Just around 24 hours after Musk made his comments, more than 42,000 new users joined Bluesky, making it the biggest signup day yet for the currently invite-only platform that launched earlier this year.

Bluesky saw a total of 53,585 new signups by the end of Tuesday, September 19. The new users gained in that single day make up 5 percent of the platform’s entire user base of 1,125,499 total accounts.

The new user signups are tracked via the third-party website “Bluesky Stats.” Looking over Bluesky signup numbers on the tracker for the past month, it appears that the platform usually sees from 10,000 to 20,000 new signups per day. Bluesky has doubled its usual daily new user numbers already, with many more hours left in the day still to go.

It’s impossible to know whether Musk’s comments about charging users to post on X really played a role in this, but it almost certainly had some effect.

  • Doug [he/him]@midwest.social
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    1 year ago

    In fairness, Gmail had a similar invite system when it launched and that’s been way more successful than G+

    • wjrii@kbin.social
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      1 year ago

      Gmail was also both “federated” and an insanely good product compared to its contemporaries. G+ had a couple of interesting innovations, but it wasn’t all that special and invite-only on a closed ecosystem is very iffy.

      • GreenMario@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Gmail was literally the best. 1GB space at launch when you’d get a dozen MB in Hotmail and others, slick fast UI in a browser.

        • SinningStromgald@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          And you got more space the longer you had the account! Then everyone got the same no matter what. I was sad to loose all that free space.

          • wjrii@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            IIRC, that was rolled out as a surprise after a few years. People were just like, “WTF, my capacity is getting bigger?”. For a while there, Goggle could do no wrong from a marketing standpoint. That, uhh, changed.

      • Kalkaline @leminal.space
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        1 year ago

        It was ad free which was amazing for a social media site at that time. No banners, no pop ups, just content.

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Gmail was invite only at first probably because Google didn’t want it to grow faster than they could buy hard drives. It gave you a gigabyte of email storage which at the time was huge. I’m certain they did that for technical reasons.

      • ᗪᗩᗰᑎ@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        It gave you a gigabyte of email storage which at the time was huge.

        You’re right, but for those who may not know the details or the impact at the time, Google was offering 500x more storage - at the free tier - than some of the competition - hotmail - who were charging people for just 10 MB of storage. This forced hotmail to increase its free tier to 250 MB and 2 GB for customers paying $20 USD/year.

        Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20230815014711/https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/hotmail-to-offer-250mb-of-free-storage/

        • wjrii@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          It’s hard to explain what an absolute paradigm shift Gmail was. It was about as drastic a difference as you could have with personal email without altering the core service. Orders of magnitude more storage, completely free to the end user, a responsive and usable web interface, a single unobtrusive 1-line text ad when we were used to at least half a dozen that were often full-size banners or even popups, and a good search tool.

          My wife (then fiancee) got us invites, and it was like Christmas. And all from the company that was way less creepy than Microsoft! I’m sure that part would never change.

        • GreenMario@lemm.ee
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          1 year ago

          Slow roll until the infrastructure can handle it and a little bit of that “exclusive” feel to it since not everyone can just join immediately.

        • Natanael@slrpnk.net
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          1 year ago

          Yeah they’re working hard on scaling, they’ve had recurring performance issues but have managed to get it stable again even with higher load now

      • geosoco@kbin.socialOP
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        1 year ago

        It’s also easier to find and fix bugs with smaller numbers of people, especially performance bugs which can be amplified at scale. So it gives them a lot of time to work through issues over the beta. It also gives them time to build teams around the expanding infrastructure and build processes for monitoring and handling issues as a larger team.

        Plus, these invite only periods start with more tech savy early adopters who more willing to put up with issues, and willing to provide decent bug reports to fix them.