What is Bluesky? Everything you need to know about this Twitter competitor

X, formerly known as Twitter, is having a bit of a rocky time lately. From confusing changes to the site’s user blocking system, to the recent removal of the ability to opt out of Grok AI data sharing, X has been in the limelight seemingly to no end. With Elon Musk’s continued ownership bringing controversies and odd feature changes on a regular basis, it’s no surprise that the field is open to competitors.

One of those gaining traction right now is Bluesky Social, a familiar-looking template from a very well-known face in the tech industry. Having just surpassed an impressive 17 million users, Bluesky is shaping up to be one of X’s primary competitors in the space.

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What is Bluesky?

If you’re familiar with X, you’ll feel right at home on Bluesky

Bluesky, called Bluesky Social in full, is a relatively new social media platform that looks and feels a lot like X to use. After a period of beta testing in which an invite code was required to sign up, Bluesky is now broadly available to the public.

Users have a profile that they can use to post their thoughts to a public or private feed, and are able to view and interact with posts from a whole world of other users.

Images and video can both be shared, and users can like, repost and reply to posts just like they would on X. Video can also be natively played on the app from sources like YouTube and Vimeo, which is actually an upgrade from X, which redirected users off the app who wanted to play media from outside sources.

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How does Bluesky work?

Decentralization is the future

Where things get more complicated is when you look into Bluesky works behind the scenes — much like Mastodon, another X competitor, Bluesky is decentralized.

This means that it runs off a whole host of dedicated smaller servers, rather than one massive central server hub run by the company itself.

These many diverse servers, organized around interests or topics or any number of other ideas, are connected by Bluesky’s proprietary AT Protocol, which ties everything into a network that you can browse.

On the surface, this makes it a little easier to navigate than Mastodon, which has proved a little difficult for many people to get their heads around.

In practice, though, it’s probably fine for now to think of Bluesky as basically another version of X with a complicated set of differences in its technical back-end, as that’s what it’ll end up being to most people.

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Who owns Bluesky?

Bluesky was founded by Jack Dorsey, the same person who brought Twitter to life

Part of what got Bluesky a bunch of attention when it was first announced years ago was that it was fronted by a certain Jack Dorsey – ex-Twitter co-founder.

That’s a big name to have attached to a modern-day X competitor specifically, and Dorsey still retains control of Bluesky, although exactly what his role at the company entails is something that remains a little ambiguous.

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How to access Bluesky

The platform is now readily available to users

Now that the waitlist period has ended, it’s easy to download the Bluesky app onto your device and create an account. Bluesky is available to download for free on both the Apple App Store and on the Google Play Store. The platform is also accessible on the web, which can be reached via the official Bluesky website.

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Is Bluesky different from X?

The two platforms are quite similar in concept

As the explanations above will have demonstrated, X and Bluesky are different, but also very similar. Despite Dorsey’s involvement, there are absolutely no ties between the two, however.

That said, there are undeniable similarities in terms of design and user interface, with both using a vertical feed and having a navigation bar at the bottom, and both letting you repost, like and reply to posts, making them feel almost like copies of one another.

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Will Bluesky replace X?

Bluesky isn’t the only player vying to eat away at Twitter’s base

This is the million-dollar question, but it’s very hard at this stage to judge whether any given app will manage to dethrone Twitter in certain communities and for certain uses.

Bluesky is certainly a long way from coming close to X’s figures in terms of users and traffic, but everything has to start somewhere. The recent news of the platform securing 17 million users is an impressive feat, and bodes well for the future of the service. What’s more, the official Bluesky account recently posted that over 1 million people joined the service within the period of just a single day on November 14.

Many apps have popped up and died back down in the last year or so, from Mastodon to Hive, but none have had the clout that Dorsey’s name brings to Bluesky, so it’s probably fair to guess that it might be one of the most viable options to have appeared so far.

Perhaps the bigger threat to X’s industry dominance and influence is the Meta-backed Threads platform. Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame has been leveraging Meta’s massive Instagram user base to push Threads into the mainstream. Threads, much like Bluesky, maintains the same core functionalities of X, but benefits from the backing of a much larger tech titan.

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