A new rival to Elon Musk’s Twitter has emerged in the form of a decentralised communications app called Bluesky, backed by Jack Dorsey, co-founder and former CEO of Twitter. Decentralised social media platforms have no single owner or leader and are not beholden to commercial or financial interests, making them less likely to collect and sell users’ data and less susceptible to censorship. Bluesky uses a decentralised networking technology called the AT Protocol, which enables people to maintain their identities across multiple apps. Although Bluesky still lags behind Twitter in total download volume, its popularity has exploded over the past few months, with 628,000 mobile downloads in April alone. This represents a 606% rise from March, when it became available on Android in addition to iOS. Mastodon, another decentralised messaging app that gained popularity in November as an alternative to Twitter, only had 90,000 downloads in April.
Bluesky’s emergence underscores how Dorsey is now actively looking to disrupt what he helped create. Bluesky was originally incubated within Twitter back in 2019 when Dorsey was still CEO. In February 2022, members of the Bluesky project created the Bluesky Public Benefit LLC, with Jay Graber as CEO and Dorsey as one of the founding board members. The company announced in April 2022 that it had received $13 million in funding “to ensure we have the freedom and independence to get started on R&D.”
However, there are drawbacks to decentralised social platforms. They typically lack algorithms to recommend particular content and do not sell ads or collect and sell user data, which are the classic ways that social networks make money. This lack of monetisation options means it is unclear how these platforms will generate money. Subscription-based models are a possibility, but Bluesky has not given many hints about its financial plans.
Another drawback is the user experience. The front-end apps built atop these decentralised platforms are often clunky and not professional-looking or easy to use. As of now, Bluesky’s user interface appears to be less confusing for newbies to engage with, but it’s still being tested and developed, so it’s unclear how the broader public will respond to its design.
Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen said in a panel at ETHDenver that the problem with social media today largely comes down to incentives and control. She believes that users have an interesting opportunity to be citizens of their platforms, having an ability to vote, but also having responsibilities that come with that.
