Jay here: this is a transition I've been working towards for awhile, and I'm looking forward to advancing the vision and ecosystem as CIO (Chief Innovation Officer). Toni has been an advisor to us for years, and I personally recruited him to take over as CEO while I focus on new projects within the company. It's an honor to have him on board to lead us into this next stage of growth.
Yep, we intentionally built it to be hackable! We believe that social media will improve when people are free to build on it, change it, fork it, and remix it. Bluesky and the atproto ecosystem can evolve as fast as users and developers want them to.
Bluesky CEO here. We were founded to build a protocol for Twitter, and likely would have died as a project within Twitter had I not spent half of 2021 negotiating for our independence. In 2022, I got funding and began building an independent protocol team that was still consulting with Twitter on how they might integrate an open protocol.
Elon buying Twitter was the factor that changed our plans and led us to build an app, as it became clear a path to adoption within Twitter would never pan out. We were not set up as a product team given the legacy of our origins, but did the best we could last spring, shipping an app to hundreds of thousands of users with just one app dev, pfraze. OpenAI has been around for nine years, and while what they've done is truly impressive, launching projects with a fully-staffed engineering team is very different from building a team as you grow a userbase.
Hindsight is 20/20 when it comes to market timing, but our goal from the start has been to deliver a decentralized social experience with good UX, and deliver on the previously theoretical concepts of algorithmic choice and community moderation in a global public square. Because of this, our product focus has been driven by showing what's possible on an open protocol, and only after doing things like custom feeds and third-party labelers have we circled back on some more basic features users have been requesting like DMs and video. We still believe decentralization, and the innovation it enables for social, has high potential, and are always looking at how we can better surface it in the app.
Yes — the canonical source of truth for a user's data is their "data repository" which is analogous to a git repo. These can really be passed around any way you want. Our current relay architecture was designed to support large, real-time scale, but other configurations are possible as well, since all the pieces here are composable.
We'll be publishing a lot more about moderation soon, but the basics of labelers:
- anyone can label anything in the network — including other labelers
- apps can surface labelers for users to subscribe to, similar to how custom feeds currently work in bluesky
- apps can exercise curation over how labelers get surfaced and ranked, similar to how custom feeds get surfaced (currently ranked by popularity expressed through likes and saves)
Hi, Jay from bluesky here. Actually nobody on the team, including myself, has ever worked at Twitter. We're designing for flexible and composable moderation systems driven by user choice.
Bluesky is building social network protocols. Our team has decades of combined experience building distributed applications, and we’re applying it to create a federated social network where users have more control.
Bluesky is building social network protocols. Our team has decades of combined experience building distributed applications, and we’re applying it to create a federated social network where users have more control.
The waitlist is just for the app. We've been developing the protocol in a public repo on Github for months, but most people don't have the patience to follow open source code development, so we'll notify them when we can put a usable app in their hands.
Bluesky is building a better social networking ecosystem based on decentralized protocols. We're creating tooling for reputation systems, transparent moderation & curation, and user self-governance, as well as laying the groundwork for self-authenticating identities and data.
We're hiring engineers passionate about the future of social, with the skills required to build on open source protocols. You can check out some of our work in progress here: https://github.com/bluesky-social/adx
Idk if you actually read the post, but a lot of people early to computing didn't become multi-millionaires. Lee Felsenstein, who helped start the Homebrew Computer Club, has a Patreon where people support his projects and writing now. And the ones in this group who did, like Brewster Kahle, have used their wealth to fund nonprofits like the Internet Archive.