Buffer has now existed for almost 14 years, and throughout that time I've seen a lot change in social media, and in our space of tools to support people and businesses with social. We're an outlier as a product and company that has existed for that kind of timeframe with our mission and values left in tact. We've been fortunate to be able to scale to 56,000 paying customers and over $18M in annual revenue while taking our own unique path. We've maintained control of the company and our ability to go boldly in the direction we believe is best for customers and the team.

This is why, as a business, we feel so philosophically aligned with rising new decentralized social media networks, such as Bluesky, Mastodon and Threads. These networks have been started with a belief that individuals should maintain ownership over their content and the connection to their audience. They have data portability baked in from the beginning. When you use these networks, you are much more likely to be able to maintain control over your content and audience than if you use social networks owned by large corporations with complex ownership structures of their own, and often with public markets to answer to.

The larger social networks provide a level of distribution that's worth tapping into, but I strongly encourage investing a portion of your energy into networks where you will be able to maintain ownership long-term.

I have been eagerly observing the emergence and growth of social media protocols, in particular with ActivityPub (and Mastodon) as the prominent implementation, and AT Protocol from Bluesky. What I find exciting about the development of these open standards, and more importantly the adoption of them and traction of social networks which support them, is that they can bring forth a new era of open standards for the web.

I personally miss the earlier days of social media where the APIs had much greater parity with what could be done natively on the platforms. When I started Buffer, the Twitter and Facebook APIs were close to feature-complete, and brought about a lot of innovation in third-party development on top of those APIs. This is how Buffer was born, along with many other products in our space.

Over time, we saw an era of closed APIs with reduced transparency and ownership of content and audiences. Mastodon and Bluesky bring the opportunity for a new era of innovation in our space, which I am welcoming with open arms. More innovation in the social media management space will be better for customers, and frankly makes for more exciting work to do.

We recently added Bluesky to Buffer, and you can now use Buffer to seamlessly post to the top 3 new decentralized social networks: Bluesky, Mastodon, and Threads.

I encourage you to add these decentralized social networks to your channels in Buffer, and start participating in this new era of social today.

This is an excerpt from my recent article on Bluesky and the significance of decentralized social networks. Read it in full here: https://joel.is/bluesky

Get started with Buffer for decentralized social: https://buffer.com