Bluesky may soon make its way into the social media platform’s rampant race as an app for the Jack DorseyThe Twitter-backed alternative was quietly dropped into Apple’s App Store on Tuesday.
The Bluesky app would offer features similar to Twitter, including a home timeline of posts from people you follow, a discovery tab, and a feed of recently posted Bluesky updates. Messages can be replied to, reposted, liked and reported. Despite similarities with Twitterhowever, BlueSky doesn’t even carry the biggest names found on alternative social sites like Mastodon.
With so many Twitter clones in the works, it’s hard to imagine taking the time to use another app, but Dorsey has a strong track record of driving engagement.
Bluesky announced plans to launch a beta version in October. However, with criticism from Mastodon and other developers, and Musk’s uncertain relationship with Twitter, it remains to be seen if Bluesky can carve out a place for itself in the already crowded social media marketplace. The application bases its hopes on the AT protocol (AKA ADTX, or Authenticated Transfer Protocol), which The edge described as being “built on four main ideals: account portability; algorithm; performance; and interoperability”.
“This framework,” according to The Verge, “is supposed to allow you to easily transfer your account data to another Bluesky provider as well as give you more control over what you see on a network, among other things.”
TechCrunch managed to get a preview of the app and described it as “a functional, albeit still fairly simple, Twitter-like experience.”
Maybe Also Like Twitter. TechCrunch says there’s “something ironic about leaving Twitter to use an app that looks and sounds so much like Twitter, right down to Jack Dorsey’s posts as he ponders product issues like ‘dense’. ‘information’, the number of characters or the navigation application.
Even though Bluesky presents the possibility of a bright future with its AT protocol capability, TechCrunch says it “still looks like stripped down Twitter.”
Ultimately, what makes a social media site, no matter how functional, is who decides to make it an online home. As similar as Bluesky is to Twitter now, it may soon stand out as a viable alternative for restless social media users who long for a more random and somehow innocent time online.