For a while now, many people have not liked the direction that X (formerly known as Twitter) has taken since it was acquired by Elon Musk in October 2022. They have been looking for alternative but similar social networks such as Mastodon and Meta"s own Threads.
Another smaller but similar social network that has seen more interest since Musk"s takeover of X is Bluesky, which launched in April 2023. However, the service has limited its growth on purpose by only allowing people who have been invited to join to sign up. Even with that model, the service got over 3 million people to register for Bluesky
That has now changed as of today. In a post on the Bluesky blog, the social network says it is letting anyone sign up without needing an invite. In a chat with The Verge, Bluesky"s CEO Jay Graber stated that the service needed to boost its infrastructure and also get its own content moderation features to a solid place before it decided to let the floodgates open for anyone to use it.
Bluesky"s blog also announced some features users and developers will see in the coming weeks and months. One is labeling services for users who want to further moderate their feeds. Bluesky says:
This will allow other organizations and people to run their own moderation services that can account for industry-specific knowledge or specific cultural norms, among other preferences.
Another experimental feature that Bluesky will roll out later in February is what it calls "federation" This will allow developers and other organizations to create their own Bluesky server with its own moderation rules. Graber told The Verge that Bluesky also has plans to offer extra features for a fee, similar to X.
It will definitely be interesting to see if Bluesky will be able to get a lot of people to use its social network and if its moderation plans will make it more attractive for users and businesses to access rather than using X.