Bluesky, the company building a decentralized alternative to Twitter/X, announced it has hit 2 million users – up by another million since September, despite remaining an invite-only app. It also revealed its timeframe regarding other key goals, indicating that it planned to have a public web interface go live by the end of the month and would launch federation by early next year, TechCrunch reported.
The latter is one of the most important differentiating factors between Bluesky and X, as it would allow Bluesky to function as a more open social network. This means it will work more like Mastodon where users can pick and choose which servers to join and move their accounts around at will. This is what Bluesky today says makes it “billionaire proof” – a swipe at Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter, now called X.
The Bluesky Team posted on its blog “Toward Federation and an Open Network”:
Toward Federation
Imagine you’ve spent 10 years building your audience and making friends on a social platform, only to decide that it’s no longer for you. When you leave this platform, you’re essentially leaving behind all of your relationships, your saved posts, and more.
We’ve been there too, and we’re similarly tired of packing our bags each time another platform winds down and everyone collectively moves to the next big thing. Signing up for a new social network every few years and losing all our data on former ones shouldn’t be the price that we have to pay in order to keep our relationships online.
That’s why our biggest priority right now is launching federation, which is timelines for early next year. This is one of the core features of Bluesky that makes it “billionaire-proof” – you’ll always have the freedom to choose (and to exit) instead of being held to the whims of private companies or black box algorithms. And wherever you go, your friends and relationships will be there too.
More exciting news: around the end of this month, we’ll release a public web interface. With this, you’ll be able to view posts on Bluesky without being logged in on an account.
This will make posts on Bluesky much more accessible, which will be especially useful for real-time commentary and breaking news.
As a reminder, Bluesky is a public social network, so your posts, likes, etc. have always been publicly accessible through the API. We designed Bluesky with the openness of the internet in mind, and you can think of your profile as a blog on the internet…
Mashable reported that X rival and social media platform Bluesky now boasts over 2 million users, as announced by the team on Thursday. A year after its creation, the Jack Dorsey-backed app marked the milestone while detailing its pending plan of creating a “truly open social network” – and adding a major feature from Twitter.
According to Mashable, Bluesky, a decentralized social media app, is set to add a public web interface, which means users will be able to view posts without being logged in on an account – Bluesky currently still requires an invite code to sign up to its platform.
Personally, I am enjoying Bluesky a lot more than I do Twitter/X. I no longer find it comfortable to use Twitter/X because the majority of what X’s algorithm shows me are things I have no interest in at all.