I'm curious whether their long closed Beta helped them or harmed them. Their invite-only beta lasted 1yr, from feb 2023 to today.
My sense is that the "exclusivity" style launch that Facebook and Gmail used successfully is pretty much played out and ineffective now. All it does is kill broad interest in your platform right when a deluge of users into your new social network is most needed and valuable.
My sense was Bluesky should have done a quick semi-open beta of no more than 3-months just as a last bug and scalability test, and then opened to the public. Make it invite-only, but distribute invites liberally, make sure anyone who wants one has one. Interest then was higher, other options were still in development or early stages. Every month of delay was a month people could find other alternatives, and they delayed a year.
Then again I haven't been following it that closely. Any HN'ers that have been following it closely since last year have an opinion on this?
>Every month of delay was a month people could find other alternatives
I always find it weird when people apply the product logic to what is an ecosystem / network / protocol. If BlueSky, mastodon or any other combination of open systems succeeds it's going to be like Linux. Slowly eating proprietary systems inside out, simultaneously while the old stuff keeps being around.
Inherent to the entire logic of decentralization is that people switching to alternatives is not bad. That there's bridges between loosely coupled networks. If people treat BlueSky just like 'an app' that needs to be timed like an iphone launch that suggests people are missing what the alternative to closed platforms is about.
There are multiple decentralized chat networks all competing for users - Bluesky, Mastodon, Nostr, Farcaster, and a handful of others I'm blanking on atm. Afaik they're not cross compatible, so once a user base gets established on one they likely won't move to another or cross-post much or at all. That's why the timing matters/ed.
In my opinion, a mistake may have been not allowing public posts for so long.
They could have stayed invite-only, and yet allowed posts being public. This would have allowed people to at least use it as a publishing platform, while the scaling was figured out. This was done a few months ago, but it seems to me it would have been beneficial to do it sooner.
BTW, I believe they had >550k signups yesterday. So all is far from lost.
My sense is that the "exclusivity" style launch that Facebook and Gmail used successfully is pretty much played out and ineffective now. All it does is kill broad interest in your platform right when a deluge of users into your new social network is most needed and valuable.
My sense was Bluesky should have done a quick semi-open beta of no more than 3-months just as a last bug and scalability test, and then opened to the public. Make it invite-only, but distribute invites liberally, make sure anyone who wants one has one. Interest then was higher, other options were still in development or early stages. Every month of delay was a month people could find other alternatives, and they delayed a year.
Then again I haven't been following it that closely. Any HN'ers that have been following it closely since last year have an opinion on this?