A few months after its launch, a layer of mystery still surrounds Bluesky. This new social network which wants to overshadow the giant Twitter is the subject of intense discussions all over the web, even though it is still not accessible to the general public – only co-opted people can for the time to access it. If the platform intrigues so much, it is because it was born from the imagination of Jack Dorsey, the founder of Twitter. The man left his post in the blue bird social network in 2021, and has since been working on the Bluesky project.
To the naked eye, the two platforms are almost identical. They allow users to post short messages, along with links, images and mentions. These “skeets”, the equivalent of tweets on Bluesky, can be shared and liked (“like”). For now, the new platform does not yet allow for sharing videos and private messages, but these features should arrive in the near future, according to the creators.
A counter-Twitter
With his project, Jack Dorsey hopes to take advantage of the discontent crystallized by Twitter. Since its acquisition last year by Elon Musk, the platform’s popularity rating has plummeted. Users criticize the many technical problems that hit the social network, between recurring breakdowns and untimely disconnections. The eccentric billionaire also made a name for himself by telling his teams to restore the accounts of many banned people. Latest scandal to date: Twitter announced that it was going to reserve verification badges for users paying a premium subscription.
Contrary to the philosophy of its competitor, Bluesky wants to be decentralized. It is possible for users to create separate applications, without the content being controlled by the creators of the platform. A protocol being developed should also allow users to create their own servers, evolving independently.
“Bluesky was designed so that no one can own or control it and users can build their own apps and communities on it,” according Wired. A strong argument for the information site specializing in new technologies, which considers that this new alternative to Twitter “is a return to an earlier era of the internet, and this shows that the blue bird can be replaced”.
Technically flawed
Observers who have had access to the network, however, point to the cohort of technical problems encountered by users. Bluesky is in the testing phase and the features are implemented one after the other, according to needs, user requests and the many bugs that appear. American journalist Paul Tassi, contributor to the magazine Forbes, written in a blog post that the network “is held together by tape”. The site is only administered by a team of about ten people. Far from the hundreds of technicians who work daily on Twitter.
THE American online magazine The Verge cites an anecdote that sheds light on the unpreparedness of the development team. On April 27, the network experienced its first targeted harassment operations, including the editorialist of Bloomberg Matt Yglesias was the target. Faced with these behaviors, the community complained about the impossibility of blocking users. Bluesky developers rolled out the feature 24 hours after the events began, but the code change was blocked by Apple, rendering the app unavailable on the AppStore for several days.
Today, Bluesky has some 50,000 users. There are developers, Silicone Valley pundits as well as public figures such as Democratic Representative to the US Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or whistleblower Chelsea Manning. Not yet enough to reach a critical size and motivate the general public. That doesn’t seem to be Bluesky’s goal right now, since the social network distributes invitations to the taste account. Users who wish to try the experience can always register on the service’s waiting list. According to the American site Forbesa million people would already be lining up.