Is BlueSky the Ultimate Solution for Social Media Platforms?

The Twitter deal has been finalized, and Elon Musk is “Doing to Twitter What He Did at Tesla and SpaceX: Firing people. Talking of bankruptcy. Telling workers to be ‘hard core,’” said The New York Times on November 21.

As the Twitter deal was being finalized, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s founder and former CEO, announced that he is soon launching a beta version for a new decentralized social media company, BlueSky Social. There were 30,000 signups within 48 hours of the announcement. Users can still sign up to join the app to become a beta user before the platform is publicly available.

Why there is such interest in BlueSky? Does it represent a better alternative to Twitter or any other social media platform? Before we answer these questions, let’s first understand what BlueSky is.

What is BlueSky?

BlueSky is an initiative to develop a decentralized social network protocol, organized as a non-profit in 2019 and is in a research phase as of 2022. BlueSky was created and funded by its parent company, Twitter, and the goal was for Twitter to eventually adopt the technology.

BlueSky received $13 million in funding from Twitter, with no conditions or commitments except to keep the research going. It was formed under BlueSky Public Benefit LLC, but now BlueSky is owned by the team itself, without any controlling stake held by Twitter.

BlueSky is a public benefit corporation aiming to build a new “open and decentralized” form of social media. The platform objective is to create a standard protocol for social media platforms. Once fully developed, it would allow separate social media networks to interact with each other via an open standard, despite each network having its own curation and moderation systems.

In other words, it is a platform like Ethereum or Algorand, but specifically for social media. Each social network using the protocol is an application – like decentralized applications (dAPPs) built on a decentralized blockchain, such as Ethereum.

To simplify it even further for those who aren’t too familiar with blockchain technology, think of it this way: The goal is to achieve interoperability. Currently all social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, TikTok, etc., all operate in a silo. If you have an account on Twitter, for example, you cannot communicate with anyone on Facebook, not even with your own account. You must create separate accounts and profiles on each platform and interact only with those accounts on that particular platform.

Not only is this siloed setup cumbersome, but may also lead to false identifications and potentially multiple different profiles for the same person. As we progress into the metaverse and Web3experiences built on the metaverse, navigating seamlessly between platforms will be vital.

BlueSky was conceived as the solution to the failures of Twitter. It was announced at a time when social media networks were being accused of data misappropriation, misinformation, and election interference.

Jack Dorsey was “partially to blame” for the current state of our internet today and claimed that he regrets it. “The days of usenet, irc, the web…even email (w PGP)…were amazing. centralizing discovery and identity into corporations really damaged the internet. I realize I’m partially to blame, and regret it,” Dorsey said in his tweet.

How will BlueSky function?

Twitter was looking to solve an issue that almost every social media platform faced. How does one regulate the speech of millions of users without running the risk of overreaching? And how can a company do that while protecting their bottom line? To tackle this issue, Twitter decided to fund a small independent team of up to five software developers tasked to create “an open and decentralized standard for social media.”

Essentially, what BlueSky aims to create is a “decentralized” protocol for social media. This would allow companies and individuals to build apps, services, or recommendation algorithms on the same underlying networks and data.

It’s how email works. You can send an email to someone who uses a different email service and still be sure your message and attachment will get through. That’s because email is built with technical rules such as HTTP and TCP/IP, which provide a common standard for how computers should communicate with each other over a network.

Such “protocols” are open source, allowing anyone to use or build products on top of them. That’s what BlueSky is planning to develop, but for social media.

BlueSky protocol – AT Protocol

In early May, BlueSky introduced its first working protocol, the Authenticated Data Experiment or ADX. After months of exploration, they announced the upcoming launch of its improved beta testing app, the Authenticated Transfer Protocol or AT Protocol.

The project positions itself as a social internet and aims to provide a common platform that will power the next generation of social applications. The Protocol will provide users with four unique features: account portability, algorithmic choice, interoperation, and performance. Account portability will allow users to move their account from one provider to another without losing their data or social graph.

The algorithmic choice will allow users more control over their online experience. For example, if a user was unhappy with Instagram’s automated recommendations, they could move to another platform that employs a different recommendation system for the same videos or photos. Most importantly, the application will provide users with all these features without compromising performance. The AT Protocol is built for fast loading and quick performance, even at large scale.

BlueSky Social is not the first initiative attempting to create an open and decentralized social media platform.

Voice — the purportedly decentralized social media platform founded by Block.one

Block.one sunk over $150 million into its Voice project, and in May 2021, Voice’s landing page displayed the message: “An NFT platform for emerging creators – summer 2021.” But it never launched.

Voice’s concept was a decentralized social media platform. In July 2020, Voice chief exec Salah Zalatimo tweeted Block.one and Daniel Larimer’s then-new project Voice was open to registrants, complete with an attempted hashtag campaign: #TakeBackSocialMedia.

“Traditional social platforms aren’t working for society, so we’re building the alternative we all need.”

A year before, at the B1June Keynote, Block.one chief exec Brendan Blumer and then-CTO Larimer were onstage saying: “Social media was intended for good, putting people in charge of what content they see and share. But it’s become less about what you want to see and more about what big companies, anonymous bot operators, and internet trolls want you to see. We are here to change that, and guess what we are going to use to do that?”

Yep, another token: The Voice Token.

However, enthusiasm for the platform or Voice Token never came. In 2021, Zalatimo said “instead of putting tokens next to creative content, the content itself will be the token” – meaning each content would be a non-fungible token (NFT).

Creating each content as an NFT is probably how content creation and monetization will evolve in the age of Web3. This would allow users and creators to be the sole owner of their creations and information – for enhanced privacy, security, and control.

Larimer left Block.one in December 2020 to create his third decentralized social media platform, called Clarion. It uses “a friend-to-friend network to propagate messages” and will be “even more decentralized than email,” Larimer claimed. Looking at its Github portal it seems that this project was abandoned two years ago.

But Larimer’s first encounter with decentralized social media was in 2016 with the creation of Steem blockchain, which still operates.

On Steem’s website, it states: “We see a world where people get paid for their content and attention – a future where digital content is monetized without the necessity for advertising or selling user data, and communities have the same fundraising capabilities online as they do in everyday life. That’s why we’re building new token-based economic models on the Steem blockchain that create opportunities for people to bridge their passions with success via cryptocurrency rewards.”

What does the future hold for social media platforms?

As technology evolves and we move from Web2 applications (the centralized internet as we know it today) to Web3 applications (a decentralized internet), decentralized social media platforms will likely become the norm. How exactly it will look and which platform will come on top? Time will tell.

Web3 is a concept for the next generation of the internet. It is the evolution of how users can control and own their creations and online content, digital assets, and online identities. Unlike Web2, where centralized companies, which provide the service, control and own all our data, Web3 users can create content while owning, controlling and monetizing it through the implementation of blockchain technology.

It seems that the focus of Steem is on empowering creators and the monetization of their creation, while BlueSky focuses on interoperability, account portability and algorithmic choice. Both Steem and BlueSky contain crucial features, and it is most likely be that we will end up with a decentralized social media platform which integrates all features.

The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.