Twitter’s New Rival 'Bluesky' Hits App Store as an Invite-Only App

Bluesky, a new social platform offering a decentralized alternative to Twitter isnow available on App Store, by invitation only. 

Backed by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, the newly developed social media app adopts features and an interface similar to Twitter. Like the Musk-owned app, users can search and follow other users and view updates from their home timeline. User profiles also include a round profile picture, background cover, bio and metrics, and a follower and following count.  

Overall, Bluesky also has a similar UI and UX design to Twitter, with a bar for home, search and notification icons at the bottom, profile details to the top-left, and posts shown top-to-bottom.

Bluesky design ain’t much different than twitter. Fun crowd so far.
Download @bluesky.
Drop a comment if you want an invite code pic.twitter.com/0D6VWMPBqT

— MultiChainMike (@MikeFraietta) March 1, 2023

While Twitter allows 280 characters per tweet, Bluesky posts will be limited to 256 characters only.. Other differences include the text prompt in a post, with Twitter asking its users “What’s happening,” and Bluesky asking “What’s up?” 

People interested in using the app in its trial stage may sign up for the waitlist here. 

The Beginnings of Bluesky 

The Bluesky project had been revealed and incubated within Twitter since Dorsey’s time as CEO in 2019. Shortly after leaving his post in November 2021, Dorsey supported the project and described it as “an open decentralized standard for social media.”  

According to Dorsey, the plan of Bluesky is to offer a decentralized platform that gives its users and communities more power in terms of who could engage in speech and who would moderate content.   

In a blog, the team which the app is also named after, explained its plans to create a new decentralized social media protocol by the name Authenticated Transfer (AT), allowing communication between different social media networks, while championing account portability, algorithmic choice, interoperation and performance. 

“The “AT Protocol” is a new federated social network. It integrates ideas from the latest decentralized technologies into a simple, fast, and open network,” it wrote.