Yep, we intentionally built it to be hackable! We believe that social media will improve when people are free to build on it, change it, fork it, and remix it. Bluesky and the atproto ecosystem can evolve as fast as users and developers want them to.
Bluesky CEO here. We were founded to build a protocol for Twitter, and likely would have died as a project within Twitter had I not spent half of 2021 negotiating for our independence. In 2022, I got funding and began building an independent protocol team that was still consulting with Twitter on how they might integrate an open protocol.
Elon buying Twitter was the factor that changed our plans and led us to build an app, as it became clear a path to adoption within Twitter would never pan out. We were not set up as a product team given the legacy of our origins, but did the best we could last spring, shipping an app to hundreds of thousands of users with just one app dev, pfraze. OpenAI has been around for nine years, and while what they've done is truly impressive, launching projects with a fully-staffed engineering team is very different from building a team as you grow a userbase.
Hindsight is 20/20 when it comes to market timing, but our goal from the start has been to deliver a decentralized social experience with good UX, and deliver on the previously theoretical concepts of algorithmic choice and community moderation in a global public square. Because of this, our product focus has been driven by showing what's possible on an open protocol, and only after doing things like custom feeds and third-party labelers have we circled back on some more basic features users have been requesting like DMs and video. We still believe decentralization, and the innovation it enables for social, has high potential, and are always looking at how we can better surface it in the app.
Thanks for commenting, always nice to get a reality check from the actual founder, vs just armchair speculating in the ether. I really like what you guys are doing and am amazed you did it with just one app developer. I hope 2024 can be a year of ramping up the feedback->prioritize->implement->feedback loop as quickly as possible. As I said above, I think the space is still wide open, and I think you can win over a lot of users with a federated protocol + clean app UI/UX + sane and decent people like you leading the org and attracting a like-minded community. I wish you the best!
Lol, dude, I was mainly referring to myself armchair speculating in the ether, which is exactly what I was doing in my comment above that you replied to. Maybe I should have been more explicit about that, but pro-tip: Stop being so sensitive on the internet man, you don't have to justify yourself to every online rando, and given your accomplishments it's not even worth your time to. Peace bro.
Yes — the canonical source of truth for a user's data is their "data repository" which is analogous to a git repo. These can really be passed around any way you want. Our current relay architecture was designed to support large, real-time scale, but other configurations are possible as well, since all the pieces here are composable.
We'll be publishing a lot more about moderation soon, but the basics of labelers:
- anyone can label anything in the network — including other labelers
- apps can surface labelers for users to subscribe to, similar to how custom feeds currently work in bluesky
- apps can exercise curation over how labelers get surfaced and ranked, similar to how custom feeds get surfaced (currently ranked by popularity expressed through likes and saves)
Hi, Jay from bluesky here. Actually nobody on the team, including myself, has ever worked at Twitter. We're designing for flexible and composable moderation systems driven by user choice.
Good deal! I just can’t trust anybody from old Twitter after their abuses. Looks like I’ll have to wait and see how your product develops rather than just writing you off as a sort of zombie mode Ole Twitter.
Bluesky is building social network protocols. Our team has decades of combined experience building distributed applications, and we’re applying it to create a federated social network where users have more control.
