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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.

13. The TV character Alf has long been a part of Bluesky's lore. When we first shipped custom feeds, our example custom feed showed posts mentioning Alf. Developers, check out our feed template here: github.com/bluesky-soci...

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

📌

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...

17. Our advisor Martin Kleppman wrote the book “Designing Data-Intensive Systems.” Good thing too, because Bluesky is now a data-intensive system!

18. On April Fool’s this year, we introduced Bluesky shorts. Yes, shorts. bsky.social/about/blog/0...

Do y'all have white papers on your architecture? And given Martin's presence, are you doing event sourcing, and is this on Kafka?