We need to talk about Bluesky...

I’m a HUGE advocate for personal brands, creatives entrepreneurs, and businesses having a community. Communities allow you to engage with your clients, fans, in ways that traditional marketing simply can’t do. I’ve written & posted plenty about Discord, Skool, and others, but I think there is a potential gamechanger here.

Bluesky.

If you’ve been keeping up with the latest in the tech world (step aside Chrome, we’ll talk about you later), you’ve probably seen some buzz about Bluesky.

Bluesky is a decentralized social media platform with an experience akin to Twitter (notice how I didn’t say X, more on that in a minute). It has been around for a few years, but recently has skyrocketed to over 20 million users, some of that being X refugees looking for alternatives.

Best of all, Bluesky is built on React Native (a personal favorite of mine), and completely open source.

You can find more information about the platform online, but let’s get to what we’re here for, the tech and how it benefits you.

Decentralization

To understand how this technology can benefit you, we need to start with this fact. Bluesky is using the AT protocol which is a completely decentralized network.

If you look at a user handle on bluesky’s servers, you’ll see that it is actually a url. Most folks have a bsky.social handle, but I’m a nerd and linked a custom domain to mine. 🤓

If you visit this URL via atproto browser, you can actually see every like, follow, post, and profile data that you have on a given server. This is actually super cool, because that given handle could potentially be used elsewhere on other servers, and all of your data belongs to you, as opposed to the social media platform that you signed up on.

Communities Without Limits

When you go to signup on Bluesky, you can choose to sign up on their server…

Or spin up your own…

Since Bluesky is open source, you can spin up your own VPS and host your own community, completely independent, secure, and invite-only to the people that you want in it i.e. your fans & staff. Not only that, but with the power of Bluesky’s API, you can build your own frontend to do whatever it is that you want it to do. So instead of having a separate community app that your fans or clients need to access, roll it in with your existing business technology and create an all inclusive experience where they know that their data is safe.

Y’all, I see a lot of potential here and it has me thinking about ways that I can utilize this technology for our clients and for my personal brand. I think that this changes the game in terms of what social media can be, and I’m here for it.

Should I spin up a server for the Riffs. Code. Coffee. community? Let me know by simply replying or commenting!

Anyways, I hope that wasn’t too deep of a dive for y’all. I do try to toe the line between technical jargon & relevant information. If you got something out of this article, share it with a friend, a business owner, or someone else that may find it useful.

In the meantime, I’ll see y’all on Friday for the Black Friday Edition of the Weekly PR!

I’ll catch y’all on Bluesky!

Paps.

PS: Have you checked out SPAP Technology Solutions yet? We help businesses grow with custom web solutions to get you more leads, increase productivity, and scale your applications. Click here to jump on a call with me, and let’s “unf[…]ck your tech stack”.