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Entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban is ready to fund an alternative to TikTok built on Bluesky’s AT Protocol, he shared in a TikTok video posted on Wednesday. Looking forward to the future Banning TikTok in the USwhich passes through Sunday unless was stopped 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 web that includes an ecosystem of apps powered by the same technology that currently underpins Bluesky’s social network.
the AT Protocol a newer, open protocol designed for decentralized social media applications. This is meant to address what some developers are thinking deficiencies with the existing decentralized protocol ActivityPub, used by Mastodon and other social services. While Bluesky is the flagship AT Protocol app at the moment, there are many more services now built with technology.
Consumer demand for open social apps is also strong, with Bluesky itself seeing a surge in new signups following the US presidential election, growing its network of 27.6+ million usersfrom 10 million+ in September. Meanwhile, on Wednesday we reported a Bluesky’s upcoming client called Flashes which will focus on images rather than text.
Cuban says he wants 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 applications.
Then he added, “I’m open to investing in supporting anyone – or anyone 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 one MVP — a minimum viable product — so I can see it, the better, because obviously, I think you have a lot of support,” Cuban said.
“And more importantly, when you build the AT Protocol, it’s expandable, so that means no one can buy it, no one can just close it,” the investor said, referring to the account portability aspects of the build for the open social web.
That is, users who want to transfer 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 just about expanding the open social web; it’s also about encouraging competition in Elon Musk’s X. The Cuban has an obvious fought with Musk on X and elsewhere, criticized X’s approach to content moderation, misinformation, and more.
Cuban asked interested developers to respond to the comments on the TikTok post.
