Social network built on the AT Protocol. Originated as an idea at Twitter to create a distributed protocol where Twitter would be just one participant; external teams were invited to pitch and Jay Graber's proposal was selected. She insisted on it being spun out as an independent company (funded by a Twitter grant) — which is the only reason it still exists after Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition. Protocol design happened in 2022; early beta launched 2023 with a waiting list that quickly reached a million. In February 2024 invites were dropped (~1M+ users) and the network was opened to external servers. Subsequent growth bumps: Japanese users (Feb), Brazilian users (September, when Twitter was blocked in Brazil for about a month — overloaded services), and millions more after the US November 2024 election. The 'Bluesky' people see combines what the Bluesky company builds with community-built layers around it.