Bluesky and the AT Protocol: Usable Decentralized Social Media

Bluesky is a social network built on the AT Protocol, a decentralized foundation for public social media, and the paper by Martin Kleppmann, Paul Frazee, Jake Gold, Jay Graber, Daniel Holmgren, Devin Ivy, Jeromy Johnson, Bryan Newbold and Jaz Volpert describes its architecture. The network launched in private beta in February 2023 and had grown to over 10 million registered users by October 2024. The authors state that its design aims to enable decentralization through multiple interoperable providers for every part of the system, make it easy for users to switch providers, give users agency over the content they see, and keep the user experience simple. They also invite the research community to use Bluesky as a dataset and testing ground for social media moderation approaches.