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A Self-Authenticating Social Protocol
Apr 6, 2022
by The Bluesky Team

Bluesky’s mission is to drive the evolution from platforms to protocols. The tools for public conversation should exist outside of private companies as common infrastructure, like the Internet itself. An open and durable decentralized protocol for public conversations can allow users a choice in their experience, creators control over their relationships with their audience, and developers freedom to innovate without permission from a platform.
We started with a research-intensive process to learn what can be applied from existing decentralized protocols. This research began with the ecosystem review and has continued while the Bluesky team was forming. We will be publishing our preliminary work and research this month, starting with this high level introduction. There are many projects that have created protocols for decentralizing discourse, including ActivityPub and SSB for social, Matrix and IRC for chat, and RSS for blogging. While each of these are successful in their own right, none of them fully met the goals we had for a network that enables global long-term public conversations at scale.
Some of the most important objectives we have been evaluating are portability, scale, and trust. Portability allows people to keep their social life intact even if they switch providers. Scale allows people to participate in global discourse. And trust is created by giving people insight into what services are doing with their data and how information is being promoted into or removed from their feed.
In this post, we’ve started to lay out the high level objectives we’ve set and how we plan to meet them. In the coming weeks, we’ll be publishing more of the research we’ve done since the ecosystem review and open sourcing preliminary code. We’ve started writing code to validate ideas and iterate on something concrete, but everything is still fully experimental. You can expect a command line client to play with, but don’t expect to build your next big app on it yet, as anything can change at this stage.

We’re not describing what we’re building as a federated or p2p network, or as a blockchain network, because it doesn’t fall neatly in any of these categories. It could be described as a hybrid federated network with p2p characteristics, but it’s more descriptive to focus on the capabilities – self-authenticating identities and data – than on network topology. Our team has previously built leading decentralized web protocols and blockchain networks, and is working on synthesizing the best of what we’ve seen into something new. For some aspects, we’ll be able to use pieces that already exist, and for others, we’ll have to come up with solutions of our own. Stay tuned for updates, we’ll share more soon.
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https://gitlab.com/bluesky-community1/decentralized-ecosystem/-/blob/master/README.md