What is Bluesky and why is it important?

Bluesky: you hear more and more about it lately. It must be a kind of alternative to Twitter, which is not always the most stable platform anymore due to the sometimes somewhat strange innovations that Elon Musk implements. Is Bluesky a good alternative? This is what you can expect.

Bluesky

In the first instance, you can unfortunately not expect much from it: Bluesky works on the basis of invitations and there is already a considerable queue for the digital gateway of the app. There are mainly celebrities and journalists to be found, although it is of course the intention to make the app available to everyone soon. Anyway, get in line and we’ll tell you what to expect once you’ve been given access.

Bluesky is very similar to Twitter in how it looks. You could even think of it as Twitter if you take a quick look. It also uses blue, it looks almost the same in terms of buttons and actually in general it is a copy of the social medium with the bird. Yet it is not completely stolen, because the person behind Bluesky once invented Twitter: Jack Dorsey. In recent years, he has seen ‘his’ Twitter change into something very different from how he ever imagined it. Reason for him to come up with an alternative that partially goes back to the early days of Twitter, decades ago.

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Jack Dorsey

Remarkably, Dorsey Bluesky already suggested it in 2019, when he was still at the helm of Twitter. Especially with the trend of decentralized apps and currencies, he thought it would be a good idea to start something like this. Eventually, Elon Musk took over Twitter and it hasn’t gotten that far since. At least, not under the banner of Twitter. So Dorsey is now doing it herself. With the same at-marked handles, the same way of reposting, commenting on and reporting messages. DMs (Direct Messages) are still missing.

There are some changes: you can write messages of up to 300 characters (that’s more than Twitter) and you have two choices for displaying your timeline: in chronological order based on people you follow or based on interests. There’s another big difference, though: Bluesky is decentralized, making it more like Mastodon. You will soon choose a server and you will then be responsible for how you configure that server: what is the subject, what are the rules, who are the moderators?

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By invitation only

The app has now been downloaded more than 375,000 times, but there are currently only 50,000 people in the app, partly due to the system with those invitations. It reminds us a bit of the corona hype Clubhouse, where sending invitations was also the motto, but which ended up being over fairly quickly in terms of hype. It remains to be seen how that will work with Bluesky, although it will also depend on the developments of Twitter and how competitors such as Mastodon will move. However, Bluesky is free so far and there does not seem to be a paid subscription as known from Twitter in the form of Blue.

At the beginning of this article we asked what Bluesky is and why it is important: well, it is not very important at the moment. For example, Mastodon has many more users as a Twitter alternative. However, it can become big, but that depends very much on the developments on other social media, and what unique possibilities Bluesky brings in the long term. Plus: that invitation system, which must of course also be removed to get a good picture of the interest in the app.

And you, are you interested in Bluesky? Why or why not? Leave it now in the comments.