Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey Reveals Roadmap for New Decentralized ‘Social Protocol’

Twitter founder and former CEO Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky has revealed a roadmap and a new website for an open and decentralized “social protocol,” while renaming the project as the AT Protocol.

Per the new website, shared on Twitter on Tuesday by Bluesky, the organization set up by Jack Dorsey to research and build an open social protocol, AT Protocol has now become “stable enough” that the team feels comfortable sharing more details about their work.

Jack Dorsey himself also shared the tweet from Bluesky, calling the new protocol “foundational.”

foundational, @at_protocol https://t.co/vMp6VKaxWY

— jack (@jack) October 18, 2022

The next step now, according to Bluesky, is the release of a social app, with a waitlist now open for those who want to be notified when it is ready and become early users. Additionally, the team also announced today that it is possible to participate in private beta testing of the protocol by signing up for a waitlist on the Bluesky website.

AT Protocol is short for “Authenticated Transfer Protocol,” which essentially describes how the protocol makes it possible to transfer a user’s social media account from one social media provider to another.

The current version of AT Protocol is an update from an initial experimental version released in May this year under the name ADX, where “X” stood for “experiment,” Bluesky said in its tweet.

Explaining what makes the protocol special and different from a traditional social media platform, Bluesky said that users get a choice of the provider they want to use and that it’s easy to move a social media account from one provider to another.

What makes the AT Protocol unique:

🔶 Account portability
🔶 Algorithmic choice
🔶 Interoperation
🔶 Performance

— bluesky (@bluesky) October 18, 2022

“A person’s online identity should not be owned by corporations with no accountability to their users. With the AT Protocol, you can move your account from one provider to another without losing any of your data or social graph,” the team wrote in a tweet.

Jack Dorsey has in the past indicated some regret over how Twitter developed into a centralized company where users do not own their own content, and risk being censored and even de-platformed. This sentiment is believed to have been part of the reason why Bluesky was created in late 2019, before Dorsey formally left his role as Twitter CEO in November 2021.