Disclosure: I’m on the board of Bluesky, so feel free to take as many grains of salt as you want in reading it, though all of it applies equally to other decentralized social media ecosys…
Guide to Bluesky: Getting Started and Best Practices
With over 20 million users and growing, Bluesky offers transparency, control, and a breath of fresh air in the social media world. Are you ready to escape the toxicity and censorship of other platforms? Sign up now! #Bluesky 🚀🌐
Decentralized Social Media for 40 Million+ Users (with Bluesky’s Jay Graber)
Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media
Bluesky is a new social network built upon the AT Protocol, a decentralized foundation for public social media. It was launched in private beta in February 2023, and has grown to over 10 million registered users by October 2024. In this paper we introduce the architecture of Bluesky and the AT Protocol, and explain how the technical design of Bluesky is informed by our goals: to enable decentralization by having multiple interoperable providers for every part of the system; to make it easy for users to switch providers; to give users agency over the content they see; and to provide a simple user experience that does not burden users with complexity arising from the system's decentralized nature. The system's openness allows anybody to contribute to content moderation and community management, and we invite the research community to use Bluesky as a dataset and testing ground for new approaches in social media moderation.
🔭🖤🚀 Social media’s next evolution: decentralized, open-source, and scalable
How Blacksky grew to millions of users without spending a dollar
Bluesky & Open Social Media Tech
Blue Skies Ahead: Social Media's Quiet User Revolution
In a digital landscape increasingly defined by user concerns over privacy and control, a quiet revolution is taking shape.
Social Media Is Now Parasocial Media
When practitioners used the term “social media” to describe the internet tools that emerged in the mid-aughts, they were giving a name to the kinds of platforms and protocols that allowed people to socialize with friends and communities of interest by using digital technologies. Twenty years later, users of social media are far more likely to scroll than post – and the content that they consume is often strategically produced and algorithmically curated. In this essay, I argue that the very essence of social media has changed. To more effectively interrogate what we are witnessing, we need to stop presuming that these tools are “social media” and begin recognizing that they are now “parasocial media.” Doing so raises new questions about digitally mediated sociality, not to mention the politics and governance of these platforms.
Reclaiming Social Spaces: Are Open Source Platforms a Path for More Human Connection?
What if social media platforms were built to serve their communities, not billionaires? Join us with the founders of Blacksky as we explore the potential of open source social media.
Ecosystem Review
A review of decentralized social media ecosystems published by Twitter's "bluesky" team on the 21st January 2021
Bluesky’s Quest to Build Nontoxic Social Media
X and Facebook are governed by the policies of mercurial billionaires. Bluesky’s C.E.O., Jay Graber, says that she wants to give power back to the user.
Trust and Faith in Our Web
I’m not Brennan, but I’m very interested in decentralization and a fan of AtProto specifically, so I’d like to weigh in. First I should mention I’ve personally never been able to get into microblogging, so I haven’t touched bluesky myself, despite having an account for ATProto reasons. But I agree it’s concerning that the company chooses to continue to host the content of harmful individuals and calling that act “neutral”. I’m certainly against the idea of the “marketplace of ideas” as it’s cle...
BlueSky - The Future of Social Media
Watch BlueSky's user base grow in real-time. Innovative, decentralized social networking is here!
What You Should Know When Joining Bluesky
Bluesky promises to rethink social media by focusing on openness and user control. But what does this actually mean for the millions of people joining the site?November was a good month for
Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media
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