Skylight, a startup with Tiktok with a more open alternative, is making its mobile app available to the public on Tuesday after just 10 weeks of active development. The app, supported by Mark Cuba and others, has become one of many people building on top of the AT protocol. This is the same technology that underpins the social network BlueSky and many other apps.
Developed by co-founders Tori White (CEO) and Reed Harmeyer (CTO), Skylight offers a short-form video app experience with many familiar features including an in-app video editor. The ability to comment, resemble, and share videos. Set up your own user profile. And follow others.
It is also built on the AT protocol (or “Atproto” for short), so users will be immediately tapped into Bluesky’s network of over 33.8 million users. This means that videos posted to Skylight can be viewed by users on Bluesky and other Atproto-based apps, for example, with more photo-centric apps flashing.
The company is funded by a Cuban pre-seed round, and he said earlier this year they would like to fund a Tiktok alternative built on the AT protocol. We also invested in the Graham & Walker Venture Fund from Leslie Feinzaig.
White, a former travel influencer and now a self-taught software developer living in Seattle, says she and co-founder Elmeyer were urged to make Skylight when she first heard that Tiktok was banned in the US
In preparation for the currently suspended ban, White has backed up her Tiktok video. However, she was still worried about losing access to her community and comments. She and Elmeyer were already playing with Atproto and seeing the possibility.
“The first thing that interests us about Atproto was that Bluesky wasn’t failing,” Harmeyer told TechCrunch at the Atmosphere Conference in Seattle in March. “I didn’t see the ‘fail whale’,” he said. This is a reference to graphics that appeared in the early days of Twitter, when apps were constantly crashing. “It made us feel comfortable with the underlying technology.”
Harmeyer and White soon realized that this was the ideal time to build new social apps on protocols that could be “banned.”
Using his influencer background, White has begun documenting Skylight’s development on Tiktok. This has helped to bring exposure to the product and build follow-ups for potentially interested users.
“We started with distribution,” White explained. “I actually made a video before writing a set of code for this… [so] She spoke to TechCrunch at the meeting. So we know that people need it, so we need to build a way to talk to people about it so they care about it,” she said.
Today, White’s @buildwithtori Tiktok profile has nearly 50,000 followers, many of whom became early testers.
Like Bluesky, Skylight supports uploading videos up to 3 minutes in length. This has recently increased from previously supported one-minute videos. But White sees the skylight becoming more than just a decentralized ticutok clone.
She implies that in the future Skylight will allow users to customize their feeds.
Other features of the work include sound, duets, stitching, bookmarks and playlist support.
The app is in the beta version of the Google Play Store and is published on Apple’s App Store after the initial testing.
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