Can Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky really take over from Twitter?

theguardian.com:

Let’s check in on social media.

In February, Bluesky released its iOS app. The social network began as a spinoff within Twitter to build a fully “decentralised” protocol, something that could replicate the Twitter experience without placing the company itself at the centre of impossible decisions around content moderation.

Its history is intimately tied up with Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey’s pivot towards bitcoin and decentralisation, and Dorsey still sits on Bluesky’s board of directors, but the company is now independent of Twitter, and over the past three months its userbase has been growing rapidly.

There’s a lot to be said about the technology of Bluesky, but its importance to the success of the social network is minor compared to a single decision made back in February: handing control of the waitlist to the users.

Because the service is still in beta, you you have to be invited to use it. Existing users get roughly one invite code every two weeks, though a slightly murky system seems to hand more codes to some than others. Download the app, enter the code, pick a username and you’re live on Bluesky, staring at a feed that is … basically the same as Twitter’s.

The invitation requirement ensures several things, in roughly ascending order of importance: firstly, that the service grows at a steady rate, rather than exploding with interest and then collapsing under the weight of user numbers; secondly, that no one arrives on Bluesky without knowing at least one other user, avoiding the horrors of an empty feed; thirdly, because it means that the network is filled with users who have hurdled the low bar of at least one person wanting to speak to them; and lastly, because it means loads of people want to join Bluesky but