A social network being invite-only is such an obvious non-starter that I genuinely can't imagine the conversation that went into that decision. Assuming the basic underlying tech works more often that not (and ideally some story for community moderation), there's literally nothing I want from a Twitter competitor other than having everyone on it. My interest in a Twitter competitor that is invite-only is and will always be exactly zero.
It works extremely well - it guarantees you know* someone on the social network. No empty feeds, no literally-no-one to talk at, you have someone you can ask questions about the site, etc.
Speaking from experience working on a social site with loads of signup flow experiments: the results are consistently wild. It's no competition on all the normally-valued metrics like interactions and retention.
*for some degree of "know" anyway. Better in most cases than "the news talked about this tweeter thing"
(edit: I do think they may have missed what might be the biggest boat sailing party, which was probably a mistake. But invite-only is quite reasonable.)
It guarantees you know one person on the network. And if you like it and want to invite everyone else – tough luck.
Threads solved the cold start problem by not having a personal feed at all at launch. There is only a single algorithmically curated one, prioritizing first/second/third/etc degree connections and otherwise showing content from everyone else. So the place always felt alive from day 1.
Unfortunately, they likely used AI to sock puppet and prime that pump, along with simply already having a user base.
Nothing very special about those shortcuts. Had they had a standalone system, it's not be much better than all the other attempts. This is akin to how Snoy launched the playstation.
I feel like there's some room for an invite-only period that's useful, but it needs to be short. Unless you've somehow got an amazingly complete test suite, you're likely to run into scaling problems and show stopper bugs with early users, and limiting user count temporarily allows you to see and fix some of those before you become known for your failure conditions. But you also don't want to linger in invite-only, and lose the hype. IMHO, maybe 2-6 weeks of invite only is fine.
Gmail's initial period was brilliant from a social network period before social networks. After the initial beta phase, once the bugs were worked out, it was invite only from existing Gmail users
Difference is that email doesn't have any network lock-in. If I'm the only one with a gmail.com account I'm the cool kid who can email everyone still on hotmail and yahoo to make them jealous, and now they want an invite as well. If I'm the only one with a bluesky account then I'm just...shouting into the void and no one cares.
I don't know about this. I got onto Facebook circa 2007 when it expanded from Harvard to other universities and man did I love it for a few years. Facebook really ended up being a major extension of my college experience. That was when it was just students, and it really had that new freshman undergrad social feel to it where it was all about linking up with new people you just met and seeing what they're up to and flirting and sharing pics and planning events.
I kind of feel like Google was onto something with the "circles" idea and it's not clear to me why something like that didn't catch on. I don't want to share everything with the whole world. My college friends, my professional contacts, my family - these are all social circles that I'd want to be connected to with a service like this, but in separate buckets that don't overlap (or only somewhat overlap).
So from a user's point of view, exclusive/invite-only can be really appealing. But if you're thinking from a "make as much money for the company as possible" point of view then yeah anything that limits the number of potential customers you can attract is going to hurt.
Facebook was never exactly "invite only" but when they started it was limited to certain universities, and they expanded gradually. If a social network is only going to have a few user it can still provide value if they all have something in common; better 1,000 users all in the same city/university than 10,000 users scattered across the globe. Threads doesn't have this problem since they can just do a full-court-press immediately and get 30M users in a few days. I dunno how bluesky works but if they are reasonably generous with the invites you can get your friends on it (who are interested) pretty quickly.
