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Twitter has, for the last couple of months at least, been the centre of self-made controversy. Much of this began the moment that Elon Musk acquired the company, immediately implementing drastic changes to make the company profitable once again. Nearly 10 months on from the takeover, users are flocking en-masse to a Jack Dorsey-backed rival site. While you can get Bluesky invite codes for free, that hasn’t done much to stop scalpers from taking advantage of desperate Twitter ex-pats and driving the price of them up to nearly $50.
Bluesky was founded in 2021, and Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey is supporting development among the board of directors. Similar to Mastodon, the platform is a decentralised social network. Rather than Tweets only being deployed on Twitter’s servers, Bluesky’s ‘skeets’ (yes, we know) can be published via the Bluesky Social network or alternatively through the user’s own domain instead. Alongside the decentralised benefits, Bluesky is also open-source, meaning that third-party development for the platform will be seamless. While all of the above sounds ideal, especially next to Twitter, the service is not yet open to the public.
It’s currently limited to an invite-only community with notable names including Grimes and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez having gotten onto the platform. Bluesky are dispersing invite codes to users on a sporadic basis with the intention of a pay-it-forward system encouraging a slow trickle of user to the platform. However, recent Twitter shenanigans from Elon Musk have had people enraged with the ‘rate limit‘ which is effectively monetising access to the bird app, and thus demand for Bluesky has hit the roof. It’s been so drastic that the Twitter rivals had to pause sign-ups to ease server load.
Knowing that there’s a desperate demand for Bluesky, it seems that some scalpers have decided this is their next project. Invite codes are being flogged for anywhere between $10 – $50, despite having originally been distributed for free. It gets worse, though, as people are actually buying them.
We first saw this happening on Reddit, on /r/BlueSkyInvites. The owner is claiming that over 500 people have now become a part of the ‘pay-it-forward’ train, with entry being $49. The community itself has over 7000 members, though not all are willing to pay that price. Alongside that, there’s an AutoModerator message which automatically sends people towards a link saying not to buy Bluesky invite codes – written by the very owner of the community asking for $49 to join the Bluesky invite train.
Over on eBay, it’s a different story. In recent months, Bluesky invites have sold at prices maxing out at $400, which is simply ridiculous to us. It’s not clear whether or not these purchases are legitimate, however. Recent eBay sales seem to have settled at prices ranging between $20-30, which is cheaper than the cost of entry to the pay-it-forward Reddit train.
Either way, paying any amount of money for Bluesky entry is ridiculous. Especially considering the social media’s future plans to open up doors to the public shortly.
