In a sense, this is understandable. The thing is still in beta. The team is small and actively juggles moderation as it tries to ship features. I’m not sure who was invited, but… something led to today’s announcement.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is already there, as are Senator Brian Schatz and Senator Ron Wyden. There are also celebrities – CNN’s Jake Tapper, filmmaker Rian Johnson, model Chrissy Teigen and filmmaker Lilly Wachowski. But the more prominent members join, the more moderation challenges the Bluesky team is likely to face. When expert Matt Yglesias joined, before a block button was available, a user threatened to hit him with hammers.
So I am sympathetic to the motivation for this policy, but it is also a shame. For reasons not entirely clear to me, on Wednesday Bluesky’s shitposters sent each other sexy jpegs of Alf, a sitcom puppet from a TV show that aired in the late 1980s. Personally, I think it would be really funny for King Charles to accidentally see Alf’s pig.