This doesn't really matter. The Bluesky app has very few features, it's still invite only which limits the number of users, and engagement and active users are low. It's on a trajectory to death right now. The core of Bluesky, relay/BGS, still isn't proven. Over a year after launch there hasn't been significant progress in these areas.
I said 8 months ago that the invite system would be the death of BlueSky[1]. I think that’s true. Just like clubhouse, but the time they actually open it up, hype is gone.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35754628
Why do they still have it? They are super late to the "twitter replacement" game. The only thing carrying them is jack Dorsey's name and that's slowly slipping into irrelevance.
The invite system is ostensibly rate limiter and moderation tool, rather than a hype machine. They've mentioned getting rid of it soon. Maybe they "missed the boat" in some sense, but I'd rather see steady and sustainable growth.
Dorsey hasn't been doing them any favours for a long time, he's all but publicly disavowed it, deleting his account to focus on nostr. He's still on the board of directors last I heard, but if his public statements are anything to go by, he's not actively involved.
With a social network, steady and sustainable is usually not an option. If they don't have a strong launch when they remove the restrictions they'll fade into irrelevance within a few weeks. Threads had a surprisingly strong launch and it still has an uphill battle to climb if it wants to challenge Twitter and that's in spite of all the ways Twitter is attempting to self-sabotage.
Explosive growth is not a requirement. Take a look at reddit's long-term trajectory, for example. It's remarkably linear (although I have a feeling it's not going to continue for much longer)
Reddit’s value is the historical content. Old content on a feed-based app is literal garbage, however.
Isn't Threads kinda proving that explosive growth isn't a requirement to a successful social network?
Threads is backed by Meta so can survive for decades running at a loss.
Not sure if the same applies to BlueSky, X, TruthSocial etc.
Social networks typically demand large user bases because it goes hand in hand with advertising.
They were actually super early but the invite system squandered that opportunity. For months it was just a tiny subset of oldschool twitter users.
There was a time when people I followed on twitter started making accounts. But 99% of their followers (like me) couldn’t follow them there. So those people of course stopped posting there.
Actually think Theads made the same mistake, you signed up and your followers were not carried over.
If I was at IG I’d have made the number carry over even if the users were not there yet, seemed catastrophic to sign up day one and see like 10 followers when you have thousands on IG
Jack Dorsey moved his support to Nostr, I don't think he has any involvement with Blue Sky. Jack doesn't even have or use a Blue Sky account, to the best of my knowledge.
I generally wouldn't trust any social media app that's not used the leadership. Threads is still half baked but at least Mark uses it regularly. And Elon is regularly posting on Twitter.
Some part of that is due to the design of BlueSky. But I think most of it was ironically due to the invite system simply existing. Jack wanted an open platform.
Letting in the eternal September from Twitter would be its death. Threads can be about hype.
I have so many Bluesky invites, I think most people do. If anyone I know needs one, I have one for them. They sign up and they will immediately have people they know to follow.
I stopped giving them away to random people.
Send one to me. greg at the email qbix.com
bsky-social-pwjar-yjsxa
bsky-social-zweux-qaqar
bsky-social-4il6n-kuumm
bsky-social-n23po-7dedu
bsky-social-7fey2-v5fw6
It looks like all of them have been used.
Yeah, when posted publicly they get scraped immediately. Invite people you know.
Well, some people are more random than others!
For example I dated this girl who was always stopped for a random search in an airport.
Bluesky invites have been abundantly available for months now, and they're processing the waitlist directly if you don't feel like asking someone.
I've found engagement is surprisingly high, much much higher than Mastodon, but of course it depends on the niche.
Only in a bubble where everybody already has an account I suspect.
I've been giving away my invites on Twitter and it has become increasingly more difficult to find any takers. I think I'm currently sitting on like ten invites since my friend is feeding me his spare invites too.
1. When people actually wanted invites, they couldn’t get one. Timing matters.
2. People may be interested, but they’re people that are outside of the existing niche that is on Bluesky. But clearly BlueSky only wants people that are part of that existing niche. The monoculture.
What?
There is one single hivemind on the network because of their invite-only system.
It was designed that way so they wouldn't have to worry about moderation so much right away.
Same, I’ve more invites to hand out than I know what to do with.
This doesn't really matter. It's replicated all of the features that matter, twitter has very few user-facing features that matter anyway. The only thing preventing Blu Sky from succeeding is user interest.
Are all users paying - or users are the product?
They will be offering paid services in the future (see my link above) but only one has shipped yet: a partnership with namecheap to make it easy to get your handle as a domain name without technical knowledge.
Sorry, which link are you referring to?
If https://bsky.app/settings/external-embeds - I don't have an account.
I'm curious what the partnership fees with Namecheap look like, if there's even transparency to make that public?
I am working on a similar centralized-aggregation system and integrating-partnering with registrars is one future aspect of the system I've been planning; it's of course always a matter of prioritizing resources, and I'll be at a major disadvantage compared to Bluesky with Jack's early involvement/launching it getting BLuesky plenty of press and at least some momentum.
As around a decade ago I wrote a comment and made a blog post of it, all else being equal, the final layer of competition will be governance - which will ultimately be different nodes that govern well enough - including providing enough value at a fair cost - to gain enough mass to begin snowballing and ideally as many as possible find a stable state; then hopefully they all copy the best features and policies of the most successful; the problem here though is virtue signalling is a survival mechanism, and pretending to offer something that may even appear quite similar on the surface may actually integrate an inherent flaw in the system - say allowing for an ideological mob to more easily form and become indoctrinated, say based on very nuanced decisions on how informatio is presented to end users (can it be more easily gamed by greedy or bad-authoritarian actors, etc).
Sorry, forgot I had posted two links; I meant this one https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39008877
They don’t mention what the business structure of the partnership is, yeah.
BlueSky has a slightly different take than yours, that you might find interesting. Things are split up into “speech” layers vs “reach” layers on top of them. So “governance” gets a bit weird: at the base level, you can say whatever you want, but how accessible that is depends on the popularity of various things in the reach layer. Nobody can stop you from running a PDS and putting your posts out into the network, but if say, the most popular moderation service decides to not show your posts, users wouldn’t see them unless they use a different tool in the reach layer, say one feed that uses it and another that doesn’t.
I think the invite system worked. They managed to keep high-bandwidth low-effort users out until nicest of online people recreated early-Twitter-like culture, unlike how Mastodon Fediverse had gone with flood of empty calories trying to make a big exodus happen. There are probably lessons on how to build a successful social medium, more so than about architecting a technically scalable system.
You say that as if it's a good thing. Bluesky turned into one of the most toxic networks out there. Just browsing the discover feed should dispell any illusions of a healthy community - most posts are whining about american politics or whining about some other unimportant memes like AI art instead of fostering growth about common interests like Mastodon does.
Bluesky had their chance with invite only and curated feeds (with some really dedicated community admins) but they've fumbled it all by focusing on american culture wars instead of the nice thing they had.
Not my experience at all. This is one such strange online remarks.
Personally I would agree. Of all these services Bluesky is the only one I have an account on and actually use directly (I "use" Twitter indicrectly via Nitter). I was actually excited to get an invite.
It just feels... cleaner somehow. The slow trickle has, I think, kept it from being overrun by low effort posters and bots.
BlueSky has for some reason far more biologists than Mastodon: Searching for 'PAG31', a currently ongoing large plant and animal genomics conference, reveals about 20 different posters on BlueSky with about 60 posts and only two posters on Mastodon with four posts (one's a company). Twitter/X still has more posts than BlueSky, though. Scientists are creatures of habit.
That’s probably because many people have not enabled search indexing on their Mastodon accounts. If instead you search for the #PAG31 hashtag you’ll find nine different posters (still too few, but more than two).
It was always going to be a struggle to compete with Threads.
But if you don't bring your A-game when you're competing against the world's best social media company then what is the point. Meta is already feeding behavioural data into Instagram's ads which means they have no need to monetise it anytime soon. And the free advertising they are running on Instagram/Facebook is bringing in new users at a rapid pace. What advantages does BlueSky have ?
And the fact that there are no AT protocol servers means that you have the ActivityPub ecosystem with such a huge head-start and likely set to dominate in 2024.
If we had ditched invites we never would've been able to ship the open network / relay system. As it stands we're on track for open hosting in Q1¹.
Same story with features. We didn't deprioritize the protocol because that's core mission, so we had to put resources there instead of into features. Features will accelerate as core stabilizes.
Shipping a novel technology, building a product, and growing a userbase all at once isn't easy. I wouldn't declare us dead unless we've missed the boat so badly with market timing that nobody bothers, but we have good runway and (IMO) a pretty solid community of users.
¹ Probably. Maybe. Pretty sure.
I signed up for a login directly from the site and got one quickly. It was pretty easy to get access overall.
Now that I’m on the site though, I feel the same about it as I do Twitter: a) Most posts are uninteresting, exist to virtue signal or are by people who _think_ it’s important to try desperately to be funny (which they often are just cringy and not funny) b) It’s extremely confusing to know any context on a reply post when it’s reply 22 of a 39 reply long thread c) It’s not fun or engaging. It doesn’t really add anything to my life d) I don’t want to post myself because inherently I, like many social media users, have nothing worthwhile to say to the digital world - so I choose not to post while others force it anyway.
It’s not my cup of tea and I’ve considered deleting the login a few times. I think I’ve just outgrown traditional social media.
Blue sky invites are plenty. But they make it quite likely that when you join, you directly find your peer group there since that's where you got your invite from. You directly know a person to follow and via their posts, repsots, followers, ... directly find a network.
If you open without connection to any of your peers you first have to find anybody who is active.
Signed up day one for the waitlist. Still no invite (and it doesn't sound like I am missing out on anything anyway).
Out of principle, I am refusing to beg on the internet and take invites from the cool kids that have been let in, and at this point I can only assume they deleted all the mere mortals who dared request to join early on.
They're apparently getting registrations at a steady linear rate though:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bluesky_Registered_U...