AT Protocol

Bluesky is an initiative to develop a decentralized social network protocol, and an associated social networking service.

Originally spun out by Twitter, Inc., it hired its first employees in 2021, and was incorporated as an independent public benefit company the same year. Jay Graber currently serves as the company's CEO, while Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey sits on its board of directors.

It currently operates its own social network, Bluesky Social, which is accessible via a web browser or an app for iOS and Android. The service is currently in an invite-only beta, though the company has specified plans to open it up to the general public at a later date. The service is described as being "Twitter-like".

Service history

Bluesky was described in 2021 as an initiative to develop a decentralized social network protocol, where multiple social networks, each with its own systems of curation and moderation, would interact with other social networks through an open standard. Each social network using the protocol would be called an "application". As of 2023, Bluesky operates its own official network called Bluesky Social, a centralized service running on proprietary software for its servers and client apps, whereas part of the protocol implementation has been released under MIT license. Neither the protocol nor service claimed to use blockchain technology in 2022.

Posts on the platform have been dubbed 'skeets' (as a portmanteau of 'sky' and 'tweet') by frequent users, despite CEO Jay Graber pleading with users not to call them that.

The Authenticated Data Experiment (ADX), in mid-2022, was Bluesky's first early protocol release. It used personal data repositories, intended to be controlled by individual users, that social networks would optionally support. The stated purpose was to let users post messages without necessarily affecting their visibility to other users, as primary storage of the data would remain in the personal data repository while networks would handle the distribution to other users. This distinction was later described in the ATP FAQ as a division between "speech" and "reach" layers. Bluesky released a simplified version as the 'AT Protocol' in October 2022 alongside technical documentation.

Bluesky started a waitlist in October 2022 for a service that would use the protocol. At the time of release, Bluesky only addressed interoperability and had not explained how it would address platform moderation and monetization. In February 2023, the Bluesky app was released for iOS as an invite-only beta, and the service was only available to users who have received an invite code, either from the company itself or from an existing user. Reviewing the app, ''TechCrunch'' described it as "a functional, if still rather bare-bones, Twitter-like experience." Later, in April 2023, it was released for Android.

After the launch of the Android app, the social network reached about 50,000 users in April 2023. The launch surfaced technical issues, including a bug which created incorrect notifications.

Bluesky Social was made open source under the MIT license in May 2023, allowing the public to view and modify its source code.

Company history

Twitter's then-CEO Jack Dorsey first announced the Bluesky initiative in 2019 on Twitter. The company's Chief Technology Officer (and later CEO) Parag Agrawal was its manager, inviting initial working group members in early 2020. The group expanded with representatives from existing decentralized networks Mastodon and ActivityPub. The group coordinated through Element chat software. Twitter commissioned Jay Graber of the Happening decentralized social network to compose a technical review of the decentralized social network landscape. She was hired to lead Bluesky in August 2021. Bluesky formally incorporated in late 2021 as a public benefit LLC separate from Twitter.

Twitter executives approved of the initiative's scope and goals, which include what the protocol itself should encompass and what should be left to applications (the social networks built atop the standard). Some of these goals include letting applications customize their system of moderation, making applications responsible for compliance and takedown requests, and preventing virality algorithms from reinforcing controversy and moral outrage. The working group did not have a common consensus towards these goals, so Twitter decided to field individual proposals, which ranged from reinforcing existing standards to endorsing standard interoperability, letting usage data decide where to invest. In early 2021, Bluesky was in a research phase, with 40–50 people from the decentralized technology community active in assessing options and assembling proposals for the protocol. Bluesky's first three employees were hired in March 2022. Around the same time, Dorsey acknowledged Bluesky's slow progress.

Twitter's blockchain division, newly announced in November 2021, planned to work with the Bluesky initiative. The division head resigned after Elon Musk bought Twitter in late 2022. Staff departures made the team's future remit unclear. Musk's takeover did not immediately affect Bluesky's operations, as a separate entity, but affects its longterm funding. Bluesky had received $13 million from Twitter by Musk's initial offer in April 2022. Adi Robertson for ''The Verge'' wrote that even with Bluesky's independence, Musk's ownership of Twitter would make Bluesky an easy item to defund, with its main executive proponents having left Twitter.

Bluesky refuses to divulge its ownership and charter language publicly, with spokespeople providing evasive or non-answers in response to inquiries.

On July 5, 2023, Bluesky announced it had raised $8 million in a seed funding round. The seed round was led by Neo, a firm with partners like Code.org co-founder Ali Partovi and former Twitter PM Suzanne Xie, and included other investors such as Joe Beda (co-creator of Kubernetes), Bob Young of Red Hat, Amjad Masad of Replit, Amir Shevat, Heather Meeker, Jeromy Johnson, and Automattic. Bluesky plans to use the funds to grow its team, manage operations, pay for infrastructure costs, and build out the AT Protocol technology that Bluesky runs on.

AT protocol

Bluesky unveiled open source code in May 2022 for an early version of their decentralized social network protocol, Authenticated Data Experiment (ADX), since named the Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol. The team opened their early code and placed it under a MIT License so that their development process would be seen in public.

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Further reading

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{{Online social networking
Internet properties established in 2021
Distributed computing projects
Social software
Social networking services
Software using the MIT license