In 2019, Jack Dorsey announced a project to “create an open and decentralized standard for social media.” Bluesky has spent the past several years developing the underlying protocol. After an iOS app in February, Bluesky for Android is now available as an invite-only beta.
The foundation of Bluesky is the Authenticated Transfer (AT) Protocol. Meant to support “large-scale distributed social applications,” tentpoles include account portability, algorithmic choice, interoperation, and performance. You can find the protocol overview here.
In terms of the end user experience, you start off at bluesky.social (with support for custom domain name handles) and @username.bluesky.social as your identifier.
…if you decide you want to host your own server, or have a username that’s your personal website, you can also switch over to doing that. If you don’t like the way we show you posts or moderate your experience, you can switch services without losing your friends or data, or swap out your feed or moderators though a plugin ecosystem.
The app, which is meant to be a reference client, is quite straightforward with four tabs:
- Home: “Following” is the default feed with “What’s hot” helpful when starting out
- Search
- Notifications
- Account
A navigation drawer can be opened by tapping your profile picture in the top-left corner. This lets you access settings, switch themes (similar to the Twitter UI), and send feedback. You’ll also see how many invite codes you have. Those are issued after “you’ve been on Bluesky for a little longer.”
It launched first on iOS in late February and Bluesky for Android is now available (via The Verge). The latter experience is pretty basic with performance just okay for an initial release.
Bluesky is on the Play Store today and still invite-only. New sign-ups are able to join with a code from an existing user or the waitlist here.
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