@blitzar I don't know you, so please forgive my assumptions here...but, you're cool enough that you don't need to wait for bluesky to send you an invite...You don't need them. In fact, if anything, they're artificially creating the scarcity, because the fact is: they need you more. Instead, take a plunge into the the Fediverse, where you can make your own party and you do the inviting of others...or join others on some instance that has open invites, and open (virtual) arms. Think of bluesky or other silos like a single apartment party. Maybe its cool and if you dig it, then that's cool; you do you. But, the greater fediverse - where mastodon and other networks live - is like a major awesome block party of multiple apartments, and all of them spilling their parties out into the street mixing fun up in all sorts of ways. But, no pressure, and fuss no muss. Remember: they need you more than you need their invite. ;-)
Thse are unfair questions, because I know the answer to them, but it demonstrates why Mastodon is unfit for the kind of chatter that Twitter excelled at and Bluesky is trying to inherit. You can't overhear stuff on Mastodon, and that has two chilling factors: one, it makes it feel like a deep echoing well unless you follow everybody you might want to talk to (thus making your signal-to-noise ratio plummet; Twitter was always better with fewer follows, so long as they engaged with people you didn't follow too--Bluesky is similar), and two, it encourages reply-guying because your Very Thoughtful Response doesn't look like it's been preempted.
Bluesky owns, actually, because they get that shitposting is the fun part of social media, and they built a thing that's good for it. They've made mistakes--quite a few of them--but they have the core of something that the Mastodon developers and ActivityPub standardization folks more generally really should look at. Because, as it stands, when you evangelize for "the fediverse", you're asking people who expect one thing to come to an offering that is drastically less of That Thing (in the good ways; much less so the bad) than the one from which they left.
Excellent points @eropple! The fediverse - or at least many stacks/implementatins/apps - does lack some features of twitter or bluesky, etc.; but, the omissions tend to be by design. So, your points about my assuming that everyone's expectations are the same is valid. I should have been more clear, and noted that expectations should be different on the Fedi side of things. My intent was to show the OP that they should feel free to, well, feel empowered, and not feel like they need to be at the whim of some corporate entity - considering there exists technology that can give that person some more freedom and at least some mechanisms to engage with other humans, etc. But, your points are valid: the experience is different. For me, i rather like the purposeful constraints of the Fediverse, but of course it might not be for everyone; that's true. ;-)
There are plenty of invites going around. I've been on Bluesky for about a month now and have gotten half a dozen invites.
The thing that is, however, making Bluesky a genuinely pleasant place to hang out, even despite its size (it's getting relatively large for pleasantness!) is that the invite code system requires that, even with that large number of invite codes, somebody wants to see your posts. It is a pretty strong high-pass filter; they're just scarce enough to value giving them to folks who are going to make for interesting reading.
Gmail was also like this. Creating scarcity and learning hard lessons without ruining reputation in front of the whole internet is very smart.
I am rooting for bluesky simply because they have been making good strategic decisions like this and have actual commerical backing.
Their name itself was the first good decision they made. Wth is lemmy,nostr, mastodon. Meta gets it with "Threads" for example. It's almost like products with bad names were named by people that went "I think this sounds cool and has an interesting meaning" and stopped there without considering marketability and consumer psychology.
People will sign up or ignore your product just because of the name. Honestly, "Threads" is a better name than "bluesky" too imo. But my hope is that they test these names using large focus groups.
It's Google+ fiasco all over again. Why are they so arrogant and think ppl will just to beg to use it? I think threads just wins because the competitors are so incompetent
Twitter go boom, bluesky announces namecheap integration, threads launches, etc. Its currently relevant for those interested in the next stable state after all this dust settles.
What did you do, go to the homepage for 20 seconds to make that in-depth assessment on something very widely-reported for nine straight months now as an ever-engulfing dumpster fire?
It is not fine, take your pick: questionable leadership, wanton firings, bad policies, abuse/harassment, technical problems, legal trouble, fleeing advertisers
As a casual twitter user I've had no issues prior to last week. The throttling was the first thing that has impacted my experience since Musk took over.
It seems like your own assessment of twitter comes from a very emotional place and not from personal experience using it.
It’s both, actually, so I’ll concede that. But I’m emotional about it because I’ve been a user for 16 years, it was the only social media I really used and got value out of, and that has completely changed for me as it has for countless others
It's a small boom, where anonymous and free API access have been cut off. Although I'm pretty sure you can't access or scrape Threads and bluesky anonymously and/or without cost either.
Actually, one of the big points of contention right now over at bluesky is how easily anyone can easily anonymously scrape all its data. Behold, one of many available sites that broadcast the firehose: https://firesky.tv/
Currently the only thing that costs money at bluesky is using your own domain name but making them manage the DNS for this so you don't have to.
If only. Twitter blue can’t be used as a significant experiment because Twitter turned the blue checkmark into a political symbol. It’s likely a great deal of people would pay if it wasn’t synonymous for support with a right wing man child.
