Bluesky gets nearly 800K new users in its first day open to the public, despite outages

Bluesky opened to the public yesterday after launching in an invite-only beta last year. Getting on Bluesky might not be as exciting as it was when people were selling invites on eBay for $400 a pop, but there’s still a lot of curiosity around the decentralized, open source social app. In the last day, Bluesky has gained almost 800,000 new users (or “newskies“). Now the platform is slated to break 4 million total signups later today, whereas it hit 3 million only last week.

According to publicly available data, Bluesky’s unique user count almost doubled from Monday to Tuesday, when the platform opened to the public. Bluesky is still smaller than its primary federated competitor, Mastodon. But as a case study, the growth of Mastodon shows the potential for Bluesky. When Elon Musk finalized the deal to buy Twitter in late October 2022, Mastodon had about 400,000 users, compared to its current 8.7 million. But on the other hand, Instagram’s Threads looms large with 130 million users. Still, platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon hold great appeal for users who don’t want Meta to own even more of their online leisure time.

Bluesky’s launch wasn’t as smooth as it could’ve been, though. Many of the platform’s user-generated, custom algorithmic feeds stopped working overnight, CEO Jay Graber confirmed. As of now, the app seems to be working smoothly.

The outage was likely a result of such increased activity. But the online team behind Bluesky has other ideas.

“When there’s a large increase in database usage, the system enters a multi polar tachyon flow which overloads the power couplings, which we all just experienced,” wrote Bluesky engineer Paul Frazee. (I am pretty sure this is a Star Wars joke?)

Outages or not, the vibes are good so far on the newly open Bluesky. After all, it got the ultimate seal of approval from legendary poster Dril, which is the best omen you could ask for when making your app public.

“I do not Fucking recall them asking the blue sky elders permission to open registration to commoners,” Dril said.

As Bluesky opens to the public, CEO Jay Graber faces her biggest challenge yet