© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
Since Donald Trump’s landslide victory in the US election, X (formerly Twitter) users have been flocking to alternate social media platforms, with Bluesky being one of the biggest winners. The decentralised social media, which ironically originated as a project under Jack Dorsey at Twitter, recently gained more than a million new users, reaching at its all-time user base of 15 million. If you are thinking of quitting X and are looking for an alternate social media platform, here’s everything you need to know about Bluesky.
In 2019, when X was called Twitter, Jack Dorsey, who was the company CEO back then incubated a new project dubbed Bluesky, which was funded by Twitter itself.
In 2021, Bluesky became an independent company and in the following year, Twitter terminated the service agreement with Bluesky’s approval. Unlike Twitter, which has servers all around the world, the idea behind Bluesky was to create an open and decentralised standard for social media.
A major difference between Bluesky and X is that the former is based on the ‘Authenticated Transfer Protocol (ATP)’, which the company says lets ‘separate social networks exist within a single hub.’ This is similar to Mastodon’s ActivityPub protocol, which also helps create a federated and decentralised network.
A decentralised network is designed in such a way that users can easily transfer their account from one Bluesky provider to another.
Unlike popular social media networks like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, Bluesky is not a single product or service, but rather a set of standards and protocols which can be used by developers and communities in their own way. This means you can either use Bluesky’s own servers or opt to create and host your very own personal server to host your Bluesky account.
We dug into the technical system requirements to host a private server and were surprised to find out that the hardware requirements were fairly low, requiring a minimum of just 1GB RAM. This is almost half the amount consumed by modern browsers like Chrome, Edge and Safari.
The sign-up process is pretty simple. Open the Apple App Store or the Google Play Store on your phone, search for Bluesky and install the app. Like other social media networks, you will have to create a new account on the platform. Once you verify your email and log in to your account, you will notice that Bluesky looks just like X/Twitter.
You get a bottom bar with four tabs. The first is the Home tab, which is a vertically scrolling feed with options like Like, Repost, Comment and a three-bot button housing options for copying and sharing. The second is the search option which lets you search for other people and posts on the platform. The third tab lets you quickly check DMs. The fourth and fifth tabs are for checking notifications and seeing your profile. If you have ever used X, Bluesky’s user interface will feel right at home.
Unlike Twitter, Bluesky lets users set their very own handle. If you are working for a company named ‘abc’, you might be able to use a handle named yourname@abc.org.
This can also be verified by your organisation. Similarly, brand accounts can also differentiate their handle and allow others to use it.
When users sign up for Bluesky, the company says they will be automatically subscribed to Bluesky’s built-in moderation service. Since Bluesky is a decentralised platform, it means users can host their very own servers instead of having to rely on company-owned servers, which is the case with Elon Musk’s X/Twitter.
However, moderation is a different story altogether. Unlike X, which has a team of machines and humans working together to label hateful or otherwise prohibited content, Bluesky might be only moderating posts on their own servers.
In case you are wondering, users who are not using Bluesky’s servers can ignore the official moderation guidelines and instead create their own or use third-party solutions. This means moderation on Bluesky’s own servers may be good, but the same may not be applicable for other ones.
