Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media

Understand

Bluesky is a new social network built upon the AT Protocol, a decentralized foundation for public social media.

• It was launched in private beta in February 2023, and has grown to over 10 million registered users by October 2024.
• In this paper we introduce the architecture of Bluesky and the AT Protocol, and explain how the technical design of Bluesky is informed by our goals: to enable decentralization by having multiple interoperable providers for every part of the system; to make it easy for users to switch providers; to give users agency over the content they see; and to provide a simple user experience that does not burden users with complexity arising from the system's decentralized nature.
• The system's openness allows anybody to contribute to content moderation and community management, and we invite the research community to use Bluesky as a dataset and testing ground for new approaches in social media moderation.