It has been a long time since Twitter stopped being a social network to which many of us went to inform ourselves and to comment on what was going through our minds or what we thought about current affairs or the tasks of our jobs or our daily lives. . Some time before Elon Musk bought it, the amount of fake news and hoaxes that were shared on it was already beginning to be alarming. His arrival further strained the atmosphere, and Users began to look for an exit to networks like Mastodon and another initiativewhich until February of this year still allowed access only through invitations: Bluesky.
In the interests of his concept of freedom of expression, among other things, Musk has dismantled the network’s moderation team and has modified several times the algorithm that dictates what users see on their timelines to encourage them to see content full of fake news and generator of hate and division.
Not only that, but he has also changed it to enhance his own messages and, specifically in the face of the recent elections in the US, to show content favorable to the Republicans and their candidate, Donald Trump. Musk is also dedicated to sowing discord against governments that he does not like, such as the Labor Party in the United Kingdom, and has numerous problems with the European Union due to his management of the social network and non-compliance with various European regulations. . It has even been banned for several weeks in Brazil after clashes between Musk and members of the country’s government and judiciary.
All this has precipitated an exit of users from the platform to Bluesky, which since February 24 of this year stopped requiring invitations to open an accountand in a very short time it has registered more than notable growth, going from two million users to the current more than 20 million in one year. But what is Bluesky and what is behind this network?
Bluesky: the base and origins
La red social Bluesky is at first glance similar to Twitter, but it has several differences regarding this. To begin with, although it is not yet, it is designed to be decentralized. Furthermore, in addition to its default feeds, it allows its users to create other themes, or subscribe to those developed by third parties.
The first idea for the creation of Bluesky arose in 2019, still within Twitter, with the first steps in the development of the AT Protocol, the basis of Bluesky. Jack Dorsey, creator of Twitter, was involved in its creation and development, and although he became part of its board of directors and financially supported the birth of the network, he no longer has any ties with it since last May. Then he left his board of directors and closed his account, due to differences with how it was evolving.
Bluesky has been separated from Twitter since 2021, the year in which it became an independent company and began hiring employees. He currently has 20 full-time employees. Its CEO is Jay Graeber, a woman who is only 33 years old, something unusual for this type of company and platform.
Since its inception, Bluesky has been described as an initiative for the development of a decentralized social network protocol. With it, several social networks called applications, each with their own standards and tools, could interact with each other through an open standard. For now, the only application on this protocol is Bluesky, which in May 2023 adopted the MIT license to be open source.
First steps and controlled growth
After the launch of its applications for mobile devices, not without problems, Bluesky reached 50,000 users in May 2023. Aware that one of Twitter’s weak points was the moderation of its content, and with the intention of avoiding problems of harassment and hatred, at Bluesky they decided to control the opening of accounts for a while so that it was done in a staggered manner.
With this they sought to develop an adequate moderation and security team, and to prepare the network to grow “in a responsible manner.” The day they were removed, last February, the company’s team published a comic and an article explaining the network and how it works in more depth.
Users, attracted by the similarities of its use with Twitter and by the moderation options it offered, began to arrive. First in drip, and then, coinciding with the different clashes and problems of Twitter and Elon Musk in several countries in waves.
Back then it still offered certain shortcomings, such as the impossibility of publishing videos, which little by little have been resolved. Currently, although many still do not offer facilities to publish threads or hashtags, Bluesky already allows you to cite other posts (although it gives the opportunity to remove the cited post from the quotes to its author) or publish videos of up to one minute in length.
It has also added “starter packs”, thematic lists of popular users with which users who access the platform for the first time, or those who want to follow accounts on a certain topic, can follow several recommended and considered relevant by other users. It offers a tool to locate followers of a Twitter account and allows adjustments from content moderation to the creation of personalized feeds.
The first big wave of users to Bluesky coincided with the Twitter ban in Brazil. Thus, at the end of August, Bluesky added more than a million new accounts in three days. In subsequent weeks, several more waves arrived from the United States and, above all, the United Kingdom, given the growth of hate messages and fake news on the platform about the country after its general elections.
Final takeoff of Bluesky
At the beginning of autumn Bluesky had just over 6.10 million users, and since then it has not stopped growing. A month ago it had about 10.8 million and on Thursday of last week it reached 15 million. Since then Its number of users has grown at a rate of one million per dayand last Tuesday Jay Graeber confirmed that has already exceeded 20 million and it doesn’t stop growing.
Bluesky now has over 20M people!! ?We’ve been adding over a million users per day for the last few days. To celebrate, here are 20 fun facts about Bluesky:
— Jay ? (@jay.bsky.team) 2024-11-19T18:19:54.104Z
The flight of Twitter users from all countries from the platform after the United States elections on November 5, especially due to Elon Musk’s closeness to Donald Trump, the unbreathable environment for many on the network, and the possibility of Musk taking a position in the future US government.
Also, of course, due to the drift of the platform, which does not stop showing, in any language and country, content that encourages tension, hatred, division and fake news. An example of this is the falsehoods that have spread like wildfire through X about the consequences of DANA in Valencia, even promoted by bots from India, increasing confusion among its users. Musk and his team have simply done nothing to stop them, and continue to allude to freedom of expression.
In recent weeks it has become clear that it is no longer just anonymous users who switch to Bluesky, since media outlets, political parties, personalities from various sectors and influencers have begun to open their profiles, exerting a level of attraction towards the platform even more pronounced. And for the first time, The number of users in Spain on Bluesky grows significantly and continuously.
Bluesky: the dark spots
At first glance, it may seem that Bluesky, a project of Bluesky Social PBC, based in Delaware (United States), is all advantages, but the network also has its black points. To begin with, it is quite complex. The basis for storing the data generated by its users is the PDS, or personal data servers. The company is responsible for hosting them, although anyone can, in theory, open its server to access the network. Of course, creating it is not easy and requires advanced technical training.
The data in these PDS is indexed on the relay servers. For now these depend on Bluesky, which has not yet explained how they work. There is also no information about the system that makes up what each Bluesky user sees on their screen and timeline when using the platform. This makes the decentralization of the network difficult, although the unknowns for this may be cleared up in the future.
Another of the dark points of the network is its financing, which began with 13 million dollars that Jack Dorsey allocated to its birth as a work team within Twitter. When it became an independent company, it closed a financing round of eight million dollars, contributed by different investors. Up to this point everything seems normal, but the controversy has arrived with its last round, closed almost a month ago and in which Bluesky has received 15 million dollars from a cryptocurrency sector organization, Blockchain Capital.
Bluesky now has 13M+ users, the @atproto.com developer ecosystem continues to grow, and we’ve shipped features like DMs and video!We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised a $15M Series A to continue growing the community, investing in Trust and Safety, and supporting the dev ecosystem.
— Bluesky (@bsky.app) 2024-10-24T16:33:56.586Z
Their business model is also not clear yet, although they have already drawn some red lines to try to reassure their users: They will not train AIs with your data or publicationsand they will not charge for using the service either. In principle, they also have no intention of including advertising. However, they have proposed charging a subscription to offer them some advanced services, such as publishing videos of greater duration and quality, or creating more personalized profiles.
For now, it already allows customization of the username in exchange for a monthly amount. But this alone cannot sustain the network, so it is likely that in the future its creators will decide to expand its functions with different payment services as its user base expands, the first phase to consolidate any social network. .
For now, its users enjoy a calmer environment without tension or falsehoods, with powerful enough moderation functions enough to prevent trolls and hate-generating accounts, which have already tried to inflame the atmosphere, from disappearing permanently from sight in a short time. They also claim that they have recovered lost contacts on Twitter (which changed its name to X, more to Musk’s liking) since its algorithm stopped showing in order what the accounts they followed wrote, and that its number of interactions and its visibility is much higher.
