More power to users? Bluesky takes on Twitter, to decentralize social media experience with AT Protocol

tech.hindustantimes.com:

Ever since Twitter was acquired by billionaire Elon Musk, the user base has been highly polarized on the platform. While one-half of the Twitter population has been on board with the new developments, the other half is not at all happy. People wanted a better alternative and soon, a number of Twitter-like platforms began emerging. From Mastodon to Substack Notes, they all claimed to offer something different, but none were able to create a buzz similar to Bluesky. The platform was conceptualized and designed by Twitter ex-CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey and is built on a promise of creating a decentralized platform using an innovative Authenticated Transfer Protocol (AT Protocol) as its foundation.

And the combination of a decentralized social media platform and the Twitter cofounder's seal of approval has turned a lot of eyes. At present, Bluesky is invite-only and has about 50,000 users. But as per reports, as many as 1 million people have joined the waitlist including personalities such as US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the comedian Dril.

But the question that remains is what exactly is this decentralized platform and how does it innovate the existing social media experience?

In short, today's social media experience is largely around engagement. Users get markers such as ‘like', ‘share', ‘retweet', ‘upvote', ‘comment' etc. to show whether they find a particular content shared on the platform interesting or not. A post that has a high number of likes, shares, or comments is generally considered to be ‘viral'.

Now, when it comes to the developers' side of things, these viral posts indicate what people are most likely interested in. So, most recommendations pick out these posts to the top of user feeds and