Twitter spinout Bluesky ends invite-only phase and opens its doors to all comers There's no need to fret if you lost your invite code to decentralized Twitter spinoff Bluesky – the service has thrown open its doors to all comers. The social network had been in an invite-only beta since it debuted with an iOS app in February 2022. On Tuesday the Bluesky team announced it's now open to all. The outfit also …
From the article:
By 2021, Bluesky had spun off into its own public benefit company...
I'm not especially familiar with the particular ins and outs of this type of entity but it does give the impression that it would be unattractive to oligarchs, narcissistic billionaires, etc.
A bit strange that this article forgot to mention that The Register itself has a Bluesky account, although the vultures aren't using it as much (or perhaps as automatedly?) as they do their account on the decreasingly useful xparrot site. Which of the social network platforms (perhaps including Mastodon, where, perhaps a bit oddly for a proper techie publication, The Register doesn't have an account - come on guys and gals!) manages to pick up most of those fleeing in the xodus still remains to be seen, but it would certainly make sense to hedge bets for the time being…
It's not official though, it just mirrors The Register's account on Twitter, which is quite a feat these days considering Elmo setting fire to the API every week.
Blocks public - hard no
No private profile - again hard no
Don't enable discovery feed but don't have any accounts followed - well here's the discovery feed - nope nope nope nope and nope
Worse than twitter used to be but not quite yet at the level of Xitter (though now the great unwashed have access, the usual hatemongers will be along in short order spewing whatever far right bile is trending this week
“Social Media”, where we get our access to information regulated by people with no social skills and demonstrating a combination of psychopathology with infantile megalomania. Jonathan Haidt: social media does a good write-up.
"It is only the journalists who complain about Twitter/X going away as it means they have to do actual work and not just embed a tweet or take a screenshot."
This. Imagine if the poor dears had to actually talk to sources, interview people - say, by meeting them in a pub or hotel and actually asking questions/ writing down the answers? Much easier to scroll Xitter in search of yet another who said what on Twitter story. Of course, if this new fangled blue thing takes off, they'll have their work cut out, what with having to scroll through two systems instead of one - they'll be wanting a pay rise for that!
It won't take off, though. The Xeeting masses won't go there because there won't be enough people to listen to them, and the rest won't go there because the people they follow aren't there. Unless his Muskiness does something (else) really stupid with Xitter it will continue as is for a while yet.
I don't know - having tried both, there are only a handful of people from Twitter I don't see on Bluesky - it has been more interesting because the invite system left way less space for bots and trolls - and a degree of accountability for being the person who invited them on. Honestly I feel as though they could have done with keeping it, but of course in startupland your business is nothing without exponential growth.
It's certainly more enjoyable than Twitter, more like Twitter used to be historically, but whether that will persist is hard to know. It has also felt a bit like Twitter methodone - a less addictive reminder that Twitter wasn't actually that great either.
Fundamentally being run by the same kind of people with the same kind of ideas, it's hard to see how it can avoid failing in the same way Twitter did - venture capital is purely destructive to the companies it possesses.
People really are leaving Xitter apart from sports fans who maybe are just using it like RSS?
I don't think BlueSky will catch up to X/Twitter. I am confident X will fall down to their level and then stop being relevant shortly. It's won't become the "everything app" that Musk wants it to be, it won't become profitable because there's not enough advertisers willing to work with them and eventually it'll wither and die.
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