AT Protocol & Bluesky

AT Protocol & Bluesky

Summary

The AT Protocol (Authenticated Transfer Protocol, pronounced “at-protocol” and commonly shortened to ATProto)is a protocol and open standard for decentralized social networking services.

It is under development by Bluesky Social PBC, a public benefit corporation originally created as an independent research group within Twitter to investigate the possibility of decentralizing the service.

OnAir Post: AT Protocol & Bluesky

News

Bluesky & AT Protocol: An Un-Enshittifiable Social Web
Wesley Finck – April 9, 2024 (16:22)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHH8OPRV0jg

This is a recording of a presentation I gave at DWeb YVRs Hack Day event recently. In it I give a high level overview of Bluesky and the AT Protocol. How some of the main components work together to create a social media app unlike anything we’ve seen before.

About

Web Links

AT Protocol

Overview

Source: Wikipedia

The AT Protocol aims to address perceived issues with other decentralized protocols, such as user experience, platform interoperability, discoverability, network scalability, and portability of user data and social graphs. It employs a modular microservice architecture and a federated, server-agnostic user identity to enable movement between protocol services, with the goal of providing an integrated online experience. Platforms can access and serve any user content within the network by fetching content formatted as predefined data schemas from federated network-wide data streams.

The AT Protocol powers the Bluesky social network, which was created as a proof of concept for the protocol, and is the main service in an ecosystem of platforms and services built on the AT Protocol referred to as the ATmosphere.  Bluesky Social has pledged to transfer the protocol’s development to a standards body such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the near future.

Bluesky

What is Bluesky?

Source: FAQs on website

Bluesky is a social app that is designed to not be controlled by a single company. We’re creating a version of social media where it’s built by many people, and it still comes together as a cohesive, easy-to-use experience. We’ve done this by building Bluesky on the AT Protocol, an open source toolbox for building social apps that can all talk to each other.

We want modern social media and public conversation online to work more like the early days of the web, when anyone could put up a blog or use RSS to subscribe to several blogs. We believe this will unlock a new era of experimentation and innovation in social media. Researchers and communities will have the ability to jump in to help solve the problems social networks currently face, and developers will be able to experiment with many new forms of interaction.

Traditional social networks are often closed platforms with a central authority. There’s a small group of people who control those companies, and they have total control over how users can use the platform and what developers can build. On these platforms, as a user, if you try to leave, you have to start over from scratch without the connections you built there or the content you made. As a developer, if you try to build a new app, you have to overcome network effects to rebuild the social graph from scratch, and if you try to build on the APIs of these companies they can cut you off and kill your company in the blink of an eye. As a creator, you might spend years building an audience only to lose access to it when the platform changes the rules on you.

What is the AT Protocol?

The AT Protocol is a protocol for public conversation and an open-source framework for building social apps, meaning people have transparency into how it is built and what is being developed. It creates a standard format for user identity, follows, and data on social apps, allowing apps to interoperate and users to move across them freely. It is a federated network with account portability.

An analogy to explain this: every time you create an account on a social platform, it’s like moving to a new city. You make friends and create posts, which is like filling your house with furniture you made. But on centralized social platforms, if you leave, it’s like leaving all your friends behind with no way to contact them, and leaving your house behind without being able to take anything with you. Leaving a centralized site and starting over from scratch is very hard.

The AT Protocol essentially lets people move between cities. Creating a standard format for identity and data is like giving people a passport, cell phone, and property rights. If you don’t like the city you first moved to, you can relocate and take all your belongings (data) with you. Your friends will still be able to find and stay in touch with you at the same name and number (identity & follow graph).

The AT Protocol offers account portability, as well as algorithmic choice and composable moderation, which you can read more about in the linked blog posts.

How are Bluesky (and AT Protocol) different from Mastodon (and ActivityPub)?

Mastodon is another federated social network built on a protocol called ActivityPub. While Bluesky — built on AT Protocol — shares the term “federation” with other networks, the way it works is very different.

On Bluesky, server choice doesn’t affect what content you see. Servers are only one piece of the protocol — when you browse Bluesky, you see posts that are pulled together from many different servers. This is why you can change your server after signing up without losing your username, friends, or posts.

A summary of some ways Bluesky differs from Mastodon:

  • A focus on the global conversation: On Mastodon, your “instance”, or server, determines your community, so your experience depends on which server you join. An instance can send and receive posts from other instances, but it doesn’t try to offer a global view of the network. Your Mastodon server is part of your username, and becomes part of your identity. On Bluesky, your experience is based on what feeds and accounts you follow, and you can always participate in the global conversation (e.g. breaking news, viral posts, and algorithmic feeds). You can use your own domain name as your username, and continue participating from anywhere your account is hosted.
  • Composable moderation: Moderation on Bluesky is not tied to your server, like it is on Mastodon. Defederation, a way of addressing moderation issues in Mastodon by disconnecting servers, is not as relevant on Bluesky because there are other layers to the system. Server operators can set rules for what content they will host, but tools like blocklists and moderation services are what help communities self-organize around moderation preferences. We’ve already integrated block and mute lists, and the tooling for independent moderation services is coming soon.
  • Composable feeds: We designed your timeline on Bluesky so that it’s not tied to your server. Anyone can build a feed, and there are currently over 40,000 algorithmic feeds to choose from. Your Mastodon timeline is only made up of posts from accounts you follow, and does not pull together posts from the whole network like Bluesky’s custom feeds.
  • Account portability: We designed federated hosting on Bluesky so that you can move servers easily. Moving hosting services should be like changing your cell phone provider — you should be able to keep your identity and data. Changing servers on Bluesky doesn’t disrupt your username, friends, or posts.

What is the corporate structure of Bluesky?

Bluesky, the company, is a Public Benefit Corporation. It is owned by Jay Graber and the Bluesky team. The board consists of Jay Graber; Jeremie Miller, the inventor of Jabber/XMPP; Mike Masnick; and Kinjal Shah. Find past public statements we have made about Bluesky PBC’s governance and structure in our original announcement, other posts on our blog, and on social media.

What is the relationship between Bluesky and Twitter?

Bluesky was initially a project kicked off by Jack Dorsey when he was CEO of Twitter in 2019. Jack chose Jay to lead Bluesky, and Twitter paid Bluesky services income to build an open social protocol for public conversation that it could someday become a client on. Bluesky has been an independent company since its formation in 2021.

In late 2022, Twitter chose to sever the service agreement with Bluesky, and Bluesky agreed. The Bluesky PBC has continued to pursue its original founding mission to “develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation.”

How many people are on the app?

As of November 2024, Bluesky has over 13 million users.
As of January 2025, over 26 million users.

How do I join Bluesky?

Sign up for Bluesky at bsky.app. (No invites required!)

What is your plan for moderation?

Our approach to moderation is three-fold: automated filtering, manual admin actions, and community labeling. It stacks new approaches to moderation on top of what centralized social sites already do, and exposes the internals of the system for anyone to observe.

The open and composable labeling system for moderation we’re creating will allow anyone to define and apply labels to content or accounts, and lets anyone choose to subscribe to these label sets. Labels can be automatically or manually generated, and can be applied by any service or person in the network.

For more information, read our original blog post on composable moderation.

For FAQ about the AT Protocol, please visit here.

For media inquiries, please contact press@blueskyweb.xyz.

More Information

AT Protocol wikipedia


For modem commands, see Hayes AT command set.

The AT Protocol (Authenticated Transfer Protocol, pronounced “at-protocol” and commonly shortened to ATProto)[1][2] is a protocol and open standard for decentralized social networking services.[3] It is under development by Bluesky Social PBC, a public benefit corporation originally created as an independent research group within Twitter to investigate the possibility of decentralizing the service.[4]

The AT Protocol aims to address perceived issues with other decentralized protocols, such as user experience, platform interoperability, discoverability, network scalability, and portability of user data and social graphs.[3] It employs a modular microservice architecture and a federated, server-agnostic user identity to enable movement between protocol services, with the goal of providing an integrated online experience.[5] Platforms can access and serve any user content within the network by fetching content formatted as predefined data schemas from federated network-wide data streams.[6][7]

The AT Protocol powers the Bluesky social network, which was created as a proof of concept for the protocol, and is the main service in an ecosystem of platforms and services built on the AT Protocol referred to as the ATmosphere.[8][9][10] Bluesky Social has pledged to transfer the protocol’s development to a standards body such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) in the near future.[11]

Design

The AT Protocol aims to create a decentralized, interoperable, and scalable online ecosystem where users can retain, manage, and customize a single federated online identity across various online platforms and services. Bluesky Social describes the protocol as being “modeled after the open web itself”.[5]

Compared to other protocols for social networking such as ActivityPub, where implementations are typically designed as a monolithic server that hosts both user data and the application, it splits up these elements into smaller microservices, which can be used as needed.[12]

AT Protocol clients and services interoperate through an HTTP API called XRPC that primarily uses JSON for data serialization.[13] Additionally, all data within the protocol that must be authenticated, referenced, or stored is encoded in CBOR.[14]

User identity

The AT Protocol utilizes a dual identifier system: a mutable domain name handle and an immutable decentralized identifier (DID). Handles serve as user-end identifiers and are verified by querying a domain’s resource records. DIDs resolve to DID documents, which contain references to key user metadata, such as the user’s handle, public keys, and data repository.[15]

AT Protocol’s identity infrastructure.

Services can assign handles to new users upon signup using subdomains (e.g. @username.bsky.social). Alternatively, users can set a custom domain or subdomain as their handle (e.g. @username.com or @username.wikipedia.org) by adding a TXT record to the domain’s records or by responding a HTTP requests to a specific .well-known URL, associating the domain or subdomain to the user’s DID.[16][17]

The protocol’s dual identifier system provides both user-friendly identifiers for use in end-user services and consistent cryptographic identities within the protocol, while also providing a robust TCP/IP-based account verification mechanism at the protocol level.

User data repositories

User data within the protocol is stored in dedicated data repositories, or “repos”. Each user is associated with a single repository, over which they have exclusive management rights. Repositories contain mutable collections of user records, which log actions such as posts, likes, follows, and blocks. Records are persistent and can only be added or removed at the explicit request of the user.[18]

Each record within a repository’s collection is assigned a unique record key, which is used by network agents to reference records within a user’s repository. The current implementation of record keys is the timestamp identifier (TID), derived from the record’s creation time.[19] Repositories store collections in a Merkle search tree, which sorts records chronologically based on their TID.[20]

Media files, along with their metadata, size, and media type, are stored separately from repositories as blobs, a type of unstructured binary data, in the user’s host server.[21] This allows network agents to access and process arbitrary media files regardless of their original schema or upload context.[22]

Personal Data Servers

Personal Data Servers (PDSes) host user repositories and their associated media. They also serve as the network access point for users, facilitating repository updates, backups, data queries, and user requests.[5]

Platform clients access the protocol on the user’s behalf by querying their PDS, which, in turn, fetches the requested data from other services within the network. This design differs from ActivityPub, where protocol interactions and services are handled by monolithic host servers. Since network events are resolved through the protocol’s network-wide indexing infrastructure, the availability of any single PDS is, by design, potentially inconsequential to the user experience.[23]

The AT Protocol prioritizes data portability, enabling users to back up and migrate repositories and associated media without data loss, even in the event of an adversarial PDS.[24] The design of PDSes within the protocol results in low computational requirements for operation, allowing individuals or groups to run their own PDSes without the need for significant computational resources.[3]

Although most users’ repositories reside in PDSes run by Bluesky Social, many independent PDSes exist within the network.[2]

Relays and the firehose

Relays are a key component of the protocol’s indexing infrastructure, serving as the core indexers within the network.[5] Relays crawl the network by continuously fetching repository updates from PDSes before aggregating, indexing, and forwarding these updates into network-wide data streams, collectively called the firehose.[7] The firehose is available to all network agents, and can be consumed by any service within the network.[3] Relays can choose to index all or part of the network.[5]

By eliminating the need to crawl or store user data and providing a unified data stream, relays simplify the development of applications and services in the protocol and reduce their operational costs.[25]

Relays have been criticized as being the most centralized component in the protocol’s design, given their near-indispensable role in the network and a lack of clear incentives for running a relay.[26][27]

App Views

App Views, analogous to current-day social networking services, are end-user platforms and services within the protocol that consume, process, and deliver data from the relay to user clients in response to queries from users’ PDSes. They utilize network-wide information from the firehose, such as posts, likes, follows, and replies, to create customized user experiences within their clients.[3]

The design of App Views within the protocol allows for significant variation in implementation. App Views can implement invite systems, custom algorithms, alternative clients, varying monetization and content moderation strategies, and off-protocol services.[28] Despite these differences, all App Views operate from the same data sourced from the firehose. This architecture reduces the computational load and storage requirements of App Views, and prevents user lock-in by enabling users to easily switch between App Views while retaining their posts, follows, likes, etc.[29]

The largest App View on the protocol is currently Bluesky, although other App Views, such as WhiteWind (a long-form blogging platform), Frontpage (a Hacker News-style social news website) and Smoke Signal (an RSVP management service) are also available within the protocol.[30][31][32]

Lexicons

All posts within the AT Protocol follow a specific global schema language called a lexicon to support different service and platform modalities.[33] App Views within the protocol have the flexibility to define their own unique lexicons, or utilize existing ones.

This approach allows App Views to create custom lexicons that are tailored to their specific use case while maintaining compatibility with the broader network. As an example, records displayed in an App View focused on microblogging would likely use a different lexicon than one focused on video-sharing, as their content types require different sets of attributes.

However, App Views can also choose to serve content using lexicons defined by other App Views, even if the content was originally posted elsewhere in the network.[6] For example, a new microblogging App View could choose to serve previously posted content using the lexicon defined by an established competitor, enabling them to provide novel features and services while maintaining compatibility with existing content.

This schema design is intended to eliminate user lock-in and foster user-centric innovation by forcing App Views to differentiate themselves through unique user experiences and additional functionality, rather than relying on exclusive access to content.[34]

Lexicons are referenced within records using Namespaced Identifiers (NSIDs), which consist of a domain authority in reverse domain-name order, followed by an arbitrary name segment.[35] For example, com.appview.foo is a valid NSID, where com.appview is the domain authority, and foo is the name segment.

The most popular lexicon in the protocol, app.bsky, defines Bluesky’s microblogging schema.[6]

Opinionated services

Opinionated services are services within the protocol that process data from the firehose to provide subjective judgements on network data for the purposes of content moderation and curation. These services contrast with the intended “unopinionated” nature of relays and App Views.[3] Opinionated services enable users to customize their content consumption and moderation preferences within the protocol while maintaining the neutrality of the protocol’s core components.

Users have the ability to subscribe and unsubscribe to these services at any time through their client app (unless they are hard-coded into the user’s current App View.)[28] The modularity of these services allows for a customizable, stackable, user-centric approach to content curation and moderation within the protocol.[36]

Labelers

Labelers produce judgements about user-generated content, such as identifying spam or inappropriate material. These labels can be applied to various aspects of the network, including posts, images, or accounts. The output of labelers is consumed by App Views and PDSes, which can then provide various strategies to users for handling labeled content, such as hiding, labeling, or blurring.[37]

Bluesky Social has open-sourced its internal labeler moderation service “Ozone”, allowing users to create custom moderation services for the network.[38][36]

Although labelers can be used as a moderation service, they can also serve informational or entertainment purposes, such as labeling post topics, user pronouns, or adding positive or playful labels to user profiles and posts.[39]

Feed generators

Feed generators process posts within the firehose for inclusion in custom feeds. After a PDS query, they return a list of post IDs to the user’s App View, which can then be used to create curated feeds.[40][41]

Adoption

The protocol’s reference implementation was first released to GitHub on May 4, 2022 under the name Authenticated Data Experiment (ADX), and is licensed under both the MIT and Apache licenses.[42] It rebranded to the AT Protocol in October 2022.[43]

The AT Protocol has been adopted for use by the Bluesky social network (also developed by Bluesky Social PBC), and is its most popular implementation. The social network itself opened federation with other Personal Data Servers in late February 2024, as it had launched without the ability to federate with other servers not run by Bluesky Social.[44] Additionally, the news aggregator Flipboard allows users to login with their Bluesky account to view and interact with posts from the service.[45] To aid adoption, Bluesky Social funds various projects that use the AT Protocol for federating and/or creating content via grants.[46] A notable application funded by the grants is a proxy server known as SkyBridge, which can convert API calls from Mastodon apps to their equivalent AT Protocol/Bluesky APIs, allowing users to have access to both networks even without official support.[47]

While the AT Protocol is a separate protocol with no major technical similarities to other protocols, there have been services developed that can bridge content across protocols. An example is the Bridgy Fed software, which can crosspost content between ActivityPub and the AT Protocol.[48][49] Posts from Nostr can also be “double-bridged” to the AT Protocol via another bridge that can crosspost notes from Nostr to ActivityPub.[50]

Criticism

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”.[51]

See also

References

  1. ^ “The AT Protocol”. Bluesky. Retrieved 2024-07-30.
  2. ^ a b “2024 Protocol Roadmap | Bluesky”. docs.bsky.app. 2024-05-06. Retrieved 2024-09-05.
  3. ^ a b c d e f Kleppmann, Martin; Frazee, Paul; Gold, Jake; Graber, Jay; Holmgren, Daniel; Ivy, Devin; Johnson, Jeromy; Newbold, Bryan; Volpert, Jaz (2024-02-05), Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media, arXiv:2402.03239
  4. ^ Robertson, Adi (2022-10-29). “Will Elon Musk keep funding Twitter’s most interesting side project?”. The Verge. Retrieved 2024-07-31.
  5. ^ a b c d e “Federation Architecture | Bluesky”. docs.bsky.app. Retrieved 2024-09-05.
  6. ^ a b c “Lexicon | AT Protocol”. atproto.com. Retrieved 2024-09-05.
  7. ^ a b “Firehose | Bluesky”. docs.bsky.app. Retrieved 2024-09-05.
  8. ^ “Glossary of terms”. AT Protocol. Retrieved 2024-09-10.
  9. ^ Robertson, Adi (2019-12-11). “Twitter is funding research into a decentralized version of its platform”. The Verge. Retrieved 2024-07-30.
  10. ^ Conger, Kate (2022-03-02). “Twitter Wants to Reinvent Itself, by Merging the Old With the New”. The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2024-07-31.
  11. ^ Patel, Nilay (2024-03-25). “Bluesky CEO Jay Graber on breaking free from Twitter and competing with Threads and Mastodon”. The Verge. Retrieved 2024-08-04.
  12. ^ “ATProto for distributed systems engineers”. atproto.com. 2024-09-03.
  13. ^ “HTTP API (XRPC) | AT Protocol”. atproto.com. Retrieved 2024-09-05.
  14. ^ “Data Model – Protocol API Reference”. atproto.com. Retrieved 2024-09-06.
  15. ^ “Identity | AT Protocol”. atproto.com. Retrieved 2024-09-05.
  16. ^ “Domain Names as Handles in Bluesky”. Bluesky. Retrieved 2024-09-05.
  17. ^ “How to verify your Bluesky account”. Bluesky. Retrieved 2024-11-26.
  18. ^ “Personal Data Repositories | AT Protocol”. atproto.com. Retrieved 2024-09-05.
  19. ^ “Record Key – Protocol API Reference”. atproto.com. Retrieved 2024-09-06.
  20. ^ “Repository – Protocol API Reference”. atproto.com. Retrieved 2024-09-06.
  21. ^ “Protocol API Reference”. atproto.com. Retrieved 2024-09-06.
  22. ^ “HTTP API (XRPC) – Protocol API Reference”. atproto.com. Retrieved 2024-09-06.
  23. ^ “PDS Entryway | Bluesky”. docs.bsky.app. Retrieved 2024-09-05.
  24. ^ “Repository | AT Protocol”. atproto.com. Retrieved 2024-09-05.
  25. ^ “The AT Protocol Developer Ecosystem”. Bluesky. Retrieved 2024-09-05.
  26. ^ “AT Protocol – First Thoughts – Rusted Gears – Obsidian Publish”. publish.obsidian.md. Retrieved 2024-09-05.
  27. ^ Schulman, Rory Mir and Ross (2024-06-18). “What’s the Difference Between Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads?”. Electronic Frontier Foundation. Retrieved 2024-09-05.
  28. ^ a b “Moderation in a Public Commons”. Bluesky. Retrieved 2024-09-05.
  29. ^ “What is Bluesky?”. Bluesky. Retrieved 2024-09-05.
  30. ^ “WhiteWind atproto blog | WhiteWind blog”. whtwnd.com. Retrieved 2024-09-05.
  31. ^ “Why atprotocol? | Smoke Signal”. docs.smokesignal.events. Retrieved 2024-09-05.
  32. ^ Hof, Laurens (2024-07-04). “Last Month in Bluesky – June 2024”. fediversereport.com. Retrieved 2024-09-06.
  33. ^ “Protocol Overview | AT Protocol”. atproto.com. Retrieved 2024-09-05.
  34. ^ “Bluesky: An Open Social Web”. Bluesky. Retrieved 2024-09-05.
  35. ^ “Namespaced Identifiers (NSIDs) – Protocol API Reference”. atproto.com. Retrieved 2024-09-06.
  36. ^ a b “Bluesky’s Stackable Approach to Moderation”. Bluesky. Retrieved 2024-09-05.
  37. ^ “Labeling and Moderation Controls”. GitHub. Retrieved 2024-09-05.
  38. ^ Ozone: labeling service for Bluesky and other atproto apps, bluesky-social, 2024-09-05, retrieved 2024-09-06
  39. ^ “Labeling and Moderation Controls”. GitHub. Retrieved 2024-09-06.
  40. ^ “Custom Feeds | Bluesky”. docs.bsky.app. Retrieved 2024-09-05.
  41. ^ ATProto Feed Generator, bluesky-social, 2024-09-05, retrieved 2024-09-06
  42. ^ Robertson, Adi (2022-05-04). “Twitter’s decentralized, open-source offshoot just released its first code”. The Verge. Retrieved 2024-07-31.
  43. ^ Pierce, David (2022-10-19). “Bluesky built a decentralized protocol for Twitter — and is working on an app that uses it”. The Verge. Retrieved 2024-08-04.
  44. ^ Khalid, Amrita (2024-02-22). “Bluesky starts letting users host their own servers”. The Verge. Retrieved 2024-08-04.
  45. ^ Davis, Wes (2023-05-23). “Flipboard is ready to work with Bluesky and Pixelfed”. The Verge. Retrieved 2024-08-01.
  46. ^ Perez, Sarah (2024-03-11). “Bluesky is funding developer projects to give its Twitter/X alternative a boost”. TechCrunch. Retrieved 2024-08-01.
  47. ^ Perez, Sarah (2024-04-25). “Bluesky backs a project that would let Mastodon apps, like Ivory, work with its network”. TechCrunch. Retrieved 2024-08-09.
  48. ^ Perez, Sarah (2024-06-05). “Bluesky and Mastodon users can now talk to each other with Bridgy Fed”. TechCrunch. Retrieved 2024-08-04.
  49. ^ Silberling, Amanda (2024-02-14). “Bluesky and Mastodon users are having a fight that could shape the next generation of social media”. TechCrunch. Retrieved 2024-08-04.
  50. ^ Perez, Sarah (2024-05-21). “The ‘vote Trump’ spam that hit Bluesky in May came from decentralized rival Nostr”. TechCrunch. Retrieved 2024-08-04.
  51. ^ “How decentralized is Bluesky really?”
    Christine Lemmer-Webber 22 November 2024
    https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

Further reading


source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AT_Protocol

    Bluesky wikipedia

    “Bsky” redirects here. For the broadcasting company formerly known as BSkyB, see Sky UK.
    For other uses, see Bluesky (disambiguation).

    Bluesky[b] is a microblogging social media service. Similar to Twitter, users can share short text messages, images, and videos in short posts. It is owned by Bluesky Social PBC, a benefit corporation based in the United States.[9][10]

    Bluesky was developed as a reference implementation of the AT Protocol, an open communication protocol for distributed social networks.[11] Bluesky Social promotes a composable user experience and algorithmic choice as core features of Bluesky.[12][13][14] 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.[15][16][17] The AT Protocol offers a domain name-based handle system within Bluesky, allowing users to self-verify an account’s legitimacy and identity by proving ownership of a domain name.[17][18]

    Bluesky began in 2019 as a research initiative at Twitter, becoming an independent company in 2021.[19][20] Development for the social app accelerated in 2022 after Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter and subsequent severing of ties between the companies.[21][22] Bluesky launched as an invite-only service in February 2023 and opened registrations in February 2024.[23] Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey left Bluesky Social’s board by May 2024.[24] The social media platform grew after October 2024, reaching 20 million users by November 2024.[25][26]

    History

    Research initiative

    Avatar of jack⚡️
    Avatar of jack⚡️

    		jack⚡️

    @jack
    		Twitter logo, a stylized blue bird

    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[27]

    Twitter‘s then-CEO Jack Dorsey first announced the Bluesky initiative in 2019 on Twitter to explore the possibility of decentralizing Twitter.[19][28] 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.[29]

    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.[30] However, this group did not achieve consensus toward these goals. As a result, Twitter decided to field individual proposals from these experts.[31]

    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.[29] 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.[20][32][33] Twitter provided $13 million in initial funding to the Bluesky project to begin development.[34]

    Incorporation and independence from Twitter

    In October 2021, Graber incorporated the Bluesky project as an independent company called “Bluesky Social”, and cited Twitter’s “very entrenched existing incentives” as a reason to operate independently.[22] 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”.[35] The company’s first three employees were hired in March 2022.[36]

    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 AT Protocol, alongside a reference implementation in the form of a social media service, as a minimum viable product.[22] The company began a waitlist for this service in October 2022.[37]

    Invite-only open beta

    Bluesky launched as an invite-only iOS beta in February 2023.[38] In April 2023, it was released for Android.[39] Soon after the launch of the Android app, the social network claimed about 50,000 users.[40] 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.[41] Bluesky garnered media attention soon after its launch due to its close association with Twitter and Jack Dorsey.[42]

    The social service attracted minority communities and subcultures, including Black, artist, left-wing, transgender, sex worker, and furry communities, who benefited from the invite system.[43][44][45] These early communities are often credited for the platform’s historically left-leaning culture and its implementation of robust community management and moderation features.[43][46][47] 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.[48]

    On July 5, 2023, Bluesky Social announced it had raised $8 million in a seed funding round led by Neo.[49] Bluesky Social pledged to use the funds to grow its team, manage operations, pay for infrastructure costs, and further develop the AT Protocol.[49] The company also announced its conversion to a public benefit corporation.[49]

    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.[50] This led to a “posting strike” from users, in which users refused to use the app until Bluesky Social addressed the controversy.[51] 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.[52]

    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.[53]

    Graph showing an increase in the amount of registered users on Bluesky.
    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[54] and surpassing 2 million users in November of that same year.[55] By the time of its public launch in February 2024, the social app had reached over 3 million users.[23]

    Public launch

    Bluesky opened registrations to the general public on February 6, 2024, a year after its release as an invite-required beta.[23] It opened federation to the social app through the AT Protocol soon afterwards, allowing users to build apps within the protocol and provide their own storage for content sent to Bluesky Social.[56][57]

    Bluesky has experienced several bursts of expansion and contraction following its public launch, mainly in relation to controversies and changes at Twitter.[8] These bursts were referred to as “Elon Musk Events”, or EMEs, by developers at Bluesky Social.[58][59]

    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.[60]

    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.[61] Bluesky Social confirmed his departure the next day.[62] Dorsey had previously deleted his account from the platform and vouched his support for both Twitter and Nostr, another decentralized protocol.[24][63] 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.[64]

    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.[65][66] Shortly afterwards, on September 16, Bluesky announced it had reached 10 million users.[67] Daily active users in Brazil decreased under 2 million by October.[8]

    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.[68][69] 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.[70][71] The company pledged to not integrate cryptocurrency into the social app or the AT Protocol, so as to not “hyperfinancialize the social experience”.[70]

    Post-election growth

    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[8] and Canada joined Bluesky.[72] 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.[73][74][75]

    On November 19, Bluesky officially crossed 20 million users, tripling its userbase within 3 months.[76][77] This surge also triggered a significant uptick of moderation reports with Bluesky Safety noting 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.”[78] COO Rose Wang stated that the company’s primary focus during the surge was ensuring the platform remained operational while maintaining the integrity of its moderation policies, emphasizing that effective content moderation enhances the user experience.[79]

    The major increase in users led to servers being temporarily overloaded, resulting in the platform acquiring more servers.[80][26][81][72] The surge also necessitated a growth in content moderation.[82][83] While growth was primarily driven by European and American users, popularity of the platform rose in East Asian countries like Japan as well.[84]

    Corporate structure

    Bluesky Social, officially named Bluesky Social PBC, is a privately-owned for-profit corporation. The company is headquartered in Seattle, Washington.[85] 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.[86][87][88]

    Funding for operations, as of late 2024, comes primarily from investors and venture capital firms. No advertising is available on the service as of December 2024, and Jay Graber has stated that Bluesky will not “enshittify the network with ads”.[89] The company is considering introducing an optional subscription service for users, as well as introducing user-to-user payment services.[86][90]

    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),[91] since renamed the Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol.[92] The team opened its early code and placed it under an MIT License so that the development process would be seen in public.[91]

    The AT Protocol’s initial architecture centers around three main services: a Personal Data Server (PDS), a Relay (previously referred to as a Big Graph Service, or BGS), and an AppView.[11] A PDS is a server which hosts user data in “Data Repositories”, which utilize a Merkle tree.[93] 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.[11] As of November 2024, most components of the protocol are either only available from Bluesky Social or need to operate with services run by the company to connect to the network, including the main Decentralized Identifier namespace used for almost all accounts that relies on a directory containing all identities and their core information.[11]

    While most of the platform’s features are available and federated through the AT Protocol, direct messages are offered though a central service outside the AT Protocol that is ran by Bluesky Social.[11] The feature is intended to be decentralized with all messages being end-to-end encrypted in the future, with the current iteration intended to be a placeholder for the sake of the user experience.[94]

    Posts from the fediverse and most platforms that support it like Mastodon and Threads can be bridged to Bluesky through a tool known as Bridgy Fed.[95]

    Features

    Bluesky is largely analogous to Twitter in its structure.[11] 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.[9][44][96]

    Bluesky offers a domain name-based handle system[11] 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.[97] The verification needs to be repeated as a live operation by consumers.[11] The specification doesn’t handle changes in status of the domain names.[11]

    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.”[98] Third-party tools to publish Custom Feeds on Bluesky have been created by independent developers, including a popular client named Skyfeed.[99]

    Bluesky Social claims that an aim to “not be controlled by a single company” is furthered by a composable user experience, “stackable” moderation, and algorithmic choice.[100][101] 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.[101][102][103]

    Bluesky open-sourced its in-house moderation software called “Ozone” in March 2024 for these services.[104]

    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.[26][105][106]

    Later, in late December 2024, Bluesky introduced a “Trending Topics” feature in beta. Similar to Twitter and Threads’ trending features, this allows users to see words or phrases that are currently unusually popular.[107] This feature, accessible globally, can be found in the right sidebar of the desktop version and in the search button of the mobile application. Currently, it is only available in English. Users can disable it in Settings > Content and Media by unchecking “Enable trending topics”. Bluesky respects users’ muted words in this feature. With over 25 million users, the social network considers this the first version of the feature and promises future improvements.[108]

    Reception

    Reviewing the app in February 2023, TechCrunch called it “a functional, if still rather bare-bones, Twitter-like experience”.[109]

    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-U.S.-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”.[110]

    Another review posted the same month highlighted key differences between Bluesky and Twitter, particularly in the level of control provided to users. Bluesky allows users to filter content and select algorithms through customizable feeds, and also incorporates features to combat harassment, including a traditional block function and anti-toxicity tools, such as the ability to detach a post from being quoted by others.[111]

    Jason Perlow of ZDNet wrote “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.”[112]

    Parnell Palme McGuinness of Sydney Morning Herald in late 2024, was critical of the platform, terming it: “a microblogging site for idealists, devoted to protecting them from the raging reality of divergent opinion in a democratic system”, a “delicate biosphere of an alternative reality … where “reasonably mainstream opinions attract the ire of the moderators, and are soft-censored as ‘intolerance’… not really information so much as a curation of comforting progressive axioms”.[113]

    See also

    Notes

    1. ^

    2. ^ Commonly abbreviated as Bsky

    Further reading

    References

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    source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bluesky

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