Jack Dorsey-backed social media app Bluesky open to all

The decentralisation-focused social media platform Bluesky envisioned by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is open to the public and no longer requires early invite codes, announced the company on Tuesday through a blog post.

Led by CEO Jay Graber, Bluesky allows users to customise their feeds based on different topics and is also aiming to decentralise so that users can move their accounts, data, and audience between apps on the underlying protocol. The company’s post said that the process of “federation” will begin this month with an experimental early version.

“Bluesky is building an open social network where anyone can contribute, while still providing an easy-to-use experience for users. For the past year, we used invite codes to help us manage growth while we built features like moderation tooling, custom feeds, and more. Now, we’re ready for anyone to join,” said the company in its post.

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“Join more than three million people discussing news, sharing art, and just posting,” added Bluesky, along with a comic showing people leaving an unnamed social media platform filled with bots and spam.

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To fight spam and bad actors in its own ecosystem, Bluesky strictly limited the number of users who could make accounts on the platform and instead distributed invite codes for early users to share with others they trusted. By comparison, Meta’s text-based app Threads recorded tens of millions of sign-ups within days of its launch last summer.

For content moderation, Bluesky said it will soon release labelling services so that individuals and groups can run their own moderation services.

“For example, a fact-checking organization can run a labeling service and mark posts as “partially false,” “misleading,” or other categories. Then, users who trust this organization can subscribe to their labels. As the user scrolls through posts in the app, any labels that the fact-checking organization publishes will be visible on the post itself,” said Bluesky in its post.

However, critics have questioned how decentralised social media platforms can effectively deal with child abuse content, illegal media, and other criminal activities online that generally require quick action and accountability from a central company authority. In addition, Bluesky is yet to ship essential features such as direct messaging (DMs).

Bluesky has claimed that it is the “last social account you’ll ever have to create”.