Here's how to get an invite.

Blue Skies

Twitter users are clamoring to get an invite to former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey's decentralized Twitter alternative Bluesky. A quick search reveals countless accounts giving away or begging for invites.

The app, now available on both Android and iOS, is only accepting new users via either a waitlist or a gifted invite code from a friend who's already on the platform.

And the hype surrounding the emerging competitor is growing fast. Bloomberg reported earlier this week that the iPhone app alone has been downloaded 245,000 times. Over a million users are now on the service's waitlist.

"Feels like Bluesky is hitting an inflection point this week?" tweeted The Verge editor Alex Heath. "At least with the Twitter tech crowd."

"My expectations for Bluesky were very low, but just in the week since I joined it’s gone from being almost entirely crypto and bad AI art to having a good mix of journalists and tech people I don’t hate," wrote programmer Travis Brown.

Buggy Mess

Meanwhile, Musk's bizarre and haphazard decisions are slowly turning Twitter from a once — at least somewhat — reliable platform into a buggy and increasingly unusable mess.

Musk has also paywalled a number of different Twitter features, from API access to being "verified" — thought the paid "verification," laughably, doesn't actually verify users' identities.

That new reality is clearly starting to alienate some of the platform's most loyal users. In short, it's not exactly surprising to see folks clamoring to jump ship.

Back to Basics

So what's this new app, then? According to a March blog post by Bluesky project leader Jay Graber, the app is a decentralized microblogging platform with the end goal of providing "choice to users, freedom to developers, and control to creators."

As of right now, Bluesky is fairly basic. It allows users to compose 300-character posts and replies, as well as share and repost images.

Whether it manages to "usurp" Twitter, as NBC's Ben Collins argued, remains to be seen. But Bluesky "works and it looks and feels like this one, which is all we ever asked," he added.

More on Bluesky: Departed Twitter Founder Jack Dorsey Is Launching a New Social Network


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