Bluesky opens the network

Bluesky has opened up the network, dropping the invite codes and allowing anyone to create an account. This spurred a massive new signup wave, and the total accounts grew in two days by 50%, from just over 3 million registered accounts to 4.5 million accounts.

What is striking about these massive wave of 1.5 million new signups is that it largely seems to be from Japan. A quick analysis of the posts by language makes it clear what is happening:

Visualisation by David Thiel

Custom feeds that show the top recent posts of the network also confirm that most of the posts are now in Japanese. Some popular accounts from Japan have migrated from X to Bluesky. At this point in time, it seems like Bluesky is rapidly turning into a Japanese social network. It is a trend that is worth watching, as it seems fairly rare that a language-specific migration to another platform is suddenly shifts the previously dominant language of the platform so much.

Bridges and architecture

As part of the opening, Bluesky also released more information on the technical structure of Bluesky and how federation works with the release of a technical paper. It indicates how complicated Bluesky’s architecture is; the paper seems to raise as much questions as it answers. Crucial questions on the moderation, where it happens and to what extend people who run their own server (PDS) can influence content moderation in some way are still unclear.

In an interview with The Verge, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber also talks more about plans on how the Bluesky company can make money:

“While the AT Protocol is being opened up soon, the Bluesky company plans to make money via a variety of ways, including charging users for additional features in its app. It also plans to take a cut of purchases for things like custom feeds that developers will be able to charge for. Graber says work is also being done on a Cloudflare-like enterprise arm for helping others easily manage their own servers on the AT Protocol.”

Finally, Bluesky also says they are planning with the first steps of federation at the end of the month. At that point, anyone will be able to run their own data server (PDS) and join the network. At this point, the network will be federated (meaning that any nodes in the network can contact and communicate with each other), but not decentralised yet (as Bluesky will still run the other parts of the pipeline, the Relay and AppView). However, this already changes the network significantly, as Ryan Barrett confirms that with federated PDS, bridges between the network will be able to operate, including his project BridgyFed. This allows people from the ActivityPub-based fediverse to connect with the Bluesky network via the bridge.