It is now owned by Musk. We have a general idea of what that means for them, including less people keeping the lights on, and maybe the addition of payments and reservations for services. The future of Musk is on other platforms. Bluesky is a social networking project that has been funded by the company over the past three years. With its original champion gone, its future prospects are shaky.
The initial manager of Bluesky was Parag Agrawal, who was then the chief technology officer of the company. The goal was to make the social network protocol compatible with other networks unrelated to the company. Bluesky was set up as an independent entity that produced non-proprietary open-source work, even as it was funded by the company. As of April, Bluesky had received $13 million from the micro-messaging service.
Bluesky expressed confidence that its mission wouldn't change after Musk's acquisition offer, and said that its funding would not be subject to any conditions. As the acquisition was about to close, we received another cautiously optimistic message. I'm curious to see where he's going to go. We will continue to work on building protocols that make social more resilient to rapid change. It's a good thing that nobody can buy 'email' as a platform.
Bluesky has been making more visible progress than usual, despite the recent turmoil on the social networking site. The first piece of the AT Protocol was released in April, and last week it opened a waiting list for an app built on the protocol. It looks like we will be able to use it soon.
The Musk acquisition doesn't seem to be good news for Bluesky. Even if nobody can buy email as a platform, they can still stop paying people to build it. Bluesky could be one of the easiest items to cut if the budget is tight.
He wished he didn't turn it into a company. Musk is happy to just take the reigns.
There may not be anyone left to fight for the project. Over time, the impression that Bluesky is a quirky pet cause has grown stronger. Decentralization could be a way to sidestep bitter content moderation debates. ActivityPub, which powers Mastodon, is a decentralized social networking protocol that reflects ideas like Dorsey's love of "algorithmic choice" or competing social media moderation. He told Musk that he regretted not creating a communications protocol that sounded like Bluesky.
I have yet to see any interest from Musk. As a self-proclaimed "nano-manager", Musk seems happy to keep control of his speech to himself and his newly announced content moderation council. Musk has said he will match the laws of a country, which means he will want the ability to filter posts as necessary.
It would be a shame to lose something like that. If you don't subscribe to the vision, it's a positive thing for Musk and the company. If it does play a role in decentralizing social media, it will open up more options for people who are skeptical of the service.
There is a lot of interest in Bluesky due to it's social media presence.
Musk is interested in the idea of decentralization. He has never explained what an open source means. He told his brother Kimbal that he thought a new social media company was needed that was based on a block chain and included payments. Graber noted earlier this month that Bluesky isn't using a blockchain, but that doesn't mean it doesn't overlap with other things.
Some ideas from Bluesky could be adopted by Musk. Bluesky has a system for dividing "speech" and "reach", for example, and he said that users should set their own levels of offensive content filters. The problem of letting a lot of different services connect to each other isn't solved by Bluesky's actual code.
$13 million isn't a lot of money by Musk's standards but he could decide Bluesky has enough potential to keep funding We don't know what Musk would demand from a Musk-runTwitter. Bluesky may have to go it alone if funding doesn't come through. Bluesky has an interest that many other protocols don't. Changing social media will get harder without it.
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