation to controversies and changes at Twitter. These bursts were referred to as "Elon Musk Events", or EMEs, by developers at Bluesky Social.

Bluesky saw a large influx of registrations by Japanese-speaking users soon after public launch, partly driven by notable Japanese social media personalities such as artist Ui Shigure registering accounts in the platform.

On May 4, 2024, Jack Dorsey, who had initiated and funded the Bluesky research initiative, posted on Twitter that he was no longer on Bluesky Social's board. Bluesky Social confirmed his departure the next day. Dorsey had previously deleted his account from the platform and vouched his support for both Twitter and Nostr, another decentralized protocol. In an interview, Dorsey criticized Bluesky Social, stating that they were "literally repeating all the mistakes [Twitter] made as a company", taking issue with Bluesky Social's company structure and the introduction of moderation tools into the AT Protocol.

In August 2024, following the blocking of Twitter in Brazil, Bluesky gained over 4 million users in under two weeks, becoming the most popular app in the Brazilian App Store and Play Store. Shortly afterwards, on September 16, Bluesky announced it had reached 10 million users. Daily active users in Brazil decreased under 2 million by October.

In October 2024, following changes to Twitter's block feature and Terms of Service to analyze users' content for AI training purposes by default, over 1.2 million users joined Bluesky within 2 days. On October 24, Bluesky Social announced it had reached 13 million users. It also announced a $15 million Series A financing round led by Blockchain Capital. The company pledged to not integrate cryptocurrency into the social app or the AT Protocol, so as to not "hyperfinancialize the social experience".

In the weeks following the 2024 United States presidential election on November 5, 2024, in which former president Donald Trump was re-elected for a second non-consecutive term, millions of Twitter users from the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada joined Bluesky. By November 13, Bluesky had reached 15 million users, growing by around 1 million users per day and reaching the top of the Apple's App Store and Google's Play Store in the United States. On November 19, Bluesky officially crossed 20 million users, tripling its userbase within 3 months. This surge also triggered a significant uptick of moderation reports, including child sexual abuse material; Bluesky Safety noted on November 16, "In the past 24 hours, we have received more than 42,000 reports (an all-time high for one day). We're receiving about 3,000 reports/hour. To put that into context, in all of 2023, we received 360k reports."

Features

Bluesky is largely analogous to Twitter in its structure. Users can send 300-character text messages, images, and video in short posts. Users can reply, repost, quote post and like these posts. Frequent users have called posts on the platform "skeets", a portmanteau of "sky" and "tweets", despite CEO Jay Graber's vigorous disapproval of the term.

Bluesky offers a domain name-based handle system via the AT Protocol, allowing users to self-verify an account's legitimacy and identity by proving ownership of a domain name through a DNS text record or HTTPS page. The verification needs to be repeated as a live operation by consumers. The specification doesn't handle changes in status of the domain names.

Bluesky promotes a "marketplace of algorithms" through its Custom Feeds feature, where users can choose or create algorithmic feeds. Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee stated that "In future updates [Bluesky] will make it easy for users to create custom feeds in-app." Third-party tools to publish Custom Feeds on Bluesky have been created by independent developers, including a popular client named Skyfeed.

Bluesky Social claims that an aim "not be controlled by a single company" is furthered by a composable user experience, "stackable" moderation, and algorithmic choice. The platform offers a "marketplace of algorithms" where users can choose or create algorithmic feeds, user-managed moderation and labelling services, and user-made "starter packs" that allow users to quickly follow a large number of related accounts within a community or subculture.

Bluesky open-sourced its in-house moderation software called "Ozone" in March 2024 for these services.

Bluesky introduced "anti-toxicity" features in August 2024, allowing users to "detach" quote posts from their original post and to hide replies to a user's post. Bluesky also promised the addition of a community notes-like feature.

Technology

Main article: AT Protocol

Bluesky unveiled open source code in May 2022 for an early version of its distributed social network protocol, Authenticated Data Experiment (ADX), since renamed the Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol. The team opened its early code and placed it under an MIT License so that the development process would be seen in public.

The AT Protocol's initial architecture centers around three main services: a Personal Data Server (PDS), Relay (previously referred to as a Big Graph Service, or BGS), and an AppView. A PDS is a server which hosts user data in "Data Repositories", which utilize a Merkle tree. The PDS also handles user authentication and manages the signing keys for its hosted repositories. A Relay is described as analogous to an indexer on the web, ingesting repositories from a variety of different PDS hosts and serving them in a single unified stream for other services to ingest. AppViews, meanwhile, are services which consume data from a Relay and can serve it to final users. As of November 2024, all systems are centralised or rely on a central authority run by BlueSky Social, including a central registry of identities and documents used to make them addressable: "The way that did:plc works is that Bluesky hosts a web service from which one can register, retrieve, and rotate keys (and other associated DID document information)".

Direct messages are offered though a parallel services outside the AT protocol, centrally run by BlueSky Social.

According to Christine Lemmer-Webber, co-author of the ActivityPub protocol and of an early internal proposal for an architecture eventually not adopted by BlueSky Social, «Bluesky is not meaningfully decentralized and that it is certainly not federated according to any technical definition of federation we have had in a decentralized social network context previously. However, "credible exit" is a reasonable term to describe what Bluesky is aiming for».

Mastodon can be bridged to Bluesky.

Corporate structure

Bluesky Social, officially named Bluesky Social PBC, is a privately-owned for-profit corporation. The company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. Bluesky Social is a benefit corporation; as such, it is allowed to use its profits for the public good, and is not obligated to maximize shareholder value or return profits to its shareholders as dividends. It is owned by CEO Jay Graber and other Bluesky Social employees. Graber has the largest ownership share of the company. In late 2024, members of the board of directors included Graber, Jeremie Miller, Mike Masnick, and Kinjal Shah.

Funding for operations, as of late 2024, comes primarily from investors and venture capital firms. No advertising is available on the service as of November 2024, and Jay Graber has stated that Bluesky will not "enshittify the network with ads". The company is considering introducing an optional subscription service for users, as well as introducing user-to-user payment services.

Reception

Reviewing the app in February 2023, TechCrunch called it "a functional, if still rather bare-bones, Twitter-like experience".

Lance Ulanoff of TechRadar originally signed up in April 2023 and at the time declared Bluesky "quiet, reserved, thoughtful, or even polite. Overall, BlueSky is the equivalent of a social media Shangri-La." When he revisited it in November 2024 after the post-US election surge in signups he declared that "for the moment, it's the most exciting place on social media" and "I wasted my day on Bluesky Social and no, I'm not sorry".

Jason Perlow of ZDNet straplines his article "It's not a direct replacement for Twitter (X), but Bluesky has a lot to offer those who want a fresh start in a decentralized, privacy-minded network." He highlights the claimed decentralized nature of Bluesky, the lack of algorithmic feeds and in a lukewarm manner says that "Bluesky might be worth your time if you're ready to leave algorithm-driven feeds behind and try a network that prioritizes user control."

Jay Peters of The Verge is much more upbeat in his review from April 2023, declaring upfront "Bluesky is really, really fun" and "I’m just really enjoying the vibes in my Bluesky feed."

Censorship

On November 21, 2024, the Pakistani internet authority blocked access to Bluesky.

See also

• ActivityPub
• Comparison of microblogging and similar services
• Comparison of software and protocols for distributed social networking
• Diaspora
• Fediverse
• Mastodon
• Misskey
• Nostr

External links

• Official website
• Official company website
• The AT Protocol website
• atproto on GitHub