Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey Launches Beta For New Social Network Circa Musk Era
Twitter’s ex-CEO Jack Dorsey is branching out on his own with the beta launch of his new social media site, Bluesky. Announced in 2019, it is ready for its first round of testers to try their hand at the new platform.
The news comes on the heels of Elon Musk concluding his long, drawn-out battle with Twitter, culminating in the Tesla CEO officially buying the company.
Bluesky, for all intents and purposes, will not work the same way as traditional social media platforms, as Dorsey was inspired years ago to create a place for content creators and users which was decentralized.
Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard. 🧵
— jack (@jack) December 11, 2019
In recently-revealed text messages between Dorsey and Musk, the previous Twitter CEO mentioned that Twitter should have always been a decentralized site and could not go on as a company.
For this reason, he decided to leave in 2021. In his place, he left the company’s helm in the hands of Parag Agrawal, whom Musk dismissed when he took over the company.
Not much is known about the new venture except that its website states it is “a new foundation for social networking which gives creators independence from platforms, developers the freedom to build, and users a choice in their experience.”
Using its new technology—‘AT Protocol’—means that users can control their algorithm and not have content pushed onto them.
In 2019, Dorsey announced that Twitter was working towards “a new decentralized standard for social media.” However, he also noted that the site should not have an advertising model.
Musk has just posted an open letter to Twitter announcing how “low relevancy ads are spam.”
According to Bluesky on its Twitter account, the beta platform currently has 30,000 signups to test the service. It remains open for registration for trials.
Wow. 30k signups for our app’s waiting list in the last two days! Thanks for the overwhelming interest, we’ll do our best to get you in soon. 🔜
— bluesky (@bluesky) October 20, 2022
