The decentralized social network started as a project by a team at then-Twitter back in 2019, but it eventually split off on its own. It only opened to the public this March after being invite-only for almost a year. While Jack Dorsey sat on its board, Bluesky is led by Jay Graber, its CEO since 2021. Dorsey has said mixed things about X since Elon Musk’s takeover, but it seems he’s now swung back around. On Saturday, he posted on X, “don’t depend on corporations to grant you rights. defend them yourself using freedom technology. (you’re on one).”

The company has made no mention yet of Dorsey’s departure, and he’s still named as a board member on its website. Dorsey seemingly deleted his own Bluesky account months ago, TechCrunch notes.

Update, May 6 2024, 11:28AM ET: Bluesky has since confirmed Dorsey’s departure on its official account. The company also noted that it’s “searching for a new board member for the Bluesky public benefit company who shares our commitment to building a social network that puts people in control of their experience.”

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Bluesky remained an invite-only platform from its launch in February 2023 until February of this year, when it finally ditched the waitlist. Bluesky had said last May that it wasn’t ready for heads of state to join, and even asked users to give its support team notice “before you invite prominent figures.” It’s since grown to more than 5 million users, gaining roughly a million alone in the day after it stopped requiring invite codes.

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Bluesky first burst into the scene as a decentralized social network (previously) funded by Twitter and backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Shortly after it launched in closed beta, it rolled out the ability for users to choose their own algorithms so that they can customize their timelines. And in its bid to remain ad-free, it started offering a paid domain service as a way for users to verify their identity. It’s unclear when the app will open to the public, and, upon checking, some codes are still being sold on eBay for hundreds of dollars.

Meta, on the other hand, chose to make Threads available to everyone from the get-go, even though it was still lacking a number of critical features. Threads reached 100 million users merely a week after it became available in July, but keyword search only started rolling out earlier this month.

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The interface will allow anybody, even those without an account, to view posts on the platform. Its launch could make more potential users aware about the service's existence, and Bluesky believes making its posts more accessible "will be especially useful for real-time commentary and breaking news." In the long run, it could make the service one of people's go-to social networks for news in the same way X users rely on the website to read about current events.

And for those waiting for Bluesky to become a more open platform like Mastodon, the team says federation is "timelined for early next year if development continues as planned." To become a federated or a decentralized and distributed social network, the team is currently developing the AT Protocol, which will give users the power to migrate both their identities and their content from one personal data server to another. "This is one of the core features of Bluesky that makes it 'billionaire-proof,' — 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," the announcement post reads.

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The new public web interface, which the company teased last month, will make Bluesky posts accessible to a bigger audience. To mark the shift, Bluesky has also adopted a blue butterfly as its new logo — gone is the stock photo-style cloudy sky. “Like a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, we are starting to open up,” Graber wrote in a blog post about the changes. Graber also notes that many Bluesky users were already using the butterfly emoji as a symbol for the social network. “We loved it,” Graber wrote, “and adopted it as it spread.”

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It’s a significant moment for Bluesky, which began as an internal project at Jack Dorsey’s Twitter (Bluesky ended its association with the entity now known as X after Elon Musk’s takeover, though Dorsey is on Bluesky’s board.) The company is part of a growing movement for decentralized social media, which proponents say could address many of the shortcomings of centrally-controlled platforms like Facebook, X and TikTok.

“We really believe that the future of social is, and should be, open and decentralized,” Bluesky CEO Jay Graber tells Engadget. “This is something that we think is good for the public conversation overall.”

For those who missed Bluesky’s first hype cycle last spring, the service is functionally similar to X and Threads. Its posts — lovingly referred to by some early users as “skeets” — default to a chronological timeline, though users can also follow numerous other algorithmic feeds created by fellow users. Soon, the company will take a similar approach to content moderation, allowing third-parties to create their own “labeling services” for Bluesky content.

The service is still much smaller than most of its counterparts and doesn’t yet have a direct messaging feature. But it has become a haven for a number of once high-profile Twitter users and others looking for more Weird Twitter vibes and less Elon Musk.

Much like how Mastodon and other services in the fediverse are built on the ActivityPub protocol, Bluesky runs on its own open-source standard called AT Protocol.Right now, the only Bluesky is the version of the service created by Bluesky, the company. But that will soon change, as the company plans to start experimenting with federation, which will allow other developers and groups to create their own instances of Bluesky.

“The protocol is like an API that’s permanently open,” Graber says. “And that means that developer creativity can kind of go wild.”

Of course, the world of Twitter alternatives looks considerably different since Bluesky first launched. Meta’s Threads app has grown to 130 million users since last summer. Meta has also started to make some Threads posts available on Mastodon, the first step toward making it compatible with the rest of the fediverse.

But while Threads may be showing some support for open-source protocols, that’s not the same as decentralization, Graber argues. “If they integrate with ActivityPub, you would still be on a Facebook-owned app with this little window into a more open world, and it wouldn’t be as easy to leave. We hope that the AT Protocol universe lets people get in between different apps, different services a lot easier.”

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The new moderation tools arrive as Bluesky is seeing a surge in growth after it got rid of its waitlist and opened to all users in February. Since then, the service has added about 2 million new users, bringing its total community to just over 5 million.

The company has said its approach to moderation is based on the same philosophy that has led it to embrace custom feed algorithms. The goal, Bluesky wrote in a blog post, is to create “an ecosystem of moderation and open-source safety tools that gives communities power to create their own spaces, with their own norms and preferences.”

In practice, these moderation tools will take the form of labeling services. Just as Bluesky allows users to set their own moderation preferences — for example, you can choose whether you want the app to “show,” “warn,” or “hide” explicit content — developers will be able to create their own filtering systems others can opt into. “For example, someone could make a moderation service that blocks photos of spiders from Bluesky — let’s call it the Spider Shield,” the company explains. “If you get a jump scare from seeing spiders in your otherwise peaceful nature feed, you could install this moderation service and immediately any labeled spider pictures would disappear from your experience.”

To help make these kinds of experiences possible, Bluesky is open sourcing its collaborative labeling tool called Ozone, which will allow groups of moderators to respond to reports and add labels to content. But the company notes that developers can also create automated labeling systems using Bluesky’s API.

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has referred to the concept as “composable” or “stackable” moderation. “We’re always doing baseline moderation, meaning that we are providing you with a default moderated experience when you come in [to Bluesky],” Graber told Engadget last month. “And then on top of that, you can customize things.”

These new third-party labeling services will start to roll out later this week on the desktop version of Bluesky, with a mobile version coming “soon,” according to the company. And it’s likely users will see more options available in the coming weeks as more developers and groups get their hands on the underlying tools.

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