Entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban is ready to fund a TikTok alternative based on Bluesky’s AT Protocol, he shared on a TikTok video posted on wednesday. In anticipation of the impending US ban on TikTok, which will take effect on Sunday unless it is overturned by the Supreme Court, users have turned to other video platforms, including Chinese app RedNote. But investors like Cuban see the potential for a more open social web that includes an ecosystem of apps powered by the same technology that currently powers Bluesky’s social network.
THE AT protocol is a newer, open protocol designed for decentralized social media applications. Its purpose is to address what some developers thought deficiencies with the existing ActivityPub decentralized protocol, used by Mastodon and other social services. While Bluesky is the flagship AT Protocol implementation for now, there are many other services now manufactured with technology.
Consumer demand for open social networking apps is also in full swing, with Bluesky itself seeing a wave of new sign-ups in the wake of the US presidential election, growing the network to 27.6+ million usersfrom 10 million+ in September. Meanwhile, on Wednesday we broke the news of an upcoming Bluesky client called Flashes that would focus on images over text.
Cuban says he’d like to see — and return — something that rivals TikTok but is based on the AT Protocol.
In the video, he briefly describes how ATProto (as it’s called for short) allows people to build their own social media servers and applications.
He then adds, “I’d be open to investing to support anyone — or someone — creating an AT Protocol-based TikTok replacement. So if you have this skill, let me know in the comments. If you build an MVP — a minimum viable product — for me to see, that’s much better, because obviously, I think you’d have a lot of support,” Cuban says.
“And most importantly, when you build the AT Protocol, it’s scalable, so that means nobody can just buy it, nobody can just close it,” notes the investor, in reference to the account portability aspects of building for the open social web. .
That is, users who want to move their account to another server can do so without losing their followers, content and other data.
In part, Cuban’s interest in ATProto is not just about expanding the open social web. it’s also to fuel competition with Elon Musk’s X. Cuban is open argued with Musk on X and elsewhere, criticizing X’s approach to content curtailment, misinformation and more.
Cuban asked concerned developers to respond in the comments of the TikTok post.
