Bluesky, a new social media platform, has launched its beta form for Apple iOS devices. The app is backed by Twitter co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey as he emerges on the social media landscape again.
The app is currently available on the App Store as an invite-only beta. In other words, only a limited number of testers can use Bluesky right now.
Earlier, there had been speculations about Jack Dorsey re-joining Twitter with Elon Musk having confirmed his decision to appoint his successor for the CEO role. However, with the launch of Bluesky’s beta version, he has also put speculations about him rejoining as Twitter CEO to bed.
An open-source Twitter alternative
Bluesky came to existence from the idea of an open-source or decentralised social network protocol which would itself consist of multiple different social networks running on different content moderation rules.
The mission statement on the company’s official website reads, “Bluesky’s mission is to drive the evolution from platforms to protocols. The conceptual framework we’ve adopted for meeting this objective is the “self-authenticating protocol.”
Bluesky development timeline
It’s been quite some time since work on Bluesky started. It first came to the fore as a spinout company formed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and initially headed by former Twitter chief Parag Aggarwal in 2019. Through the next year, the company hired its first batch of employees on the project.
While the initial plans for Bluesky involved incorporating it with Twitter at some point. The organisation effectively grew into a separate organisation and a business entity of its own in 2021.
In early 2022, the open-source social media platform revealed the Authenticated Development Experiment or ADX, the first version of the decentralised social media protocol. Later that year, Bluesky improved the protocol enough to be ready to release a preview.
