After Musk's Twitter takeover, Jack Dorsey plans new app

The news had emerged a week ahead of Tesla chief Elon Musk's Twitter takeover that resulted in the exit of top executives of the microblogging site and evoked multiple opinions about how Musk would run the platform.

Dorsey announced that his decentralized social app Bluesky is seeking beta testers.

"The next step is to start testing the protocol. Distributed protocol development is a tricky process," the company shared in a news release last Tuesday.

"It requires coordination from many parties once a network is deployed, so we're going to start in private beta to iron out issues.

"As we beta test, we'll continue to iterate on the protocol specs and share details about how it works. When it's ready, we'll move to the open beta," it added.

The press release also shared a link to sign up for the beta test's waitlist.

The release explained how the new app will work. It will use an Authenticated Transfer Protocol (AT Protocol), which is a federated social network run by multiple sites instead of a single site.

"The word 'Bluesky' evokes a wide-open space of possibility. It was the original name for this project before it took shape, and continues to be the name of our company," the release stated.

"We're calling the application we're building Bluesky because it will be a portal to the world of possibility on top of the AT Protocol."

Last week, Dorsey said in a tweet that Bluesky intends to be "a competitor to any company trying to own the underlying fundamentals for social media or the data of the people using it"

Bluesky was initially founded by Twitter in 2019. Dorsey quit as Twitter CEO in November 2019 and stepped down from Twitter's board in May 2022.