The decentralized social network, backed by Twitter creator Jack Dorsey, recently canceled its wait list and is now available to the public without an invitation.

Known as an open-source alternative to Twitter, the service has been in beta and invitation-only for a year, with 3 million users joining Bluesky during that time and another 850,000 joining within a day of announcing the public launch.

At the moment, according to the online tracker, the total number of registrations on the social network reaches 4.2 million.

After opening the service Yesterday, Bluesky has crossed 4M users! ????

• 850k+ New users have signed up
• Averaged 8.5 New Accounts/Second
• 2M posts were created in the last 24 hours

Sign up for Bluesky here, no invite code required: pic.twitter.com/vDB4pdnERy

— bluesky (@bluesky) February 7, 2024

Another Twitter alternative, Meta’s Threads, reported 130 million monthly active users last week.

Meanwhile, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber says the social network intended to grow more slowly to build a platform and underlying protocol without the added pressure that sudden growth spurts can cause. Some of these fears were confirmed during the public launch, when the social network experienced technical problems with the feed – the glitch was fixed within hours.

A large part of Bluesky’s future success will depend on whether the social network can sustain the new growth and interest of all its new users (Threads, for example, barely survived the decline after a surge in downloads and urgently began to roll out new features – advertising in other Meta apps also seems to have helped) .

While Bluesky may look a bit like Threads or X, it’s a fundamentally different kind of platform and part of the decentralized social media movement. Its open source protocol functions as an “always open” API, and Graber says the site already has dozens of developers building their own experiences. Bluesky also offers more customization options for users, particularly regarding algorithms or moderation.