Bluesky began as a Twitter research project to decentralise social media
In 2019 Twitter's own chief executive, Jack Dorsey, announced a plan to explore an open standard that could make his platform decentralised. Inspired by Mike Masnick's essay Protocols, Not Platforms, the effort became Bluesky, which later split from Twitter entirely and grew to tens of millions of registered users.
Early progress was halting. A working group of decentralisation experts gathered in a group chat but could not agree, so Twitter solicited individual proposals instead. In August 2021 Jay Graber was hired to lead the project, backed by 13 million dollars of Twitter funding, and that October she incorporated it as an independent company, citing her former parent's entrenched incentives. It became a benefit corporation in February 2022 and hired its first three employees a month later.
Its technical core is the AT Protocol, an open standard for distributed networks, with the Bluesky app serving as its reference implementation. Users can pick or build their own algorithmic feeds, subscribe to community-run moderation and labelling services, and use starter packs to follow a whole cluster of related accounts at once. Handles can be tied to domain names, letting people verify themselves. The app's code went open source under the MIT licence in May 2023, and a blue butterfly logo, borrowed from users' own emoji habits, replaced a stock sky photo that December.
Access started as an invitation-only iPhone beta on 17 February 2023, reaching a million registered users that September before opening to everyone on 6 February 2024. Growth then came in bursts that staff nicknamed Elon Musk Events, tied to changes at X. After Brazil blocked X in August 2024, more than four million newcomers signed up within a fortnight.
Dorsey left the board in May 2024 and criticised the company's direction. Registrations passed 38.5 million by August 2025, though daily active users fell from 2.5 million in March 2025 to 1.5 million by September.
Source: Bluesky
