Open-Source Social Network Bluesky is Now Open to Everyone

Bluesky, the much-hyped open-source alternative to X/Twitter, is now open for all — invites code no longer needed!

Launched in the spring of last year, Bluesky is a decentralised social network modelled after early Twitter. You sign up, post, follow people, repost, and generally enjoy seeing content from people you choose in a reverse-chronological feed.

And for fans of algorithms, Bluesky has an open marketplace where developers can share custom feeds that users can add, access, and even make their default experience. This focus on giving users choice will, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber says, shortly extend to moderation.

Despite being invite-only until today Bluesky has already attracted 3 million users — a figure dwarfed by the estimated 130 million users Meta’s Threads amassed since its debut last summer, but impressive considering signup restrictions, minimal marketing, and the inability to be Meta.

Bluesky also plans to support federation in the near future. This will allow anyone to create their own instance built on the open-source AT protocol and see/follow/interact with users on the reference Bluesky site — but not Mastodon as it uses the ActivityPub protocol.

“Joey, Bluesky isn’t related to Ubuntu” — true: you got me there.

But social media is something many (not saying all) of us use. It’s how we keep in touch with each other, where we choose to get “news” from, follow our favourites open-source projects, and cringe at companies try-hard wannabe-viral marketing efforts (that might just be me).

Plus, the AT protocol is open-source. If instances built around the service become popular we may well see Linux developers create standalone GUI clients, command-line tools, and other kinds of DE integrations — which would be ace!