Mark Cuban Says He’ll Back a TikTok Alternative Built Off Bluesky’s Protocol

If TikTok bites the dust (as it is expected to do on Sunday), billionaire Mark Cuban says he’d be open to financing an alternative video-sharing platform that is built off the protocol developed by microblogging site Bluesky.

Ever since outgoing President Joe Biden signed an order demanding that TikTok sell its platform to the U.S. or risk a nationwide ban, there’s been much anticipation over what could fill the void if the app does indeed exit the country. Many people would like to buy the original app from ByteDance, its Chinese parent company. ByteDance has repeatedly said it’s not for sale. Now, Cuban has proposed an alternative version of the video-sharing app that could be much better for everybody in the long run.

Cuban shared the idea in a TikTok video posted to his account Tuesday. “There’s an app called Bluesky and it’s built on the AT Protocol,” Cuban said. “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,” Cuban said. “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 said.

Whether Cuban would actually follow through with such an investment is unknown, though the idea is intriguing. The appeal of Bluesky is that it is ostensibly a “decentralized” social media platform, in that it allows users to host their data on servers other than those owned by the company. While most decentralized web users don’t count Bluesky as an official part of the Fediverse, and others claim the site is only “cosplaying” at decentralization, the site does have some benefits that you can’t get at a site like X or Facebook. Its AT Protocol is a federated protocol that allows users to create their own interoperable apps and servers, while still maintaining ties to Bluesky’s user base. In that sense, it allows users more autonomy than other sites.

Bluesky has attempted to present itself as the antidote to X—the formerly popular microblogging site that nutjob tech billionaire Elon Musk has since converted into his own private propaganda apparatus. The platform was created by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey in 2019 as a Twitter side-project, then spun off into its own company when Musk took over Twitter. Since then, Dorsey has parted ways with the platform, but the site has continued to grow. A recent study claimed that so-called “Twitter-quitters” had helped boost Bluesky’s user base to more than 27 million people (for comparison, X has an estimated 250 million daily users).

While the idea of having a TikTok-esque site that functions more or less like Bluesky is a cool one, it’s not clear that TikTok’s U.S. app will actually die. The company is doing everything it can to court incoming President Donald Trump in the hopes of getting a last-minute reprieve. On Thursday, it was reported that TikTok’s CEO, Shou Chew, would attend Trump’s inauguration. Trump has also said that he is considering an executive order to save the platform.