Entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban is ready to fund a TikTok alternative built on Bluesky’s AT Protocol, he shared in a TikTok video posted on Wednesday. In anticipation of the coming U.S. TikTok ban, which will go through on Sunday unless paused by the Supreme Court, users have been fleeing to other video platforms, including the Chinese app RedNote. But investors like Cuban see the potential for a more open social web that includes an ecosystem of apps powered by the same technology that today underpins Bluesky’s social network.
The AT Protocol is a newer, open protocol designed for decentralized social media applications. It’s meant to address what some developers thought were shortcomings with the existing decentralized protocol ActivityPub, used by Mastodon and other social services. While Bluesky is the AT Protocol’s flagship app for the time being, there are many other services now being built with the technology.
Consumer demand for open social apps is also in full swing, with Bluesky itself seeing a surge of new signups in the wake of the U.S. presidential elections, growing the network to 27.6+ million users, up from 10 million+ in September. Meanwhile, on Wednesday we broke the news of a coming Bluesky client called Flashes that would focus on images over text.
Cuban says he’d like to see — and back — 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 social networking servers and apps.
Then he adds, “I would be open to investing in supporting anybody — or somebody who creates a TikTok replacement built on the AT Protocol. So if you’ve got that ability, let me know in the comments. If you create an MVP — a minimum viable product — so I can see it, that’s all the better, because obviously, I think you’d have a whole lot of support,” Cuban says.
“And more importantly, when you build on the AT Protocol, it’s extensible, so that means nobody can just buy it, nobody can just close it,” the investor notes, in reference to the account portability aspects of building 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 isn’t only about expanding the open social web; it’s also about fueling competition with Elon Musk’s X. Cuban has openly feuded with Musk on X and elsewhere, criticizing X’s approach to content moderation, misinformation, and more.
Cuban asked interested developers to respond in the comments of the TikTok post.
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