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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 TikTok video published on Wednesday. In anticipation of the upcoming TikTok banned in the USwhich will pass on Sunday unless paused by 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 today powers Bluesky’s social network.
The AT protocol is a newer, open protocol designed for decentralized social media applications. It is intended to address what some developers thought shortcomings with the existing ActivityPub decentralized protocol, used by Mastodon and other social services. Although Bluesky is currently the leading AT protocol application, there are many other services now it is built with technology.
Consumer demand for open social apps is also in full swing, with Bluesky itself seeing a wave of new sign-ups following the US presidential election, growing the network to 27.6+ million usersworse than 10 million+ in September. In the meantime, on Wednesday we published the news of Fr comes a Bluesky client called Flashes which would focus on images instead of text.
Cuban says he’d like to see — and back — something on par with TikTok, but built on the AT protocol.
The video briefly describes how ATProto (as it’s called for short) allows people to create their own social networking servers and applications.
Then he adds: “I would be open to investing in supporting anyone — or someone who creates a replacement for TikTok built on the AT protocol. So if you have that ability, let me know in the comments. If you create an MVP — a minimum viable product — so that I can see it, that’s even better, because obviously, I think you’d have a 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 shut it down,” notes the investor, referring to the portability aspects of building accounts for 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 just about expanding the open social web; it’s also about fueling competition with Elon Musk’s X. Cuban is open quarreled 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 on the TikTok post.
