Bluesky stays an invite-only decentralized Twitter various, however now, you don’t must be logged in to have the ability to see posts on the platform, in keeping with a weblog put up from Bluesky CEO Jay Graber. Now you can see posts from each the net and from the Bluesky app — like this one.

If you wish to stop logged-out customers from seeing your posts, you possibly can “discourage” that by clicking a toggle in settings. However Bluesky notes that “different apps could not honor this request” and that the toggle doesn’t make your account non-public.

“Bluesky is an open and public community,” Bluesky says in a be aware beneath the toggle. “This setting solely limits the visibility of your content material on the Bluesky app and web site, and different apps could not respect this setting.” Within the weblog put up, Graber notes that “posts on Bluesky have all the time been public through developer tooling and different apps.”

Bluesky has a brand new emblem, too: a butterfly. Beforehand, the app’s emblem was a blue sky with clouds, however “early on, we observed that folks have been organically utilizing the butterfly emoji 🦋 to point their Bluesky handles,” Graber says within the weblog put up. “The butterfly speaks to our mission of reworking social media into one thing new.”

I feel the butterfly is a giant enchancment from the generic blue sky. And, as noticed by my colleague Parker Ortolani, the app has a enjoyable animation that can really feel acquainted to followers of Twitter. (I do imply Twitter, not X.)

With the rising momentum behind ActivityPub — together with the very public assist from Meta’s Threads — I’ve nervous that Bluesky, which is predicated by itself AT Protocol, may get left behind. However each time I jump over to my Bluesky account, it looks as if persons are having plenty of enjoyable — the platform appears to be rising shortly, too — so hopefully the protocols can co-exist and usher in a fediverse future.