Bluesky’s Game-Changing Strategy to Boost its Twitter/X Alternative with Developer Funding. A possible rival to Twitter/X Bluesky is planning to specifically invest into its community of developers to encourage expansion. Bluesky last week launched “AT Protocol Grants,” an initiative which will offer small grants to developers working using its social network protocol. In the beginning, Bluesky said it would offer grants of $10,000 ranging from $500-$2,000 for each project per annum, based upon the factors of cost, usage as well as other factors.
The developers who are interested in applying Are able to submit a request application form to submit an application for grants. There’s not a deadline for applications however Bluesky will let you know when the $10,000 is exhausted.
The company has given out $3000 of the $10,000 through the pilot program for the developers of two popular SDKs. These include AT Protocol Python SDK (by Ilya Siamionau) and AT Protocol Python SDK (by Ilya Siamionau) as well as the AT Protocol Dart SDK (by Shinya Kato). Another recipient will be SkyFeed an program that allows anyone, even non-developers create custom feeds through a user-friendly interface. It is noted that according to Bluesky over 4000 feeds custom-designed by users have been developed by using SkyFeed.
Bluesky, the idea is to provide Bluesky it is the intention to allow users to customize the service according to their own preferences, which includes setting their own preferences for moderation and constructing or subscribing to feeds that display their information in various ways, in addition to the default timeline that Bluesky provides. The users will also be able to join other federated servers (beyond Bluesky’s own Bluesky) and they could have different moderation policies.
The idea of decentralized social networks is more popular than Bluesky However, it is a complex concept with numerous projects, such as Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, and many others, all backed with the ActivityPub protocol.
Meta’s Instagram Threads plans to integrate with ActivityPub in addition. However, Bluesky is fighting these efforts by introducing the company’s AT Protocol, its own AT Protocol, which it believes is a step up from the current option due to various reasons such as it’s support for algorithms in selection. ( A bridge between both protocols could be created to ensure that, eventually, users don’t need to know the difference, but will be able to communicate with users across each network.)
Bluesky claims that the projects that receive the grants could be beneficial for both developers and end users. The grants will be repaid through public GitHub sponsorships. Bluesky also joined forces in partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide developers with $5,000 AWS Credits for Activate to start their projects off on into the air. The credits can be used to cover the costs of cloud-based services including machine learning, computation databases, storage containers, development tools, and much more.
The money invested in community-based projects is in stark contrast to how Twitter has, which is now called X has dealt with the developers under the ownership of Elon Musk. Twitter/X has changed its API policies and put a lot of smaller developers, researchers and bot builders who were helpful off the market.
Many have switched their focus towards Mastodon in the same way that Tweetbot developer Tapbots have done with the introduction of Ivory. Bluesky is much more open and open with the developer community that X is, and has seen the value of a third party ecosystem to increase its user base as well as engage in its service. This could prove beneficial in the coming months because the surge that came from the public launch of Bluesky this month has since tapered off. Bluesky now has more than 5.18 million registered users however, its growth has slowed over the last few days.
The announcement of the grants came this week, along with the release bluesky’s application Version 1.71 which added a professional Instagram view, the option to “mutewords” to catch quoted posts (but not your own posts) and the option to begin hashtags using numbers, and so on.