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Bluesky now has over 20M people!! 🎉 We've been adding over a million users per day for the last few days. To celebrate, here are 20 fun facts about Bluesky:

1. The name Bluesky was originally a placeholder for the project started by Twitter to build an open social protocol. Purely by coincidence, my mother gave me the name Lantian, which translates to "blue sky."

2. Here's an image from a presentation I gave to Twitter, representing the Twitter bird freed from a closed platform to fly in Bluesky's open ecosystem.

3. Bluesky was an invite-only app until February 2024 to give us time to grow the network responsibly and build our Trust & Safety team. When we opened to the public, we published both a comic strip and an academic paper to explain Bluesky. bsky.social/about/blog/0...

4. Bluesky didn't have a logo until December 2023. Before the butterfly 🦋, here are some of the placeholders we used...

5. Bluesky's team consists of about 20 full-time employees. That's a million users here per employee now 🤯 Also, we're hiring! bsky.social/about/join

6. Custom feeds on Bluesky are the first implementation of algorithmic choice. Instead of using a single black-box For You algorithm, you can create and subscribe to your own. Now, there are over 50k+ custom feeds on the network! Check them out: bsky.app/feeds

7. Bluesky's data servers are named after mushrooms! Some of them include morel, enoki, shiitake, puffball, oyster... 🍄

8. Bluesky is an open ecosystem with an API that is guaranteed to always be open to developers. Developers, we're eager to see what you create! Our API docs are here. docs.bsky.app

9. I started my career as a digital right activist, working to protect net neutrality and privacy.

10. The three largest countries on Bluesky are the United States, Japan, and Brazil, and these countries were early adopters since our invite-only days as well. Thank you for being here! 💙

11. To help us catch bugs with long threads, we used to play the "counting game" during our invite-only days. Someone would post "1," and everyone would start counting up in that thread.

12. Back in the day, Bluesky's "algorithm" was called "What's Hot," and it showed any post that got over 5 likes. When our community grew, we had to up that to 8 likes.

I'm from Spain. ALF was a phenomenon on national TV (we only had two channels). It was broadcast on Sunday afternoons when we were partying. I programmed the video recorder to watch it when I got home. You've won me over with ALF.

14. People have built really cool use cases of custom labelers, including games! There's a TTRPG class labeler.

I think you've given the TTRPG labeller a BlueSky hug of death

Any elaboration on what this is? I’m having a hard time finding it

15. Bluesky is built on the AT Protocol. This is the standard that Bluesky's open network is built upon. atproto.com

📌

Does Bluesky PBC own the protocol itself?

16. Twitter was inspired to start Bluesky by the paper “Protocols, not Platforms.” The author, Mike Masnick, is now on our board. bsky.social/about/blog/0...