Bluesky: Two months after its launch, Jack Dorsey’s Twitter alternative comes to Android

Since his departure from Twitter in late 2021, co-founder Jack Dorsey has been working on an alternative to the microblogging site, now owned by eccentric billionaire Elon Musk. Bluesky was initially rolled out to iOS devices in February, and it’s now finally come to Android.

If you plan to download the app and post updates about your dislike of Twitter, you’ll still have to wait. Access to Bluesky is by invitation only, so you must sign up for the waitlist or get an invitation from someone already on it. Either way, there isn’t a whole of action going on there now, as the community is only around 25,000 people. But that could change quickly when more people are allowed in, potentially exploding the user base.

Whilst the new social network is decentralised (not hosted on one central server), it is not federated like the Fediverse and Mastodon is, to interconnect across other social networks. So, likening it to e-mail is not a good analogy, as e-mail is an international open standard supported by different brands and mail clients. It is better to compare it say to Microsoft’s cloud service: Hosted across many different servers and countries, all talking to each other, but not talking to Google or Amazon’s cloud services.

But if the network could work like Hubzilla and Friendica do, it is possible it could interconnect more broadly. Hubzilla and Friendica have their own (very good) protocols, but they also allow for the Twitter API and ActivityPub protocols to be activated, thereby interconnecting very broadly from one client. So, we really have to see where Bluesky goes to in the future.

See https://www.xda-developers.com/jack-dorsey-bluesky-twitter-alternative-android/
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