Share this article

Though it is still an invite-only app, Bluesky, the company creating a decentralized Twitter/X substitute, revealed today that it has reached 2 million users, up another million since September. It also disclosed the timeline for other important objectives, saying that it would launch Federation by early in the following year and have a public web interface operational by the end of the month.

The latter would enable Bluesky to operate as a more open social network, which makes it one of the keyways that it differs from X. This implies that it will function more like Mastodon, allowing users to freely switch between servers and accounts. Today, Bluesky asserts that this is what makes it “billionaire-proof,” taking a jab at Elon Musk’s ownership of Twitter, which is now referred to as X.

A company blog post stated, “You’ll always have the freedom to choose (and to exit) instead of being held to the whims of private companies or black box algorithms.” It said, “And your relationships and friends will be there too, wherever you go.”

The Federation would allow anyone to run their own service and connect to any other service running the same protocol, much like Mastodon, a decentralized service. In Bluesky’s case, this would be accomplished through the AT Protocol, which the business is simultaneously creating in addition to its mobile app and consumer-facing service. But Mastodon—the other major decentralized social network—uses an established protocol called Activity Pub, which has become more popular in the months following Musk’s acquisition of Twitter.

Since then, Mastodon and Activity Pub have been adopted by other businesses, such as Mozilla, Flipboard, Medium, and Automatic (the parent company of WordPress.com). That might present a problem for Bluesky’s future reach unless it takes action to permit Activity Pub and the AT Protocol to work together in some way. Although it might be technically feasible, bridging the two is probably something that will happen in the distant future rather than right now.

Bluesky is currently working on improving the accessibility of its own service, and later this month, it plans to launch a public web interface. This will make it possible for anybody without an account to view the posts on Bluesky. This may increase the network’s potential as a legitimate X competitor for breaking news and discussions, but it may also reveal Bluesky users’ posts to the public in ways they weren’t expecting. (Unlike Twitter/X, the app does not currently have the option to set profiles to “private.” This has not gone down well with some users.)

Even though Bluesky is expanding, other X rivals have been able to take advantage of its reluctance to abandon its invite-only policy and make its network more widely accessible. For instance, Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta, revealed last month that Instagram Threads, his X substitute, has less than 100 million active monthly users. In the upcoming years, a billion people could use it, according to him. Additionally, Threads plans to work with ActivityPub in the future.

After Threads quickly released features to make its app more competitive with X, Bluesky made an announcement. These features included a chronological feed, the ability to view your likes, search, a (free) edit button, a web version, support for polls and GIFs, topic tags, and soon, a developer API. Mastodon also took advantage of the publicity that Twitter’s acquisition brought, and this September introduced a more user-friendly version of their service. However, Mastodn is still far smaller than Threads, with 1.6 million active users per month.

In addition to today’s news, Bluesky listed other recently released features that include a media tab on user profiles, a Likes tab on your own user profile, suggested follows, email verification, shareable user lists, mobile push notifications, and advanced feed and thread preferences for filtering and sorting posts.

Despite having started as a Twitter project under Jack Dorsey, Bluesky was separated from Twitter and given $13 million to fund its initial research and development. Dorsey is a board member. To advance its growth, the company raised a $8 million seed round this year, with Neo leading it. It also changed its legal status from public benefit LLC to public benefit C Corp.