Jack Dorsey Beta Testing New Social App amid Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover: ‘The Next Step’

Jack Dorsey

Scott Olson/Getty Jack Dorsey

Jack Dorsey is one step closer to providing online refuge for the slew of social media users ready to desert Twitter in the wake of Elon Musk’s takeover.

A week before Musk took control of the company Thursday and immediately fired its CEO Parag Agrawal and two other top executives, Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO Dorsey, 45, 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, sharing a link to sign up for the beta test’s waitlist.

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

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“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.”

Dorsey shared last week on Twitter 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”

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Bluesky was initially founded by Twitter in 2019 to help develop a similar decentralized concept for the social media giant. “The biggest and long-term goal is to build a durable and open protocol for public conversation,” Dorsey wrote in a Q&A at the time.

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“That it not be owned by any one organization but contributed by as many as possible,” he added. “And that it is born and evolved on the internet with the same principles.”

Elon Musk

Elon Musk

In February, the company announced the formation of Bluesky PBLLC, “a Public Benefit LLC that will implement that vision as an independent organization,” with Dorsey as one of its board members.

After Dorsey, who co-founded Twitter in 2006, stepped down as the company’s CEO in November, Musk, 51, made an offer to buy the social network in April.

RELATED VIDEO: Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey on Elon Musk’s New Ownership: ‘This Is the Right Path’

Dorsey wrote at the time that he believes with “all my heart” that Musk taking over was “the right path” for Twitter: “In principle, I don’t believe anyone should own or run Twitter. It wants to be a public good at a protocol level, not a company. Solving the problem of it being a company, however, Elon is the singular solution I trust. I trust his mission to extend the light of consciousness.”

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Although Musk reached a deal to buy Twitter for $44 billion in late April, he soon announced plans to back out of the agreement in July, sparking a lawsuit from Twitter and a legal back-and-forth before moving forward with the deal again.