Sky High: Twitter-alternative Bluesky invites are being sold for thousands of dollars on eBay
Sky High: Twitter-alternative Bluesky invites are being sold for thousands of dollars on eBay
According to the company’s newest App Store data and stats, consumer demand for the Jack Dorsey-backed Twitter competitor Bluesky is outpacing availability. Bluesky’s community has surpassed 50,000 people, according to a new FAQ on the company’s website.
According to data.ai, an app intelligence business, the decentralised Twitter clone has over 375,000 worldwide installs on iOS as of April 26, 2023, and has been placed strongly on Apple and Google’s app stores’ top rankings by downloads.
Bluesky has also gained traction in recent weeks, owing to a combination of exclusivity — the app still requires a difficult-to-obtain invite — and the culture its community is cultivating. The latter has seen the app adopt “early Twitter” enthusiasm, owing in part to the numerous meme accounts and shitposting.
Creating a sense of rarity
This gives Bluesky a frantic, chaotic feel that attracts many former Twitter users, particularly those who didn’t blend well with the more serious and organised environment seen in Mastodon, the other decentralised Twitter alternative.
But, for the time being, Bluesky isn’t capitalising on the app’s massive consumer demand.
While other would-be Twitter alternatives such as Post and T2 have expanded access to their respective networks, Bluesky invites have become such a hot commodity that they’ve been selling for as much as $400 on eBay in recent days. Some have listed them for as high as $999 or $6900, although the latter looks like a joke that Elon Musk would love.
According to data.ai’s study, consumer enthusiasm in the app has also fueled its surge to the top of the app stores’ top rankings.
Bluesky has over 375,000 iOS downloads worldwide, having peaked on April 15th with 66,000 downloads in a single day after becoming Thailand’s No. 1 app across all categories. Prior to then, the greatest day amount of iOS downloads was over 22,000 on March 22, 2023.
This 375,000 figure is an increase over Bluesky’s 240,000 iOS installations as of April 20th, 135,000 of which came only that month, according to data.ai.
Topping charts everywhere
The app was released on Google Play in late April, thus data on its popularity on Android devices is still scarce.
However, despite consumers’ lack of access to the new social network, Bluesky has managed to trend on the downloads charts in several markets on both Apple’s App Store and Google Play.
Also read: How different is Jack Dorsey’s Bluesky from Twitter?
Meanwhile, the United States has accounted for the majority of Bluesky’s recent growth, according to the company. This helped the app climb to No. 22 in Google Play downloads for social applications on April 26 and No. 11 in iOS downloads for social apps on April 24.
Data.ai stated that because to its newness, it is unable to anticipate the number of daily or monthly active users at this moment. The rankings are outstanding not just because the app is still new, but also since the community is still fairly tiny.
Bluesky, for example, achieved No. 3 among social applications on Google Play by downloads on April 24 in Japan, after earlier hitting No. 8 among social apps on iOS on March 4. In the U.K., the app was No. 10 among social apps by Google Play downloads on April 26, shortly after reaching No. 10 among social apps by iOS downloads on April 23.
The FAQ also attempts to clarify how invite codes will be issued, emphasising that existing users would only receive one invite per two weeks they use the app. Furthermore, the company stated that it monitors the social graph on a regular basis, and if it discovers that certain users are inviting “other trustworthy participants,” they will receive additional invites.
This feature of the invite system makes Bluesky feel even more exclusive than if it were simply gradually granting access to its waitlist. Getting in now feels more like a function of who you know. As a result, existing Bluesky users are being asked on a daily basis, frequently by numerous people, if they have any invite codes to offer.
However, Dorsey and Bluesky don’t look like they are ready for explosive growth.
“Spammers and bad actors who want to manipulate public discourse can take advantage of social networks.” “It’s far easier to limit sign-ups and let them spread through an existing social graph than it is to try to clean up rampant network abuse retroactively,” the piece says.
“In the long run, we see this invite code system as part of the open source tooling we’re developing to help server admins (people running services) curate and moderate their communities,” the company claims.
It’s unclear if the firm feels its existing user base can’t be trusted to distribute invites properly, or whether it just wants greater say over who gets in, and who stays out. However, with Bluesky invites now being sold to the highest bidder on eBay, the company’s plans to keep out bad actors may be jeopardised.
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