The Jack Dorsey-backed decentralised social media protocol Bluesky said on Tuesday that it had crossed one million users, around nine months after it began inviting people to test the closed beta version of the app.
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In a company blog post, the social media platform seen as a rival to the embittered X (formerly Twitter) said that its focus was to “open up” and bolster the network so that it could support more users.
Currently, users need an invite code from the company or other members in order to join Bluesky. This restrictive strategy is in place to stop malicious actors from spamming the system, the company has clarified in the past.
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Bluesky said that it will need to improve some processes in order to support a larger number of users.
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“This means improving moderation and curation on the network through increased staffing and tooling, scaling our infrastructure and federating the network to support this growth, and iterating on the user experience of the app,” said the company in its post.
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Bluesky is based on what it calls the AT Protocol, and the founding team has envisioned a social media ecosystem where users can move between other apps on the protocol without having to give up their identity, data, and following.
Bluesky is owned by Jay Graber, who is also the CEO, while former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey serves on the board. The Bluesky app’s interface is similar to X and Meta’s Threads, but it is still centralised and tightly regulated by its team.
Interested applicants can sign up to Bluesky’s waitlist for an invite code.
“To date, we’ve invited 1M users through the waitlist, and we currently have 2 to 3M more to send out. We email tens of thousands of invite codes weekly, and existing users receive invite codes periodically as well,” said the company in its blog post.