Twitter/X alternative BlueSky is rapidly increasing in popularity. It launched in beta in 2021, which meant you could only access it with an invite from someone else. Ultimately, the caterpillar grew into a butterfly, because since it is no longer necessary to have an invitation, the platform is growing like crazy.
Jack Dorsey
Twitter was a very good idea in 2006. Founder Jack Dorsey started it with the idea that people could quickly exchange ideas and it has turned out that people like to use it for that. Or well, used: things haven’t always gone well for Twitter, but for many people the low point of the platform is the takeover. Jack Dorsey sold his blue bird to Elon Musk, who turned it into a black and white X.
And it has now turned out to be a cross, because more and more people are leaving because Musk’s ‘open’ construction does not make it any more pleasant. Sex ads, extreme right, Twitter is no longer a friendly bird. Reason for Jack Dorsey to start something else, namely BlueSky. This has already seen enormous increases in the number of users in the last six months, but now that an invitation has no longer been required for the social medium for two days, it seems to be the end of the story. As many as 1 million people joined BlueSky in one day. Many people seem to applaud the social medium extra, because it is also a nice story: someone sets up Twitter, sells it, and then takes the tweeters with him to his new initiative.
BlueSky
Is BlueSky very different from Twitter? No. The timeline is called a skyline and tweets are called skeets. The biggest difference, and perhaps the only one if we compare it to the old Twitter, is the decentralized nature of the app. The idea is that you will soon be able to read messages in other apps via BlueSky. Sort of what WhatsApp is also planning to do, although it is mainly doing so because it is forced to do so by the EU. For BlueSky it is a very conscious choice, that decentralized origin. It uses the AT protocol for this, which allows various servers to communicate with each other.
Apparently people find that an attractive idea, because BlueSky is growing enormously. 8.5 new accounts would be created every second. There is also a lot of posting: 2 million times in one day. Ultimately, BlueSky now has 4 million users and we expect that to grow even further. Especially because it is done in a healthier way than Threads, which is linked to Instagram and was therefore tried out by many people and then in many cases ignored. Fortunately, there are a lot of people on Threads, so it will survive, but it seems that the choice for BlueSky is considerably more conscious. And that’s exactly how someone like Jack Dorsey wants it.
