Mark Cuban is ready to fund a TikTok alternative built on Bluesky’s AT Protocol

Source: Tech Crunch

By Sarah PerezJanuary 16, 2025

Entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban is ready to fund a TikTok alternative built on Bluesky’s AT Protocol, he shared in a TikTok video posted on Wednesday. In anticipation of the coming U.S. TikTok ban, which will go through on Sunday unless paused by the Supreme Court, users have been fleeing to other video platforms, including the Chinese app RedNote. But investors like Cuban see the potential for a more open social web that includes an ecosystem of apps powered by the same technology that today underpins Bluesky’s social network.

The AT Protocol is a newer, open protocol designed for decentralized social media applications. It’s meant to address what some developers thought were shortcomings with the existing decentralized protocol ActivityPub, used by Mastodon and other social services. While Bluesky is the AT Protocol’s flagship app for the time being, there are many other services now being built with the technology.

Consumer demand for open social apps is also in full swing, with Bluesky itself seeing a surge of new signups in the wake of the U.S. presidential elections, growing the network to 27.6+ million users, up from 10 million+ in September. Meanwhile, on Wednesday we broke the news of a coming Bluesky client called Flashes that would focus on images over text.

Cuban says he’d like to see — and back — something that rivals TikTok but is built on the AT Protocol.

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