Jack Dorsey, one of the pioneers of Silicon Valley responsible for co-founding Twitter, is finding success in social networking again as his latest brainchild, Bluesky, builds traction.
The decentralised social network, backed by Dorsey, has become the latest buzzword and busiest alternative to Twitter, with about 65 000 users, despite Bluesky not being publicly available.
Access to BlueSky has been limited to invitations with invite codes available for beta testers only, with the codes finding their way to eBay fetching hundreds of dollars per invitation.
According to information from data.ai, the BlueSky iOS app has been downloaded more than 375 000 times while rising to become one of the most popular social networks on the Play Store.
What is Bluesky?
Bluesky was initially intended to become a decentralised social network. It was originally incubated under the Twitter umbrella while becoming independent after tech billionaire Elon Musk purchased the microblogging social network for $44 billion last year.
With a Twitter-like feel, BlueSky was launched as a company in 2021, hiring employees in the same year, with US software engineer Jay Graber becoming CEO and Dorsey seated on the board of its directors.
Bluesky is reported to look and feel a lot like Twitter, with the difference being that posts appear on a user’s timeline in chronological order instead of suggested feeds, as Twitter’s new timeline has shaped up to become.
While in its infancy, the platform also lacks many of the features on Twitter, for example private messaging functionality and the ability to share rich media such as video, features that will be available once it is launched.
Although limited to a select few, the social network is expected to open to the wider public later this year.
Despite having sold Twitter, Dorsey has been noted to make more announcements and posts via Nostr, his other decentralised social network.
He has been reported to frequent BlueSky, recently taking to the social network to share his view on the Musk takeover of Twitter, stating that after the tech billionaire’s acquisition of the platform, he should have walked away from a deal that “went south”.
Dorsey has been seen to be less active on his first social media success from posting numerous times daily on Twitter, with his last tweet posted on February 1 and recent tweets promoting other social networks.
IOL Tech