When Elon Musk acquired Twitter and turned it into X, people started to feel the heat to see more open voices coming to light on the platform. Some didn’t like the idea to give free speech to everyone. You see the world is not that entirely democratic in nature and so how can a social media platform be allowed to practise it. There are indeed social norms that need to be honored and kept in mind while creating or posting any content.
The current CEO of Bluesky, Jay Graber, recently reiterated that she won’t be allowing Bluesky to turn into a personal fantasy of one billionaire. Keeping that in mind people started flooding the gates open for Bluesky. Jack Dorsey, the original creator of Twitter created Bluesky as a side project to favor decentralized social media platforms in 2019. Just before the Twitter acquisition in 2022, Bluesky turned independent in 2021. It is in fact one of many answers to Elon Musk’s X. While Elon Musk’s X is far right, Bluesky tends to support far left ideology.
And while we are discussing the openness of social media platforms, it is crucial to understand the underlying technology as well. Bluesky is based on AT Protocol and is distributed under Apache and MIT License but the protocol was in fact influenced by the ActivityPub protocol that drives the social media platform, Mastodon. Though the ActivityPub protocol has already been criticised for its weakness on distributed-denial-of-service (or DDOS) attacks and account migration, other for-profit companies like Automattic continue to adopt the protocol for its WordPress and Tumblr platforms. It is very difficult to say that one protocol is better than the other.
The fine print is that any for-profit organization can’t promise and adhere to claims that it won’t turn into one billionaire’s playground. Therefore, I think Mastodon’s recent announcement about its structure to turn non-profit is a clever move. Mastodon has always been a crowdfunded platform and never dependent on any advertisers and the way I see it, the platform has far reaching potential as compared to Bluesky especially when people are looking at independent alternatives to corporate owned social media platforms. Though the initial drive of users inflated Bluesky user base, I believe the trend will change and towards the already existing Mastodon. This healthy competition in social media platforms is a good sign for users and can curb the polarization of the modern web and we might soon have an uncomfortable clear winner in the battle of Bluesky versus X.