Bluesky, Twitter’s internal not-for-profit R&D initiative heralded by former CEO Jack Dorsey, is out with its first code release. The release, called Authenticated Data eXperiment or ADX, is just a glimpse of how Bluesky plans to build a decentralized social network protocol.
The Twitter spin-off clarified that ADX, in its present form, is not ready for other companies or teams to build respective social platforms. But developers can test the new ADX code releaseOpens a new window , which is open source.
Jay Graber, who was roped in to take over Bluesky’s reins from the then Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal and head the R&D initiative as the CEO in August 2021, calls the release part of the team’s “Working In Public†approach. This implies there could be more intermittent code releases before it is fully ready for greater public engagement.
For the uninitiated, Bluesky is working on a decentralized social network protocol upon which other companies can build and operate social media platforms. The concept is fairly similar to ActivityPub, IPFS, Peergos, Hypercore Protocol, GUN, Matrix, and IRC.
A decentralized social protocol is a technology to bring content interoperability between multiple platforms and eliminate access barriers from different networks. This means that the content on one social media platform will be viewable and accessible from others running on the same protocol. It also imparts control to respective platforms to moderate content according to their policy.
For example, suppose a post made on a platform running on Bluesky’s protocol, say Twitter, violates the policies of another platform. In that case, the other platform can enforce its moderation policies and delete it, but this won’t affect the post’s visibility across Twitter and other platforms running on the same decentralized protocol.
In essence, it is a way to take away the power wielded by current web-based platforms and give it back to the users through structural changes to social networking.
ActivityPub is one of the more popular decentralized network protocols. It currently runs Mastodon, a distributed social networking software with microblogging features, federated hosting service Nextcloud, image-sharing platform Pixelfed, social media platform Diaspora, federated video streaming service PeerTube, blogging platform WriteFreely, and others.
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The difference between ActivityPub and Bluesky is that in the former, data is not self-certifying, i.e., it is up to the user to see which server it came from for authenticity. On the other hand, Bluesky is self-certifying, wherein the user doesn’t need to rely on any extrinsic evidence for authenticity.
Bluesky leverages cryptographic identifiers, content-addressed data, and verifiable computation to enable self-certification of data. “When resources in a network can attest to their own authenticity, then that data is inherently live, canonical and transactable, no matter where it is located,†the Bluesky team explained.Â
“This is a departure from the connection-centric model of the Web, where information is host-certified and therefore becomes dead when it is no longer hosted by its original service. Self-authenticating data moves authority to the user and therefore preserves the liveness of data across every hosting service.â€
The advantage of this approach, according to Bluesky, is threefold: it provides portability, scalability, and trust.
“Today, every time someone creates a post or engages with content on a social platform (likes, follows, etc), they’re creating data about themselves. On the Web, this data lives on the social platform where it was created. In ADX, this data will live in Personal Data Repositories owned by the user,†Bluesky added.
“These repositories are similar to websites in the sense that they represent content published by one user, but they use self-authenticating data to identify themselves independently of the host servers. We then create a larger, more interconnected view of the network by crawling the repositories with indexers.â€
Indexers act in a similar way as Google’s web crawlers. The difference being content on Google is collated and presented from across the Web. Here it will be sourced from social media platforms from the protocol.
However, Bluesky clarified that the speech and reach layers are separated. While speech (post in this context) should be an inherent part of social platforms, its reach is subject to moderation. A “marketplace of companies†will steer speech moderation that will rely on aggregation algorithms, reputation, and end-user choice.
Bluesky has operated independently within Twitter since 2019. It is funded with $13 million from Twitter but is owned by the Bluesky team without any controlling stake by Twitter. Dorsey, currently CEO at Block, is one of Bluesky’s board members.
It is unclear if Musk’s ongoing acquisition of Twitter will impact Bluesky. But considering Dorsey is an ardent supporter of Musk taking over the microblogging platform and called the Tesla and SpaceX CEO “the singular solution I trust,†we cannot discount Musk’s influence on how Bluesky operates in the future.
“We’re in R&D mode at the moment, experimenting with pieces that point in the right direction,†wroteOpens a new window Graber.
In the meantime, “Feel free to play around, but don’t try to build your next big social app on this yet. Things are missing, and things are going to change. We’ve been writing code to validate ideas and discover edge cases as a part of the research process, as opposed to writing code to produce a finished product.â€
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