Bluesky, the much-hyped open-source alternative to X/Twitter, is now open for all — invites code no longer needed!
Launched in the spring of last year, Bluesky is a decentralised social network modelled after early Twitter. You sign up, post, follow people, repost, and generally enjoy seeing content from people you choose in a reverse-chronological feed.
And for fans of algorithms, Bluesky has an open marketplace where developers can share custom feeds that users can add, access, and even make their default experience. This focus on giving users choice will, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber says, shortly extend to moderation.
Despite being invite-only until today, Bluesky has already attracted 3 million users. Restricting signs ups was necessary, CEO WHO WHO says, to allow the company to build up the reliable infrastructure required to support.
3 millions signups pales when compared to the estimated 130 million users Meta’s Threads amassed soon after its debut last summer, but it’s an impressive number given the signup restrictions, minimal marketing, and inability to shoe-horn posts into other products (cough, Facebook).
Bluesky also plans to support federation in the future. This will enable other instances/servers built on the open-source AT protocol to see/follow/interact with users on the reference Bluesky implementation, and vice versa (but not Mastodon, as it uses the ActivityPub protocol).
“Joey, Bluesky isn’t related to Ubuntu” — true: you got me there.
But social media is something many (not saying all) of us use. It’s how we keep in touch with each other, where we choose to get “news” from, follow our favourites open-source projects, and cringe at companies try-hard wannabe-viral marketing efforts (that might just be me).
Plus, the AT protocol is open-source. If instances built around it become popular enough we could see Linux developers offering desktop clients, command-line scripts, and other integrations to ‘free’ the service from being used in a browser tab.
