[daveloyall]

Y'all let the public in before finishing your wait-list. I joined the list on 2023-03-02.

Y'all didn't email me that signups were going to be public.

Y'all didn't email me when signups actually went public. I found out about it here.

...And, let's see.. Yep, my handle is taken.

[jakebsky]

Sorry about that. You definitely should have received a waitlist invite. We did invite everyone on the waitlist before launching. The deliverability of those emails was quite high but it's possible it went to the spam folder or something else went wrong.

Something like 1 million of the users that joined came from the waitlist.

Most users on HN are probably able to navigate using a domain handle, which is really the recommended and most decentralized option.

https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutor...

[omoikane]

Same here, I was on the waitlist for a few months, during that time I saw no evidence that anyone joined Bluesky via the waitlist. Eventually I got lucky and found someone who was giving out invites on Twitter, but by then all of my friends are no longer interested in joining yet another social network.

I hope Bluesky prospers since it has some features that Mastodon and Twitter lacks, but it has a lot of catching up to do.

[pierat]

Well, join Mastodon! Find a community (server) that fits your liking and get your username! You can talk with anybody on other servers, but the one you choose is your homebase!

https://joinmastodon.org/servers

At least you're not succumbing to a commercial interest who will inevitably enshittify for eventual profit extraction.

[ipqk]

Yeah, it's pretty ridiculous.

On the other hand, the benefit of decentralized services is that your handle being taken shouldn't (eventually) matter, because you can just find another server.