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Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey launches new app ‘Bluesky’

Who doesn’t love a little healthy competition? Jack Dorsey, who is partly responsible for Twitter’s rise to success, has now launched a new platform called Bluesky. It’s aimed at competing with Twitter, under Elon Musk.

Twitter has been nothing short of a mess since Elon Musk took over as CEO in October of last year.

From the iconic bluebird symbol being switched to the Dogecoin Shiba Inu for a week, to millions of people reporting that Elon Musk had boosted his own tweets on their timelines, to confusion and outrage over blue tick verification fees… avid users of the bird app have been through a lot lately.

As Twitter’s future continues to hang in the balance – some believe we’re already near the end, mind – it’s been announced that Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder, has launched a completely independent alternative to the app.

Named Bluesky, the platform has already seen journalists, politicians, and other famous figures flock to join. It’s been downloaded 375,000 times since February and there are well over one million potential members waiting to be approved.

If you’re over Elon’s Twitter as we know it, I bear some bad news. For now, Bluesky is running on an invite-only basis, with account verification times for those invited by current users taking up to a week to be cleared.

This is likely due to the fact that Bluesky is still operating in beta mode. It can’t yet keep up with the user capacity boasted by reigning tech giants like Meta (including Instagram) and Twitter.

But with the brain responsible for catapulting Twitter into a mammoth-like force in charge, it wouldn’t be ambitious to anticipate Bluesky being up and running at full speed in no time.

Jack Dorsey hasn’t been shy in his criticism of Musk, saying in recent weeks that he didn’t think Elon had ‘acted right’ after realising his timing in purchasing the platform was bad.

He also stated that he didn’t think Twitter’s board should have ‘forced the sale’ of the company.

‘It all went south,’ Dorsey says. ‘But it happened and all we can do now is build something to avoid that ever happening again.’

On matters of Bluesky, Dorsey sounds optimistic. In a recent interview, he said he is ‘happy’ with the Bluesky team, who is extremely busy with building the new social media platform.

Bluesky’s features are similar to Twitter’s, at least from the sounds of things.

Users have the option of sending text and image posts to the world while building up ‘likes’ and a following of other users. These posts? They’re called ‘skeets,’ a play on the words ‘sky’ and ‘tweet,’ of course.

Nuevo "Twitter" de Jack Dorsey ya está disponible para pruebas en la AppStore

Where the two platforms differ is moderation guidelines.

Users can set their own content moderation rules via an ‘opt-in/opt-out’ feature, whereas Twitter’s are decided at whim by Elon Musk.

Bluesky is also reportedly a ‘decentralised platform’. This means all user data is stored on independent servers, not on servers owned by Bluesky – a big win for those looking to maintain their privacy.

We’ll have to wait until Dorsey’s new platform is widely available to see if a new social media platform steals the crown.

Until then, it looks like we’re at the whim of Elon Musk’s random quirks, interface changes, and algorithms.

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