Upon its launch last year, BlueSky had been accessible by invitation only. Starting this Tuesday it is open to anyone who wants to have an account. Its appearance and operation is modeled on that of X, formerly Twitter, with one caveat: it is open source. After opening, BlueSky was down for a couple of hours: “We are seeing many new registrations and some servers have reached their capacity limit,” the platform announced.
The network was born from an idea in 2019 by Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and then its executive president. His intention was to create a decentralized social network. The initiative began within Twitter, but in 2021 it became independent with Jay Gruber as executive president. That move saved the network from possible closure following Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter.
According to its own figures, Bluesky today has 3.6 million accounts, not all of them active. A page that updates daily Bluesky data shows the jump on February 6. The figure is very far from the 130 million Threads, the alternative to X created by Meta. X said late last year that it had 500 million users, although it is unclear whether different networks use the same metrics to define what a user is.
The big difference about Bluesky is that it works on an open and decentralized protocol. This system allows its users to create or adopt their own versions of the network, with the custom-made algorithm. In one of his last posts he publicly thanks to different developers some news on the platform. The idea is similar to the one already used by another X competitor, Mastodon.
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