this post was submitted on 22 Sep 2023
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Just around 24 hours after Musk made his comments, more than 42,000 new users joined Bluesky, making it the biggest signup day yet for the currently invite-only platform that launched earlier this year.

Bluesky saw a total of 53,585 new signups by the end of Tuesday, September 19. The new users gained in that single day make up 5 percent of the platform's entire user base of 1,125,499 total accounts.

The new user signups are tracked via the third-party website "Bluesky Stats." Looking over Bluesky signup numbers on the tracker for the past month, it appears that the platform usually sees from 10,000 to 20,000 new signups per day. Bluesky has doubled its usual daily new user numbers already, with many more hours left in the day still to go.

It's impossible to know whether Musk's comments about charging users to post on X really played a role in this, but it almost certainly had some effect.

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[–] [email protected] 104 points 1 year ago (6 children)

isn’t bluesky invite only?

[–] [email protected] 79 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Each current member usually get at least one invite to share biweekly. That’s how they have been growing it.

[–] [email protected] 73 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Google+ did the same thing when it rolled out, then they tried to force people to use it before they cancelled the project.

[–] [email protected] 57 points 1 year ago (2 children)

In fairness, Gmail had a similar invite system when it launched and that's been way more successful than G+

[–] [email protected] 47 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Gmail was also both "federated" and an insanely good product compared to its contemporaries. G+ had a couple of interesting innovations, but it wasn't all that special and invite-only on a closed ecosystem is very iffy.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Gmail was literally the best. 1GB space at launch when you'd get a dozen MB in Hotmail and others, slick fast UI in a browser.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

And you got more space the longer you had the account! Then everyone got the same no matter what. I was sad to loose all that free space.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

“Never delete an email”. Pepperidge Farm remembers.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

IIRC, that was rolled out as a surprise after a few years. People were just like, "WTF, my capacity is getting bigger?". For a while there, Goggle could do no wrong from a marketing standpoint. That, uhh, changed.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Hotmail was 2mb.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

It was ad free which was amazing for a social media site at that time. No banners, no pop ups, just content.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Gmail was invite only at first probably because Google didn't want it to grow faster than they could buy hard drives. It gave you a gigabyte of email storage which at the time was huge. I'm certain they did that for technical reasons.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It gave you a gigabyte of email storage which at the time was huge.

You're right, but for those who may not know the details or the impact at the time, Google was offering 500x more storage - at the free tier - than some of the competition - hotmail - who were charging people for just 10 MB of storage. This forced hotmail to increase its free tier to 250 MB and 2 GB for customers paying $20 USD/year.

Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20230815014711/https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/hotmail-to-offer-250mb-of-free-storage/

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It's hard to explain what an absolute paradigm shift Gmail was. It was about as drastic a difference as you could have with personal email without altering the core service. Orders of magnitude more storage, completely free to the end user, a responsive and usable web interface, a single unobtrusive 1-line text ad when we were used to at least half a dozen that were often full-size banners or even popups, and a good search tool.

My wife (then fiancee) got us invites, and it was like Christmas. And all from the company that was way less creepy than Microsoft! I'm sure that part would never change.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Might Bluesky be doing the same?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Slow roll until the infrastructure can handle it and a little bit of that "exclusive" feel to it since not everyone can just join immediately.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

So more Gmail than G+

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah they're working hard on scaling, they've had recurring performance issues but have managed to get it stable again even with higher load now

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

It's also easier to find and fix bugs with smaller numbers of people, especially performance bugs which can be amplified at scale. So it gives them a lot of time to work through issues over the beta. It also gives them time to build teams around the expanding infrastructure and build processes for monitoring and handling issues as a larger team.

Plus, these invite only periods start with more tech savy early adopters who more willing to put up with issues, and willing to provide decent bug reports to fix them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

"i am the choosen one!" As if...

Boy, our servers are ducktaped!

[–] [email protected] 42 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm still salty about that. Google+ was fantastic on release. Simple, clean, elegant, and fast. Then they steadily, systematically fucked it up. By the time it was cancelled, it had become unusable.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

G+'s downfall was they kept it invite-only too long. Demand was there, people wanted in but Google was like, "Nah..."

By the time it was open-access, everyone had moved on or back to their old social media platforms. It could've been great, but Google, in typical Google fashion, got distracted by something shiny and killed it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The sad thing is, if they'd thought even a tiny bit laterally and leveraged the fact that Google Reader was getting a lot of traction and a core of people were beginning to use its social functions, they could have backdoored themselves into being Digg/Reddit/Etc. and had the social media userbase to take on Facebook organically.

Instead, they fought the last war (Gmail vs Hotmail), intentionally eroded and then killed Reader, and with G+ they completely fucked up what was a cleaner interface (if not all that special) and a better technological experience, all while they were a brand that was at that time more trusted than their competitors.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yep. Once they screwed up G+, I committed to never becoming dependent on any Google service beyond Drive and Gmail, and only those two because they're completely untouchable - Google couldn't break those without having a mass rebellion on its hands.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

So, in the shape of a pyramid? Sounds like a good business model. I wonder if anyone has ever done that before? (yes, it's a joke)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Yup. I have a bunch of invites (for sane people only)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Uhh... I can't prove I'm sane, but a DM would be nice...!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This guy is crazy! Don't listen to him!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Welp. Was worth a shot...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I'd love an invite if it's still available (:

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I would love one if you have a spare.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I would love an invite if you have any left

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

If I could have one, I'm waiting for months now. :(

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

I requested an invite a couple of months ago when I downloaded the app. Wish someone would invite me!

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It says that in the first sentence

[–] snowe 17 points 1 year ago

lol they didn’t even bother reading the lemmy description. 😂

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Yes, that's part of what's surprising about the number.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Yes but I'm sure many recorded invites and didn't bother. Musk musking TSFKAT ( the-site-formerly-known-as-twitter) was the needed motivation to accept it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I didn't bother and was gonna give it a walk around. Downloaded but can't access without an invite.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’ve been trying to get an invite since June.

Apparently if you ask, you’re not good enough or some shit.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

You’re not missing anything. I eventually got an invite, found that 40% of the content was furry and I deleted my account.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Invite only is a fascinating choice for a social network that requires network effect to succeed.

Gmail is the most famous/successful example but interesting to note that email is a federated network that can interoperate with every other email address too.

What about this bluesky network?