Bluesky, the company building a decentralized alternative to Twitter/X, was announced today it has reached 2 million users — up another million from September, even though it remains an invite-only app. It also revealed its timeline on other key goals, indicating it planned to open a public web interface by the end of the month and launch the federation early next year.
The latter is one of the most important differentiators between Bluesky and X, as it would allow Bluesky to function as a more open social network. This means it will work more like Mastodon where users can pick and choose which servers to join and move their accounts around at will. That’s what Bluesky says today makes it “billionaire proof” — a jab at Twitter’s ownership by Elon Musk, now called X.
“You will always have the freedom to opt in (and out) rather than being bound by the whims of private companies or black box algorithms.” explained a company blog post. “And wherever you go, your friends and relations will also be there,” he noted.
Similar to the Mastodon decentralized service, the federation would allow anyone to run their own service and connect to any other service that also runs the same protocol. In Bluesky’s case, this would be via the AT protocol that the company is also developing alongside the consumer-facing service and mobile app. However, the other major decentralized social network, Mastodon, uses an established protocol, ActivityPub, which has gained more traction in the months since Musk bought Twitter.
Since then, other companies, including Mozilla, Flipboard, Medium, and Automattic (parent of WordPress.com), have embraced ActivityPub and Mastodon. This could pose a challenge to Bluesky’s ultimate reach unless it makes a move to allow AT Protocol and ActivityPub to work somehow. Bridging both can be technically it’s possible, but it’s likely something that would happen further down the line, rather than in the near future.
Meanwhile, Bluesky is working to make its own service more accessible, which includes launching a public web interface later this month. This will allow anyone to see Bluesky posts, even if they don’t have an account. That could make the network more promising in terms of being a true rival to X for breaking news and talk, but it could also expose Bluesky users’ posts to the outside world in ways they’re not prepared for. (The app doesn’t currently offer an option to set profiles to “private” like Twitter/X. Some users is not happy about This.)
Despite its growth, Bluesky’s reluctance to abandon its invite-only status and open up its network to more users has allowed other X competitors to gain ground. Last month, for example, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced his X alternative, Instagram Threads, which has fewer than 100 million monthly active users. He believes it could reach a billion users in the next few years. And Threads plans to work with ActivityPub in the future.
Bluesky’s announcement follows Threads’ rapid release of features to make its app more competitive with X, including things like a timeline, support for viewing your likes, search, a (free) edit button, a web version , polls and GIF support , topic tags and, soon, a developer API. Mastodon also took advantage of the opportunity presented by the Twitter acquisition and launched a more user-friendly version of its service this September. But Mastodon has it right now 1.6 million monthly active usersmaking it even much smaller than Threads.
Along with today’s news, Bluesky also noted other recently released features such as mobile push notifications, shareable user lists, email verification, advanced feed and thread preferences to sort and filter posts, a media tab on user profiles, a “Like” tab on your own user profile , and various accessibility improvements are suggested below.
Although Bluesky began life as a Twitter project under Jack Dorsey, the company was banned from Twitter 13 million dollars to start R&D. Dorsey sits at his dashboard. This year, the company raised an $8 million seed round led by Neo to fuel its growth and converted from a non-profit LLC to a non-profit C Corp.
