A doomed experiment or a credible alternative to X (formerly Twitter)? Since its launch in the spring, Bluesky has been attracting more and more users – at least those who manage to get themselves invited. What does this new social media platform look like? Who's behind it? How does it differ from Twitter or Mastodon? What does it intend to achieve? Le Monde tries to answer all your questions.
Bluesky is virtually identical to the Twitter interface. You can post short messages, 300-character posts, and images, and subscribe to other users' accounts. Unsurprisingly, you can "repost" someone else's message to share it with your followers, or "like" it to show your support.
The site had 100,000 users at the end of May, rising today to 1.6 million. Yet this sharp rise should be put into perspective: There are still 225 million active accounts on X – though this figure is falling – and Mastodon, a Twitter alternative that launched in 2016, lists 14 million accounts (1.7 million of which are active).
Bluesky is still in its beta testing phase and is deliberately limiting the number of accounts through an invitation system. To join the platform, you have to sign up for a waiting list or obtain a code from one of the users already there. Every 10 days or so, they receive one of the famous golden tickets to distribute.
There are, however, already a few large accounts, notably from media outlets such as the Washington Post, the New York Times, Bloomberg, and the American public radio station NPR. Le Monde is also on Bluesky, but, as its biography cleverly states, it isn't posting anything there.
The social media platform has seen waves of registrations, often correlated with announcements by the very polarizing owner of X, Elon Musk. They accelerated with the start of the war between Israel and Hamas, as violent images and videos of the conflict were being widely circulated on X – sometimes manipulated, rarely moderated.
In previous months, Bluesky's early users were already praising its good-natured atmosphere, reminiscent of "Twitter's golden days," according to the nostalgic ones. Others, however, have criticized it for this frivolity and a certain cliquishness. Bluesky is also said to be easier to use than Mastodon, a comparable platform in many respects, but with an interface less directly modeled on Twitter.
For the time being, Bluesky includes the basic Twitter functionalities, but it's still missing many options that are generally considered basic. Animated GIFs and videos don't work at the moment, as the service's teams acknowledge that they don't yet have the means to moderate them. Nor is it possible to send private messages or create a poll.
But even in its prototype state, Bluesky isn't just "Twitter but worse." While on X, the algorithm decides what content you'll see, according to rather nebulous criteria, Bluesky allows anyone to create and share their own algorithms – here called "feeds."
It's possible to subscribe to different feeds and navigate from one to the next in the same way you would switch tabs in your web browser. Among the most popular are "Top skeets FR," which shows the most popular French-language posts; "Followers," which lets you see what your subscribers are posting; "What's Science," which highlights scientific content; and "Blacksky," which aims to amplify messages by the platform's Black users.
Note that it is also possible to go without these feeds and simply follow the posts of your subscribers, with no algorithms or advertising.
In 2019, Jack Dorsey, then CEO of Twitter, commissioned a team led by Parag Agrawal to devise a technology that would enable social media networks to operate in a decentralized way, connected yet autonomous. One of the theoretical interests of this technology dubbed the "AT Protocol," was to enable more effective moderation, exercised at the level of each network rather than by a central authority. Accordingly, Bluesky is a simplified version of Twitter compatible with the AT Protocol – it will become its showcase.
In 2021, when Agrawal replaced Dorsey at the head of Twitter, Bluesky took off and became an independent company. Today, its president is Jay Graber, although Dorsey retains a seat on the board. Bluesky remained funded by Twitter until the end of 2022 and Musk's takeover.
Today, it's impossible for users of platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube to interact directly with each other: Networks of this kind operate in a vacuum. The proponents of decentralized social media want to develop a protocol that would enable communication from one platform to another, in the same way, that you can have an "@gmail.com" mailbox and exchange with the owners of "@laposte.net" or "@orange.fr" addresses in a transparent way.
Bluesky is not the first to explore this avenue with its AT Protocol. A competing technology, ActivityPub, has enabled users of social media platforms Mastodon and Misskey and the video streaming platform PeerTube to communicate with each other for years. Such an approach has seduced even Facebook: Threads, its new social media platform still officially unavailable in Europe, is destined to join this decentralized galaxy. In the firmament of another galaxy, that of the AT Protocol, a single star shines for the time being: Bluesky. Nevertheless, the engineers behind the project have promised that by early 2024, AT will also be able to accommodate a whole host of applications.
But what's the point of launching a new technology, rather than working in concert with the existing one? For the developers of Bluesky and AT, the answer is simple: They emphasize their desire to offer users unprecedented control over their data. The idea is that everyone will be the true owner of their data, and if they decide, for example, to leave Bluesky and join one of its future competitors, they'll be able to take it with them. The downside is that, for the time being, Bluesky offers very little protection for its users' data, and a great deal of normally hidden information is public.
The troublesome Dorsey (he actively supports conspiracy-theorist presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr) is not Bluesky's CEO, but he does sit on its board of directors. However, he deleted his Bluesky account in September and hasn't posted on Twitter since then.
Instead, he makes daily use of Nostr, a decentralized social media technology that competes with the ActivityPub and AT protocols and openly relies on the blockchain. Some have seen one of his public pronouncements – "The only solution is to build on unowned protocols like Nostr and bitcoin" – as an implicit disavowal of Bluesky. The latter's developers have promised that, while the AT Protocol will be compatible with the blockchain and their competitors will be able to take advantage of it if they wish, Bluesky will not use it.
That's the big question. For the moment, no business model is emerging. The only thing you can pay for is a personalized, forgery-proof domain name. While usernames on Bluesky are built on the "@XXX.bsky.social" model, it is possible to use a perhaps more elegant domain name, which has the added advantage of proving that you are the person, media, or service you claim to be.
For example, the username for the Le Monde newspaper on Bluesky is not @lemonde.bsky.social, but @lemonde.fr, indicating that the account administrators are the same as the owners of the domain name www.lemonde.fr.
Bluesky can be accessed via the official app available on iOS or Android, or on the Bsky.app website. Other alternative tools exist, such as Deck.blue, which reproduces the experience of Twitter's TweetDeck, and the Graysky app, which already lets you post animated GIFs. But first, of course, you'll need to find an invite code.
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.