Potential Twitter/X rival Bluesky is looking to invest more directly in its developer community to fuel growth. Last week, the company announced AT Protocol Grants, a new program that provides small grants to developers building new social networking protocols. Initially, Bluesky said it would release $10,000 in grants ranging from $500 to $2,000 per project, based on factors such as cost and usage.
Interested developers can apply for a grant by filling out a form. There is no deadline to apply, but Bluesky will make an announcement once all $10,000 is spent.
The company has already distributed $3,000 of the $10,000 pilot program to developers of two popular SDKs, including the AT Protocol Python SDK (Ilya Siamionau) and the AT Protocol Dart SDK (Kato Shinya). The third recipient is SkyFeed. This is a custom tool that allows anyone, even non-developers, to create their own feeds using a graphical user interface. Bluesky pointed out that he currently has over 40,000 custom feeds built using SkyFeed.
Bluesky's idea is that users can control their own moderation settings and tailor the service to their liking by building or subscribing to feeds that display data in different ways beyond the default timeline provided by Bluesky itself. The goal is to provide features that can be customized. Users can also join federated servers (other than those operated by Bluesky) that have different moderation rules.
However, the concept of decentralized social networking has been around longer than Bluesky, and many projects are supported by the ActivityPub protocol, including Mastodon, Misskey, Pixelfed, and more. Meta's Instagram Threads will also be integrated with ActivityPub. However, Bluesky is challenging these efforts with his own AT protocol, which he believes is an improvement over existing options for a variety of reasons, including support for algorithm selection. (Once a bridge is built between the two protocols, users may eventually no longer need to understand the differences and be able to converse with users on both networks.)
Bluesky said the projects that received the grant will be beneficial to both developers and end users, and will be paid for through public GitHub sponsorships. The company also partnered with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide developers with $5,000 in AWS Activate credits to get their projects off the ground. These credits help cover the cost of cloud services such as machine learning, compute, databases, storage, containers, and development tools.
The investment in community projects is in stark contrast to how Twitter, now called X, has treated developers under Elon Musk's ownership. Twitter/X changed his API terms and put many small developers, researchers, and useful bot builders out of business. Others have since turned to Mastodon, as Tweetbot developer Tapbots did when launching Ivory. Bluesky is much more collaborative with its developer community than X and sees value in the third-party ecosystem to expand its user base and engagement with the platform. This could be even more useful in the coming months, as the impact of Bluesky's public launch last month has since tapered off. The company currently has nearly 5.18 million users, but growth has slowed in recent days.
The grant will support the release of Bluesky app version 1.71, which adds a sophisticated hashtag display page, a “mute word” feature to catch cited posts (not your own), the ability to start hashtags with a number, and more. It was also announced last week. .