Twitter Down as Jack Dorsey’s Decentralized App Takes the Center Stage
- Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey believes his new startup will rival companies trying to own the data of their users because it has a decentralized protocol.
- The Bluesky app is only available on Apple and does not yet support Android.
- Bluesky began in 2019 as a Twitter side project but was launched with the goal of developing a free and open standard for social media.
Thousands of Twitter users raised concerns about another outage on Wednesday, March 1. The outage occurred as Bluesky, a new startup by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, entered beta testing. Figures from Downdetector confirmed that thousands of Twitter users had reported difficulties with using Twitter as of 9 a.m. UTC. The concerns were slowly resolved within a 5-hour time frame. However, both mobile and web Twitter users were affected by the outage and there has been no official explanation for the outage.
Interestingly, some Twitter users expressed renewed hope following the launch of Jack Dorsey’s new social networking app. Twitter has not enjoyed massive support from its community since Tesla CEO Elon Musk took over as CEO late last year. Musk introduced stricter work ethics and trimmed Twitter’s staff number by a large margin. Twitter reportedly laid off an extra 200 employees over the weekend, reducing the company’s staff to under 2,000 from 7,500.
On the other hand, Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky has already gained massive attention hours after its launch. Users can now download the decentralized social network from the Apple Store. However, they’ll need an invitation code to create an account.
Bluesky has a similar interface to Twitter and also features search, notifications, and home tabs. Additionally, each user’s profile displays who they are following and who follows them. Bluesky, like Twitter, also supports reposting content from other users. But, despite its striking similarity with Twitter, developers say Bluesky’s protocol is its stand-out feature.
Bluesky uses the Authenticated Transfer Protocol (AT Protocol), a federated social network. The AT protocol allows users the option to self-host if they choose to. Last October, Dorsey tweeted that Bluesky would be “a competitor to any company trying to own the underlying fundamentals of social media or the data of the people using it.”
The Bluesky initiative was first developed within Twitter in 2019 under Jack Dorsey’s leadership. Twitter reportedly provided financial support for the project. It remains to be seen how both platforms will coexist.
Lawrence has covered some exciting stories in his career as a journalist, he finds blockchain-related stories very intriguing. He believes Web3 will change the world and wants everyone to be a part of it.
