If you're looking for a Twitter alternative that feels more like Twitter, you may want to check out Bluesky Social. It's been getting lots of attention lately, with celebrities and tech CEOs flocking to it and millions clamoring to get in. While it's still a new app that hasn't even hit 100,000 users (it had to pause new signups over the weekend), it's managed to form its identity faster than many other Twitter alternatives and feels a lot more like the microblogging service that people have been tweeting in since 2009.
That said, there are some things about Bluesky that should give some pause. Most notably, it's not open to the public and requires an invite code to join. This is to combat spammers and other bad actors that have plagued the app during its early days. It's also still a private beta, with plenty of bugs and missing features that might scare away some potential users. For example, you can't post gifs or videos, and the app doesn't automatically switch to dark mode in the browser on either Android or iOS. And while Bluesky hasn't added ads yet, it might eventually add them as it grows.
Despite its similarities to Twitter, Bluesky's biggest Bsky login selling point is that it's organized around a decentralized system. In the future, users will be able to develop servers on which they can host their own communities and choose their own rules, says Bluesky's chief executive, Jay Graber. The company's plans may seem ambitious, but it has a solid team behind it that includes the founder of the XMPP protocol and a co-founder of GitHub. And while some have questioned whether the platform can manage the content moderation that it promises, Graber has said that Bluesky is committed to keeping its community safe.
Bluesky also wants to help other apps build their own communities on top of its platform. The idea is that the app would serve as a kind of "city" where people could move between different social media sites, keeping their data and their connections with them. That's a bit like how a person can take their passport, cell phone and property with them when they relocate to another city.
While the goals of Bluesky Social sound noble and may even comport with some of my own wishes for social media, I'm not sure the company has the right ingredients to succeed in its quest to reinvent Twitter. It will have to strike a delicate balance between curbing hate speech and trolls, maintaining engaging discussions, and retaining enough user interest to fend off the rise of competing services such as TikTok and Slack. Then again, if it can deliver on its promise to make it possible for users to curate their own feeds with curation tools of their choice, Bluesky might just be the next big thing in social media. And if it doesn't, it might fade into obscurity, like so many trendy social apps before it.
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