This week, everyone is talking about Bluesky, the Twitter competitor using decentralization in an attempt to entice users away from “the world’s town square.” Bluesky was originally built as a Twitter side project and became independent from the app in 2022. It uses the AT Protocol, a “federated network.” A federated network allows servers to communicate with each other (like email, for example), meaning many sites can run the network instead of one site running the network. This gives users more control and choice over their provider. According to Bluesky, what makes the AT Protocol unique is the account portability (this is the ability to move your account from one provider to another without losing your data), algorithmic choice (the AT Protocol has an open algorithms mode so you can control your experience), interoperation (AT Protocol uses a schema-based interoperation framework called Lexicon to solve coordination problems), and performance (fast loading at large scales). So, why is this relevant? This week, the number of users on the app doubled from Wednesday to Thursday. Big names like DeGods and y00ts founder Rohun “Frank” Vora, Rug Radio co-founder and co-CEO Farokh Sarmad, Chrissy Teigen and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez joined. And it trended on Twitter. While we don’t know what’s next for Bluesky, this could be the beginning of more apps built on the AT Protocol, which could bring web3 capabilities to a new, wider audience.

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