Entrepreneur and investor Mark Cuban is prepared to finance a TikTok alternative that will utilise Bluesky’s AT Protocol, as he revealed in a TikTok video shared on Wednesday. With the impending TikTok ban in the U.S. set for Sunday, unless halted by the Supreme Court, users are transitioning to other video platforms, including the Chinese app RedNote. Investors such as Cuban recognise the opportunity for a more open social web consisting of various applications driven by the same technology that currently supports Bluesky’s social network.
The AT Protocol is an innovative, open protocol created for decentralised social media applications. It aims to rectify what some developers perceived as limitations of the existing decentralised protocol ActivityPub, which is employed by Mastodon and other social platforms. At present, Bluesky serves as the flagship application for the AT Protocol, but there are numerous other services being developed with this technology.
The demand from consumers for open social applications is significant, as evidenced by a spike in user registrations on Bluesky following the U.S. presidential elections, leading to a network growth to over 27.6 million users, rising from more than 10 million in September. Furthermore, on Wednesday, news broke about an upcoming Bluesky client named Flashes that is set to prioritise images over text.
Cuban expressed his interest in seeing — and supporting — a rival to TikTok that operates using the AT Protocol.
In the video, he elaborated on how the AT Protocol facilitates the creation of individual social networking servers and applications.
He stated that he would be open to investing in anyone who develops a TikTok alternative built on the AT Protocol. He encouraged individuals with such capabilities to reach out in the comments and mentioned that demonstrating a minimum viable product (MVP) would be beneficial, indicating there would likely be substantial support available for promising projects.
Cuban noted that building on the AT Protocol offers extensibility, which signifies that the platform cannot be easily acquired or shut down, referencing the account portability features inherent in the open social web.
This means that users wishing to transfer their accounts to a different server can do so without losing their followers, content, or any other data.
Part of Cuban’s interest in the AT Protocol centres on promoting competition with Elon Musk’s platform X. He has publicly clashed with Musk on X and other platforms, openly critiquing X’s policies regarding content moderation, misinformation, and other related issues.
Cuban invited aspiring developers to respond in the comments section of his TikTok post.