BlueSky is the new social media from Twitter creator Jack Dorsey. Now that Elon Musk has taken the reins of Twitter, there’s been an outpouring of both rage and fear. This new social media has been postulated as a future alternative to what Musk is proposing with Twitter. Faced with the massive monetization of the platform by the richest man in the world, BlueSky proposes a fully decentralized protocol that will give users a good deal of freedom in a way that’s attractive to them.
In this short article, we’ll tell you exactly what’s so great about this new technology, as well as some of the drawbacks that make this service a bit more complex than Twitter as we know it today.
How BlueSky Social works
BlueSky Social aims to fix what Twitter founder, Jack Dorsey, considers his biggest mistake. In his own words, the American entrepreneur claims that he should have turned Twitter into a decentralized network protocol in which users were the key. Far from algorithms and brands—users should have been the ones to generate and sustain the content by creating their own networks within superior social media.
So now we have BlueSky Social, a social media platform inspired by email protocols to allow users to connect to social media and talk to users from other platforms. Basically, it would be sort of like when you use a Gmail address and the person you’re talking to uses Yahoo. BlueSky Social would be a social network of social networks that would interconnect with each other.
It’s a new, totally decentralized way of understanding social media, something that already exists today, but doesn’t have enough support to stand out on its own. This way, through BlueSky, you can access all the content of other social media and have much more freedom to choose what you want to do than with any other platform.
On the other hand, Jack Dorsey’s idea with his new protocol is to greatly simplify everything. For example, Mastodon is a legitimate alternative to Twitter, but it’s still too complicated and has an outdated interface.
Dorsey’s looking to break down existing barriers to make everything easier, as we said above. That’s why you’ll only need one account to be able to achieve all this.
How to download BlueSky Social
Unfortunately, BlueSky Social is still in closed beta. However, users can be added to a waiting list to be one of the first to try it out once it’s ready or when registration opens. If you want to be at the forefront to test and get access to the social media before anyone else, then you’ll want to sign up for the beta waitlist. However, there most likely won’t be enough people to make it really worth using yet, and many languages may not be available either.
Mastodon: the decentralized alternative to Twitter
Mastodon is a decentralized platform with several instances. Each one of them, also known as a network server, can be specialized in a specific topic or may be generalized. All these servers are connected to a central network that’s in charge of displaying the messages from all of them.
Aside from that, the way it works is absolutely identical to Twitter. You can retoot messages. It allows toots longer than 500 characters and you can send audio and video messages. Likewise, you can communicate with your local network or with the central one, so you can focus on smaller communities if that’s what you’re looking for.
On the other hand, Mastodon is a little more complicated to use than Twitter because you have to choose a server first. This is important, since each one has different rules. Plus, if you choose an unreliable server, it could close down completely unexpectedly.
