While Elon Musk Finished Twitter Deal, Twitter's Co-Founder Revealed a New Platform Is Coming Soon

By Abby Liebing October 31, 2022 at 4:34pm

As Elon Musk moved through the final steps of acquiring Twitter, the co-founder of the social media giant, Jack Dorsey, unveiled that he plans to eventually launch a new social media platform, called Bluesky Social, and its testing is getting underway.

On Tuesday, just two days before Musk officially acquired Twitter, Dorsey announced that Bluesky Social, a “blockchain-base” social media platform, was beginning testing and getting closer to a public launch, Business Insider reported.

Bluesky was actually founded back in 2019 as a kind of research platform for making social media less centralized. It was meant to be an “open and decentralized” standard for social media, the Independent reported.

It is based on blockchains, which means that the platform “brings decentralized and permissionless blockchain protocols to platforms built for facilitating connection and content-sharing between people,” Cryptopedia reported in an explanation of blockchain social media.

Blockchains are an integral part of the technology behind cryptocurrency, the Independent added.

But though Bluesky has been around since 2019, this recent announcement from Dorsey shows that it is coming into its next phase of development and one step closer to being usable.

Bluesky Social is not actually being launched but is starting beta testing, Insider reported.

For this testing stage, Bluesky has been gathering thousands of users to sign up and try it out.

Bluesky tweeted on its official Twitter account on Oct. 20 that it already had 30,000 signups.

“Wow. 30k signups for our app’s waiting list in the last two days! Thanks for the overwhelming interest, we’ll do our best to get you in soon,” Bluesky tweeted.

Wow. 30k signups for our app’s waiting list in the last two days! Thanks for the overwhelming interest, we’ll do our best to get you in soon. 🔜

— bluesky (@bluesky) October 20, 2022

One aspect of Bluesky that has been reportedly appealing is that the technology it’s built on gives users control over algorithms, instead of the platform moderating them, Gizmodo reported.

“What’s perhaps most interesting and actually tenable in today’s social media ecosystem is the promise that the AT Protocol will let users control their own algorithms … What this supposedly means is that users can dictate how much of certain content they wish to receive and from where,” Gizmodo explained.

That is why Bluesky described itself on the website as “creators independence from platforms, developers the freedom to build and users a choice in their experience.”

Though Bluesky was originally founded with funding from Twitter, the social media giant does not have controlling shares in the fledgling platform, the Independent reported.

Bluesky also clarified in April that the funding from Twitter did not come with any strings attached.

“Twitter’s funding of Bluesky is not subject to any conditions except one: that Bluesky is to research and develop technologies that enable open and decentralized public conversation,” the tweet read.

Twitter’s funding of Bluesky is not subject to any conditions except one: that Bluesky is to research and develop technologies that enable open and decentralized public conversation.

— bluesky (@bluesky) April 25, 2022