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New social media platform BlueSky uses comics to promote its service

By John Freeman on February 9, 2024

Bluesky is building an open social network where anyone can contribute, while still providing an easy-to-use experience for users. For the past year, the company has used invite codes to help manage growth while they built features like moderation tooling, custom feeds, and more.

Now, with three million users plus on board, they’re ready for anyone to join – and they’ve utilised the work of Davis Bickford, an artist and occasional game developer on the network, to share why the team excited about Bluesky.

With a huge amount of attention on moderation on social media, after some appalling examples of shared content surfaced in regional and national news media, the content filter tools the new platform offers may be of considerable interest.

Bluesky, the company, is an independent, Public Benefit Corporation, owned by Jay Graber and the Bluesky team. CEO of Twitter Jack Dorsey and Jeremie Miller serve on the board, along with Jay.

The social app they’ve created is designed to not be controlled by a single company. “We’re creating a version of social media where it’s built by many people, and it still comes together as a cohesive, easy-to-use experience,” they state. “We’ve done this by building Bluesky on the AT Protocol, an open source toolbox for building social apps that can all talk to each other.

“We want modern social media and public conversation online to work more like the early days of the web, when anyone could put up a blog or use RSS to subscribe to several blogs. We believe this will unlock a new era of experimentation and innovation in social media. Researchers and communities will have the ability to jump in to help solve the problems social networks currently face, and developers will be able to experiment with many new forms of interaction.”

• You can sign up for BlueSky here – and learn more about Bluesky and how to get started, by reading their user FAQ here

• If deep dives are more your style, Martin Kleppman, author of Designing Data-Intensive Applications and technical advisor to Bluesky, wrote a paper that goes into more detail about the technical underpinnings of Bluesky

• Find out more about the BlueSky company here

John Freeman

The founder of downthetubes, which he established in 1998. John works as a comics and magazine editor, writer, and on promotional work for the Lakes International Comic Art Festival. He is currently editor of Star Trek Explorer, published by Titan – his third tour of duty on the title originally titled Star Trek Magazine.

Working in British comics publishing since the 1980s, his credits include editor of titles such as Doctor Who Magazine, Babylon 5 Magazine, and more. He also edited the comics anthology STRIP Magazine and edited several audio comics for ROK Comics. He has also edited several comic collections, including volumes of “Charley’s War” and “Dan Dare”.

He’s the writer of “Pilgrim: Secrets and Lies” for B7 Comics; “Crucible”, a creator-owned project with 2000AD artist Smuzz; and “Death Duty” and “Skow Dogs” with Dave Hailwood.