In development for a while already with an initial commit in April 2021 on the AT protocol repo, the Bluesky App has suddenly become the hot new thing in social media.

Growing to ~10k+ daily active posters within the time frame of April 2023 and now over a 100k posts being added daily.

The chart below shows this growth in daily active users in the dark blue line and daily posts in the light blue line.

The project claims to be developing a protocol with a re-thinking of the tech stack for more open social networks. Though to launch the first implementation of that protocol, the Bluesky app started adding users through an invite-only policy.

This being an open protocol though, Software Developer Zhuowei Zhang was able to get access to the posts and users data and published a Bluesky data dump on his blog. Which was used as data source for the creation of the above chart. Dataset includes posts until May 1st, 2023.

Some of the innovations included in the protocol are the use of Decentralized Identifiers (DIDs) and an architecture for multiple parties to develop feed algorithms to aggregate posts for various purposes ranging from the by now familiar personalized feed to more possibly innovative ideas.

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Further reading:

• Bluesky data dump
• AT Protocol repository
• Decentralized Identifiers