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Bluesky is finally open — can it replace Twitter?
Can anything replace Twitter?
After nearly a year of an invite-only closed beta, Bluesky opened itself up to the world this month. In October, I wrote about Bluesky and how it became my favorite social media app, fully replacing Twitter, although the app is not equipped to do that yet. You can’t yet DM folks on Bluesky yet and there are no hashtags.
After two days of being open to everyone, the service saw more than one million new signups. By contrast, it took Bluesky three months just to get to 70,000 users. Now the service has five million users, which is more than Truth Social’s two million.
While in beta, Bluesky built the foundation for its own AT protocol, which allows users to voluntarily opt-in or opt-out to seeing flagged content such as nudity, violence, and hate speech. It also lets users switch servers or “hosts” without losing any data or identity. Bluesky launched on the web, iOS, and Android and in December, announced an identity: a butterfly, its own version of Twitter’s bird.
Twitter, meanwhile, has collapsed. In one of the biggest branding disasters in modern history, site owner Elon Musk destroyed the company’s shorthand, effectively throwing away patented terms like “Tweet”; he’s rebranded some — not all — of the site with a double-crossed 𝕏…