Bluesky, the social microblogging platform powered by the Authenticated Transfer Protocol, is now accepting public signups. Historically, the platform has operated in a closed beta, but that changes today. Jay Graber, CEO of Bluesky, remarked that the platform drew in over 100,000 new signups today.

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.

Bluesky announcement

While Bluesky is a federated social network, it is often framed as an alternative to the Fediverse, rather than a part of it. Instead of building on atop ActivityPub, the company behind Bluesky opted to build their own protocol, which incorporates some very different ideas regarding identity, verification, and data structures.

It’s not out of the question as to whether Fediverse platforms might adopt atproto as an additional protocol. Friendica and Bridgy Fed are both sterling examples of polyglot platforms that can speak multiple protocols at once, with both offering some way to connect with Bluesky.

What happens now?

It’s still very early days for this network. Internally, they’ve been experimenting with federation between servers, and the team hopes to bring its approach to composable moderation sometime soon.

Not everybody seems to be happy about the opening up of user registrations, or of federation becoming the next big focus. I found a lot of people expressing concerns over a lack of privacy tooling, a worry about a flood of new users killing everything good about the site, and disgruntlement at the idea of Bluesky doing everything they hated about Mastodon.

Bluesky seems to be serious about their commitment to growing a decentralized network, and opening up to the public shows a maturation of the site. It will be interesting to see how the company intends to carry out their vision for social federation, and what new improvements may be coming soon.

If you’re interested in giving Bluesky a shot, why not check out a handy New User Guide, or take a look at the Bluesky App Showcase? You can even use Skybridge to connect your favorite Fediverse applications to it.

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