Bluesky, the highly publicized open-source alternative to X/Twitter, is now open for everyone — no invitation code required!
Introduced in the spring of the previous year, Bluesky is a distributed social platform inspired by the early version of Twitter. It allows users to sign up, post updates, follow others, share posts, and generally participate in a feed sorted in reverse chronological order, offering them content from their chosen contacts.
Bluesky offers a marketplace open to developers to design and share custom feeds that users can integrate, explore, and even set as their default experience. As Bluesky CEO Jay Graber states, this emphasis on providing user choice will soon also be applied to content moderation.
Although it was invitation-only until today, 3 million users have already joined Bluesky— a number that is outshined by the estimated 130 million users that Meta’s Threads gathered since its launch last summer. However, this figure is still considerable given the signup restrictions, limited promotional efforts, and the inability to replicate Meta’s reach.
Bluesky also plans to support federation in the near future. This will enable anyone to construct their own instance utilising the open-source AT protocol and interact with users on the primary Bluesky site, though not with Mastodon as it implements the ActivityPub protocol.
“Joey, Bluesky isn’t related to Ubuntu”, indeed, you’ve caught me out there.
Nevertheless, many of us utilise social media. It’s our primary tool for staying connected, where we choose to source our “news”, follow our favoured open-source projects, and grimace at the desperate attempts at viral marketing by companies (maybe that’s just me).
Furthermore, the AT protocol is open-source. If instances constructed around the service gain popularity, we might see Linux developers crafting standalone GUI clients, command-line tools, and other types of DE integrations, which would be fantastic!