Jack Dorsey moved his support to Nostr, I don't think he has any involvement with Blue Sky. Jack doesn't even have or use a Blue Sky account, to the best of my knowledge.

I generally wouldn't trust any social media app that's not used the leadership. Threads is still half baked but at least Mark uses it regularly. And Elon is regularly posting on Twitter.

The invite system is ostensibly rate limiter and moderation tool, rather than a hype machine. They've mentioned getting rid of it soon. Maybe they "missed the boat" in some sense, but I'd rather see steady and sustainable growth.

Dorsey hasn't been doing them any favours for a long time, he's all but publicly disavowed it, deleting his account to focus on nostr. He's still on the board of directors last I heard, but if his public statements are anything to go by, he's not actively involved.

With a social network, steady and sustainable is usually not an option. If they don't have a strong launch when they remove the restrictions they'll fade into irrelevance within a few weeks. Threads had a surprisingly strong launch and it still has an uphill battle to climb if it wants to challenge Twitter and that's in spite of all the ways Twitter is attempting to self-sabotage.

Explosive growth is not a requirement. Take a look at reddit's long-term trajectory, for example. It's remarkably linear (although I have a feeling it's not going to continue for much longer)

Reddit’s value is the historical content. Old content on a feed-based app is literal garbage, however.

Isn't Threads kinda proving that explosive growth isn't a requirement to a successful social network?

Threads is backed by Meta so can survive for decades running at a loss.

Not sure if the same applies to BlueSky, X, TruthSocial etc.

Social networks typically demand large user bases because it goes hand in hand with advertising.

> They are super late to the "twitter replacement" game

They were actually super early but the invite system squandered that opportunity. For months it was just a tiny subset of oldschool twitter users.

There was a time when people I followed on twitter started making accounts. But 99% of their followers (like me) couldn’t follow them there. So those people of course stopped posting there.

Actually think Theads made the same mistake, you signed up and your followers were not carried over.

If I was at IG I’d have made the number carry over even if the users were not there yet, seemed catastrophic to sign up day one and see like 10 followers when you have thousands on IG