Twitter: If Jack Dorsey did it again it would be like Bluesky –
Elon Musk became its owner Twitter last year and followed by a series of sweeping changes to the platform that led to the… exit door a lot of users. This was good news for Bluesky, the new player in the social media market.
It is about a application στην οποία μπορείς να συμμετάσχεις μόνο κατόπιν πρόσκλησης που κέρδισε γρήγορα θαυμαστές από τότε που έκανε το ντεμπούτο του τον Φεβρουάριο. Μέχρι στιγμής, η εφαρμογή έχει «κατέβει» 360.000 φορές από το κατάστημα εφαρμογών της Apple σε όλο τον κόσμο, he reported to Fortune η ομάδα δεδομένων καταναλωτών Date.ai και πάνω από a million more users are on the waiting list for participation.
"Blowing it and not cooling down" the founder of Twitter - He lost 526 million in just one day
Most of the new users were added this month, according to Bloomberg.
Bluesky's open platform
A particular point of reference is the fact that Bluesky was created by Jack Dorsey, who was one of the co-founders of Twitter. With the new platform, and unlike Twitter, Dorsey wanted to create a decentralized service, meaning its user data is stored on independent servers rather than those owned by a single company, thus giving users more autonomy in how interaction on the platform.
«Οραματιζόμαστε ένα ανοιχτό οικοσύστημα μέσων κοινωνικής δικτύωσης όπου οι προγραμματιστές έχουν περισσότερες ευκαιρίες να οικοδομήσουν και να καινοτομήσουν και οι χρήστες να έχουν περισσότερες επιλογές και έλεγχο σχετικά με τις υπηρεσίες που χρησιμοποιούν και την εμπειρία τους στα social media συνολικά», έγραψε η Τζέι Γκράμπερ, Διευθύνων Σύμβουλος της Bluesky, σε blog post last year.
The biggest mistake
After all, Dorsey himself has stated that one of his regrettable mistakes was commercializing Twitter, admitting that if he had the chance to do it over again, he would make it more of an open source project.
"My biggest problem and biggest regret is that [Twitter] became a company," Dorsey wrote in August, responding to a question about whether the platform had become what he wanted.
The biggest issue and my biggest regret is that it became a company.
—jack (@jack) August 25
Bluesky's rise comes amid increasing scrutiny over data security at social networking sites as well as complaints about Twitter under Musk's leadership.
What Bluesky could offer
Bluesky's story is closely related to Twitter. It received its initial funding in 2021 from Twitter – of which Dorsey was CEO until November 2021 – without it being clear exactly when the funding was received. Dorsey is also on Bluesky's board of directors. The service is still considered to be in the testing phase and has a waiting list for users who want to subscribe to it. The timing of any wider rollout is unclear.
Despite the deep ties between the two social networking apps, users' search for an alternative social platform could be a direct result of Musk's acquisition of Twitter and the changes it instituted.
When Musk took over the reins of the company at the end of last October, top executives and, within weeks, half of the company's staff were fired. Twitter no longer has a large part of its content moderation team due to a lack of engineers and there have been outages. According to the Washington Post, the platform offers fertile ground for the expression of hate speech and racist content.
The second alternative
Bluesky isn't the only Twitter alternative though. There is also Mastodon, another decentralized service, founded in 2016 and growing rapidly recently.
Shortly after Musk bought Twitter, Mastodon's user base skyrocketed. They grew from 300.000 users in late October to 2,6 million at their peak in late November, according to what reports Wired. However, this growth has been difficult to sustain. By February, the number of downloads had dropped by 99%.
Ακόμη και με προκλήσεις, οι αποκεντρωμένες platforms θα μπορούσαν να αντιμετωπίσουν ορισμένες από τις μεγαλύτερες ανησυχίες σχετικά με τα δεδομένα χρηστών στα χέρια μεμονωμένων εταιρειών – ένα από τα βασικά θέματα που οδήγησε και στην ακρόαση του TikTok στο Κογκρέσο τον περασμένο μήνα.
"We believe that decentralization is a means to an end," Graber wrote in blog post last month. "The ultimate goal is to provide choice to users, freedom to developers and control to creators," he concluded.
