I’d pretty much given up on social media as it’s all owned by horrible corporations and alternatives like Mastodon are just too niche to gain traction outside of certain circles. This all changed when I found Bluesky was now open to the public after a long invite only period.

Bluesky is a decentralised social media platform aiming to be a more open and less centralised alternative to Twitter (now X). The core differences with Bluesky are that it’s not owned by a billionaire using it to promote fascism, and its open nature. There are also no ads currently, and most people are way better behaved on Bluesky than other social media as their business model is not farming conflict for aD EnGaGEmEnt.

Reasons I like Bluesky include:

Decentralisation

Bluesky uses a protocol called the AT Protocol, which allows for multiple independent servers to host instances of the platform. This is unlike X/Twitter, which operates on a single, centralised server controlled by one shareholder driven company. This decentralisation theoretically makes Bluesky more resilient to censorship, takeovers, and single points of failure. If one server goes down, others can continue functioning.

Open Source

The AT Protocol is open-source, meaning its code is publicly available. This allows developers to contribute to its improvement and create their own Bluesky-compatible applications and services. Twitter’s code is proprietary and not accessible to the public.

Your timeline, your choice

The decentralised nature of Bluesky could give users more control over their feeds and the algorithms that curate their content. It’s still early days but Flashes for Bluesky is an Instagram type visual feed that allows us to access our Bluesky timeline in a slightly different way to the stock app.

Summary

So Bluesky looking great so far – join us at https://bsky.app/profile/econotts.org