Besides, 'limited' account creation to form communities is a pretty well-established scaling strategy. They have scaled from 0 users to 200k users in 5 months - Facebook originally took a year to scale to 1m users so it's not unrealistic that Bsky are growing/scaling at approx the same pace at this stage in the curve. Worth noting that Facebook also just couldn't have handled scaling to 1 billion users on Y1, and that required years of engineering effort (and lots of money/resources).
Considering they can only have limited users at their current stage, invites to form close communities is a strategy to ensure that a social graph is created early. Having 20k users that all have a few friends with accounts is more important than having 20k users where nobody knows each other.
Remember Facebook also originally scaled campus by campus - which was a process that let it 'scale' in a way that encourages social graph creation (i.e. 10k signups in 1 university is probably WAY better for a social network than 10k signups in 100 universities).
Has anyone else created a decentralised social network at this scale? Arguably matrix but they also grew slower, potentially have a simpler product, and had scaling challenges along the way.
Remember scaling doesn’t just mean technical for a social network - it also means support and moderation.
With which backend? Scaling from 200k users to possibly hundreds of millions that quickly?
