Twitter has more reasons to worry now. The company’s closest rival—Bluesky—created by ex-CEO Jack Dorsey now has an Android app. The arrival on Android comes nearly two months after the Bluesky app was made available on iOS.
For those who want to try the app, they can join the waitlist to try the beta before it is publicly available. Alternatively, they can do so via an invite code from a friend.
Bluesky was launched on February 17 and reportedly has seen over 2000 installs by beta testers so far. The Google Play Store, at the time of writing this article, shows more than 5000 downloads of the app.
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Bluesky has a simple interface and resembles Twitter in some ways. It has a plus button which when clicked lets users create a post of 256 characters. Just like Twitter’s “What’s happening?”, Bluesky asks “What’s up?”
“Moderation is a necessary feature of social spaces. It’s how bad behaviour gets constrained, norms get set, and disputes get resolved. We’ve kept the Bluesky app invite-only and are finishing moderation before the last pieces of open federation because we wanted to prioritize user safety from the start,” company CEO Jay Graber wrote in a blog post.
Bluesky plans to allow users to create their own filters and labels or use third-party services to help them personalise their social media feeds according to their preferences. This will give users more control over what they see.
“Centralized social sites use labeling to implement moderation — we think this piece can be unbundled, opened up to third-party innovation, and configured with user agency in mind,” wrote Graber. “Anyone should be able to create or subscribe to moderation labels that third parties create.”
Bluesky was announced by Dorsey in 2019 when he was the Twitter CEO. It was initially announced as a project that would be funded by Twitter to create an open and decentralized standard for social media. The legal entity of the app was created in 2022.
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“Bluesky’s mission is to drive the evolution from platforms to protocols. The conceptual framework we’ve adopted for meeting this objective is the “self-authenticating protocol,” reads the company’s blog post.
