The Honest Courtesan

Most of y’all probably now by now about Bluesky, Jack Dorsey’s still-fairly-new Twitter clone, which is supposed to have been designed to make it more difficult for one delusional billionaire to buy up and intentionally wreck.  I’ve been there for a few months now, and I like it; the flavor is similar to that of Twitter when I first joined twelve years ago.  In fact, the only reason I’m still on Twitter is that Bluesky simply isn’t big enough yet to provide all the content I need to keep this blog going.  That’s partly by design; Bluesky management apparently felt that it needed to grow slowly until all the bugs are ironed out.  The chief way they limited growth is by requiring new users to be invited by existing users; each user receives new invite codes at irregular intervals and can share those with others.  At first, I offered mine to people I follow on Twitter, but it seems now that most of the ones who want to be there already are, so my codes started to pile up; once I had five to share I decided to write this essay offering them to readers.  But the very next day after I wrote the above, Bluesky announced invite codes are no longer necessary, and anyone can join.  So once again, I was fashionably late to the party, but at least this time I already have my seat before the crowd surges in.