With Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter, many social media users are getting ready to leave the platform. Jack Dorsey is one step closer to giving them an online haven.
Twitter co-founder and former CEO Dorsey, 45, stated that his decentralized social network Bluesky is looking for beta testers a week before Musk took control of the company on Thursday and instantly fired its CEO Parag Agrawal and two other top executives.
App In Protocol Testing Phase
The company said in a news release on Tuesday that the protocol’s testing is the next phase because distributed protocol development is a challenging process. According to the company, once a network is established, coordination between numerous parties is necessary, therefore they have to start in private beta to sort out kinks. As the beta test continues, they will continue to iterate on the protocol specs and share details about how it works. When it’s ready, they’ll move to the open beta. The company has also shared a link to sign up for the beta test’s waitlist.
According to the press release, the new app will make use of the federated social network known as the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (AT Protocol), which is hosted by numerous sites rather than just one.
“The word ‘Bluesky’ evokes a wide-open space of possibility. It was the original name for this project before it took shape, and continues to be the name of our company, the release declared.
Bluesky to Rival Twitter
Dorsey stated last week on Twitter that Bluesky intends to be “a competitor to any company trying to own the underlying fundamentals for social media or the data of the people using it.”
Twitter established Bluesky in 2019 to assist with the creation of a comparable decentralized concept for the dominant social media platform. At the time, Dorsey stated in a Q&A that “the biggest and long-term goal” was to create a reliable and transparent system for public discourse.
Dorsey shared that Bluesky was designed not to be owned by anyone but to have as many contributors as possible. Twitter established Bluesky in 2019 to assist with the creation of a comparable decentralized concept for the dominant social media platform. At the time, Dorsey stated in a Q&A that “the biggest and long-term goal” was to create a reliable and transparent system for public discourse.
At the time, Dorsey declared in a blog post that he wholeheartedly felt Musk taking over Twitter was “the right path”. He added that he did not believe a single person or entity should own Twitter in principle adding that he preferred the platform to be a public good at a protocol level. Despite those beliefs, he added that he trusted Elon Musk to take over Twitter and “extend the light of consciousness”.
Dorsey and Musk seem to enjoy a positive relationship. The launch of Bluesky social will, therefore, be interesting since the platform could become Twitter’s fiercest rival. Things could get even more interesting if embattled rapper Kanye West acquires the social app Parler.
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