Before Jack Dorsey and the founders of Twitter sold the platform off to Elon Musk, Dorsey took an internal project called Bluesky and spun it off into its own company.
Bluesky was designed to be a decentralized and open platform that would allow users to create their own versions of Twitter through a social media protocol called the AT Protocol.
This means when you join a Bluesky platform, you have to join a specific server as a host that has its own rules, interests, and users.
When Twitter was turned into X by Elon Musk, the team at Bluesky created Bluesky Social, built on its own open protocol as an example of what could be accomplished with the tool.
Bluesky Social has become an insider’s club seeking an alternative to X, with some big names like Neil Gaiman and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez among the early adherents.
And while Bluesky has reached a million users, the platform was always meant for others to take the idea and create their own versions with their own rules.
The first of these versions is getting ready to ship and will be available to download for iOS and Android.
It is called Greysky, and the team behind it is based in the UK. That team consists of one person named Samuel.
But this little app has a lot of power and a lot of early buzz as being a feature-rich alternative to X.
It stands in contrast to Meta’s Threads, which launched with almost no features.
What remains unclear for creators of Bluesky apps like Samuel and Greysky is how these mini-Twitters will monetize themselves.
However, the democratization of technology might offer many more alternatives in the days to come.
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