After a year in invite-only beta mode, anyone can sign up for the new social network. Whether they will want to stay is another matter
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Last week, Bluesky opened up its doors. After a year in an invite-only closed beta, anyone who wants it can now sign up for an account with only an email address.
Even if the value of an invitation had lessened somewhat in recent months (I have five sitting unused, and not for want of trying), there was clearly some pent-up demand. In just two days, the service has seen more than a million new signups. For comparison, it took Bluesky more than three months from the release of its iOS app last February until it hit 70,000 users.
We weren’t using invites to try to be exclusive. We were using them to manage growth while we built out what is essentially a foundation, the rails for this new kind of distributed network.
We had to build the app protocol beneath Bluesky, the AT Protocol, that lets different developers, companies, or people come in and modify their experiences. Some of it is going to be rolling out soon.
The silent majority of every successful text-based social media site is lurkers. These are sane, normal people with sane, normal lives … The influencer is building a business. They are making #content … The commenter is trying to have a conversation with another human being. They are hoping, however misguidedly, to have a meaningful interaction online … The reply guy can be thought of as the most important subclass of commenter; they are specific. They are usually interacting with or on behalf of a favored internet user … Finally, we have the poster, sometimes referred to as a poaster. The poster is required for every social network to function.
Look, I know the real story of the self-driving car torched on the streets of San Francisco is of “drunk men doing dumb things after sporting fixture”, but it’s hard not to view it as the start of things to come.
“The pre-enshittification era wasn’t a time of better leadership. The executives weren’t better. They were constrained. Their worst impulses were checked by competition, regulation, self-help and worker power. So what happened?” Cory Doctorow’s Financial Times essay on enshittification (£) is great.
Arc is one of the most interesting companies building for the web right now, and Arc Search – a new AI-powered Google replacement – is fascinating. But is it healthy for the web itself?
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