Bluesky Social opens waiting list for massive demand

Bluesky, a decentralized social networking project funded by Twitter, has announced the beta version of its upcoming app.

Bluesky Social App announced

Bluesky is coming soon.

The project team announced that they will launch a social media app called Bluesky Social, which will be offered to end users.

Bluesky’s waiting list quickly saw excessive demand, as the project wrote that it had “reached a temporary limit on mailing list signups.” Although Bluesky has switched email providers and is still accepting new waitlist applications, the incident suggests there is significant demand for the app.

The team also announced the next version of the platform’s underlying protocol, formerly known as ADX.

The team said today that it has renamed ADX the “Authenticated Transport Protocol” or “AT protocol.” It aims to offer portable accounts, a choice of content algorithms, interoperability with other services and high performance.

The team also described the AT protocol as a federated network, meaning users can choose between different providers or host their own.

Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who first announced the project in 2019, acknowledged the project’s latest milestone today. He simply called the news “fundamental” in one chirping.

Despite earlier expectations, today’s announcement did not announce any cryptocurrency or blockchain.

Bluesky’s earliest research considered blockchain social networks such as Steemit and Peepeth alongside non-blockchain protocols such as ActivityPub and XMPP. In 2021, former Zcash developer Jay Graber was hired to lead the project. In the same year, Dorsey responded positively to the proposal to integrate the Lightning Network into Bluesky.

Although blockchain appears to be absent from the final product, Bluesky is likely to appeal to the crypto community due to shared values ​​of decentralization and user control.

Disclosure: At the time of writing, the author of this piece owned BTC, ETH and other cryptocurrencies.