Gmail also had invites to start, back in the day, and that's the de facto email service now.

But that had a compelling day-1 offering that was clearly better - massive free storage allocation. Bluesky doesn't have a compelling reason to sign up like that, so the invite system feels flawed.

GMail's invite system worked because you could use GMail to talk to your non-GMail friends. G+ failed for many reasons, but one of them is that if you got in before all your friends there was just nothing you could actually do there.

- Gmail had killer features that made even moving desirable.

- Email is federated so there is much less cost to switch providers where you can still receive and send from others. No stickiness factor

This is why Gmail succeeded and g+ failed

Gmail also had so much hype around it, invites were sold online (I paid ~1.10€ or something on eBay). ~~Blusky, not so much.~~

I see a lot of Bluesky invites that have sold on Ebay today. For ~$20 too.

Huh. Not only correct, they were selling for ~200 in May.

Do people actually talk about bluesky outside of HN? I never heard of it anywhere else.

> Do people actually talk about bluesky outside of HN?

I see a bunch of people talking about it on Twitter in the context of "I'm on Bluesky, follow me there in case this implodes". But yeah, >90% of the Bluesky mentions I see are on HN.

Gmail was so much better than competing services at the time (in terms of storage) and also this was almost 20 years ago.

Different world, different internet, different userbase.

I'd expect that Bluesky would launch invites in next few days or so, to those who left their emails. I mean, their competitor is up so why not sent these invites or even open registration for anyone

Unless of course they first want to see how much interest it gains

Facebook exists because they started off as .edu only.