Twitter’s former CEO Jack Dorsey introduces decentralized social with algo choice and portable accounts

The eagerly anticipated “Bluesky Social” software is currently accepting participants for a private beta and promises a “short launch.”

As part of its decentralized response to Twitter, Bluesky Social’s co-founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey has revealed the most recent version of its social protocol and a new Bluesky Social app.

The program was first launched by Dorsey in December 2019 with the goal of allowing social media users to have control over their data and be able to move it from platform to platform without authorization.

The announcement on October 18 comes almost three years later.

Account portability, algorithmic choice, interoperability, and performance will all be possible with the new protocol, which has been renamed from “ADX” to “Authenticated Transfer Protocol”—or AT Protocol—and is referred to as a “protocol for large-scale distributed social applications.”

According to the protocol, domain names in the AT protocol, like @alice.com, will handle user identity. These would then translate to URLs that use cryptography to secure the user’s account and associated data.

Additionally, this information can be moved between providers “without losing any of your data or social graph.”

The protocol also offers “algorithmic choice,” which gives users access to “an open market of algorithms,” much as how consumers dealing with Web search engines are allowed to choose their indexers. Other characteristics include interoperation and improved performance.

As per Bluesky, users will now have more choice over what they see and who they connect with on social media platforms by adopting the protocol as opposed to having that part controlled and exploited by a single corporation looking for interaction.

In an earlier statement, Bluesky stated that its content moderation strategy is implemented in “many layers of the system, including in aggregation algorithms, reputation-based thresholds, and end-user choice.”