If you’re looking to freshen up your social media life, Bluesky has just closed its waiting list and is now open for anyone to join — because everyone was itching for another platform.

You remember Bluesky, right? Yeah, we had to remind ourselves about it too. Not to be confused with the cloud consulting company of the same name, Bluesky Social is the decentralised open-source X.com alternative that launched in February last year as a closed beta for iPhones. It has since spread to desktops through a web browser and Android devices through the Play Store.

It’s free to sign up, which takes around ten minutes. Once you’re in, you’ll notice it looks rather similar to X or Threads. Your feed of posts defaults to a chronological timeline but there are plenty of other types of feeds to follow should you wish — or create your own if nothing tickles your fancy.

Bluesky fills the blue bird hole

With the wider rollout, the platform is seeing a huge uptick in traffic — so much so that it suffered an outage earlier this morning as the servers struggled to keep up. It is currently sitting at around 3.6 million users at the time of writing which we expect to grow as more people hop on to check it out. Whether they’ll stick around or immediately forget about it like they did Threads, remains to be seen.

Although it’s been around in some form for a while already, the platform is still finding its feet — it doesn’t have a direct message feature yet, for example. But if you’re tired of being force-fed Musk’s posts, that might not matter to you.