Bluesky remains a decentralized, invite-only alternative to Twitter, but now, you don't need to log in to be able to see posts on the platform, according to Blog post From Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. You can now view posts from the web and from the Bluesky app — like this.
If you want to prevent logged out users from seeing your posts, you can “discourage” this by clicking the toggle button in Settings. But Plosky points out that “other apps may not honor this request” and that switching doesn't make your account private.
“Bluesky is an open and public network,” Bluesky says in a note under the toggle. “This setting only limits the visibility of your content on the Bluesky app and website, other apps may not respect this setting.” In the blog post, Graber notes that “posts on Bluesky have always been public across developer tools and other apps.”
Bluesky has a new logo too: a butterfly. Previously, the app's logo was a blue sky with clouds, but “early on, we noticed that people were organically using the butterfly 🦋 icon to indicate their Bluesky handles,” Graber says in the blog post. “Butterfly speaks to our mission to transform social media into something new.”
I think the butterfly is a huge improvement over the generic blue sky. As my colleague Parker Ortolani noted, the app has fun animations It will feel familiar to Twitter fans. (I mean Twitter, not X.)
With the growing momentum behind ActivityPub — including very public support from Meta's Threads — I was concerned that Bluesky, which relies on its own AT protocol, might fall behind. But every time I switch to my Bluesky account, people seem to be having a lot of fun — and the platform seems to be growing quickly, too — so I'm hoping the protocols coexist and herald a diverse future.
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