Dorsey-backed Bluesky draws users in droves

At a recent event hosted by a tech company, dozens of San Francisco young professionals and others crowded into a basement event space decorated with string lights and munched on pizza and sipped LaCroix. Like attendees at so many Bay Area gatherings, they were chasing the latest hot new thing. This wasn't the real place they wanted to be.

- Meghan Bobrowsky & Alexa Corse

The event was hosted by Bluesky, the Twitter-like social-media platform backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. The platform, which said this week it has grown to some 100,000 users from just a few hundred in February, is invite-only and the invite codes can be hard to come by.

Some attendees at the party were hungry for codes. They gathered in a corner where two employees were parceling them out in a decidedly low-tech fashion: a bunch of jumbled letters and numbers written on tiny pieces of paper.

Those codes, also shared digitally, are some of the most sought-after perks in social media right now because of what they unlock: access to an exclusive platform that's also not run by Elon Musk.

Since Musk bought Twitter, the Twitterverse has been in a tizzy about whether to stay or go. Bluesky has emerged as a coveted alternative, and with its scarcity of invites, has prompted an outbreak of FOMO: Where are all the cool kids going and how can I get there? As with many aspirational goals, getting in is sometimes more fun than being there.

Many are using Twitter to find a new option to Twitter: "Hello all. This is me, asking nicely if anyone has a Bluesky invite to bestow 95 upon me," tweeted videogame developer Graham Reid, 32.

Arick Jones, a publicist for a popular fitness club, has been trying for months to get into Bluesky. Jones, 37, said he'd be willing to pay for a code. He's been hunting on Reddit, messaged an old social-media professor and posted on LinkedIn, so far without success.

"If I could guarantee it wasn't a scam, I would pay up to $250 for it," said Jones, who lives in San Diego.