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Entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban is ready to fund a TikTok alternative built on Bluesky’s AT Protocol, he shared in a TikTok video published on Wednesday. In anticipation of the coming Banning TikTok in the United Statesthat will pass on Sunday safely break from the Supreme Courtusers flee to other video platforms, including the Chinese app RedNote. But investors like Cuban see the potential for a more open social network that includes an ecosystem of apps powered by the same technology that currently powers Bluesky’s social network.
U AT Protocol is a newer, open protocol designed for decentralized social media applications. It is intended to address what some developers think were some of the i shortages with the existing ActivityPub decentralized protocol, used by Mastodon and other social services. While Bluesky is the flagship app of the AT Protocol at the moment, there are many other services now being built with technology.
Consumer demand for open social applications is also on the rise, with Bluesky itself seeing a surge in new sign-ups following the US presidential election, growing the network to date. 27.6+ million usersup from 10 million + in September. Meanwhile, on Wednesday we made the news of a the upcoming Bluesky client called Flashes which focuses on images over text.
Cuban says he would like to see – and return – something that rivals TikTok but is built on the AT Protocol.
In the video, he briefly describes how ATProto (as it’s called for short) allows people to create their own servers and social networking apps.
Then, he adds, “I would be open to invest in the support of someone – or someone who creates a TikTok substitute built on the AT Protocol. So if you have this ability, let me know in the comments. If you create an MVP – a minimum viable product – so I can see, this is better, because obviously, I think you will have a lot of support,” says Cuban.
“And most importantly, when you build on the AT Protocol, it is extensible, so it means that no one can just buy it, no one can just close it,” notes the investor, referring to the portability aspects of the build account for the open social web. .
That is, users who want to move their account to another server can do so without losing their followers, content and other data.
In part, Cuban’s interest in ATProto is not only to expand the open social web, it is also to strengthen the competition with Elon Musk’s X. Cuban has openly feuded. with Musk at X and elsewhere, criticizing X’s approach to content moderation, misinformation, and no longer.
Cuban asked interested developers to respond in the comments of the TikTok post.
