2y ago

Bluesky temporarily halts sign-ups because so many people are joining from Twitter

www.theverge.com

Bluesky, a decentralized Twitter-like social network, is pausing new signups “temporarily” to try and resolve performance issues it’s been experiencing after Twitter introduced limits on the amount of tweets you can see in a day. Even though you still need an invite code to be able to join Bluesky, it seems that the influx of new users has been a problem.

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2y ago

Bluesky temporarily halts sign-ups because so many people are joining from Twitter

www.theverge.com /2023/7/1/23781417/bluesky-halted-sign-ups-joining-twitter

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2y ago

Bluesky temporarily halts sign-ups because so many people are joining from Twitter

www.theverge.com /2023/7/1/23781417/bluesky-halted-sign-ups-joining-twitter

37 comments

Irrespective of the popular success which Bluesky / Mastodon may receive, I am simply glad that enough platforms exist for anyone to seek refuge in if the rapacity by these giants becomes the norm.
- The majority of social media sites (with the exception of youtube imo) don't provide anything of value. A smart high school kid could write a twitter clone over a weekend. The only thing these websites have to offer is their large user base.
  EDIT: OK, I apparently upset some people. I was exagerating when I said it could be done in a weekend, but my point stands that it's pretty easy to make a twitter clone/reddit clone, and the challenge in succeeding for twitter is getting a user base. The tech is incredibly easy to build.
  
  A smart high school kid could write a twitter clone over a weekend
  This is a pretty good example of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Twitter is much more than the simple frontend you see when you click on the website, there is absolutely no way a single person could recreate it in a month, less alone a weekend.
- No but it is decentralized
  
  No. It's decentralized like the Fediverse, but it doesn't use ActivityPub. I think there are some 3rd party developers working on an ActivityPub-Bluesky bridge, but nothing concrete yet.
  
  They’re making their own federation. They brought in Mastodon consultants and have set up their own AT Protocol and of course we’re activitypub. To federate everyone their would need to be a bridge between AT and activitypub
As someone that had never used Twitter, why use this over Mastodon?
- Presumably, discovery is a lot better.
  Having used both Twitter and Mastadon, discovery on Mastadon is essentially impossible. You have to already know who you want to follow, there is no mechanism in place to help you actually find content you might be interested in.
  
  This makes me feel better. I thought it was just me having a terrible time trying to find content on Mastodon.
  
  Something that makes it a bit easier to discover new accounts is to join a medium to large server, and look at posts from the local and federated timelines. I know it's not as easy as an algorithm-powered timeline
I thought it was currently invite only? Is that not the case?
- It is. They've temporarily disabled invite codes.
- They mention this in the article. And the article summary.
I'm rooting for the federated platforms, but there is clearly a need for a basic simple twitter replacement.
- It's unfortunate that this drop in replacement isn't in the fediverse though. Bluesky's success isn't technical (yet), it is better marketing and connections with VIP users.
- Mastodon.
  Anything else simple/centralized will eventually become the next twitter.
I managed to get a code today and signup maybe an hour before they locked out invites :)
Is it similar to Mastodon? Is the same happening there?
- Mastodon is also seeing an influx, but probably smaller and crucially, the signups are spread across many many servers (there are thousands to choose from), so the likelihood of more than a couple getting overloaded now is slim.
  The earlier twitter - mastodon migrations put more stress on the servers because there were far fewer available but things have scaled up a lot since then. And we have a lot more experienced sysadmins and cloud engineers who are capable of scaling up their instances more rapidly at the helm of many of the large instances.
Are they not on a whitelist? I sign up for the whitelist but didn't even get any email
Does it rub anyone else the wrong way that you need to have an invite code to use bluesky? I wanted to use it but it just screams elitism to me.

37 comments