Right in the article they are discussing adding ads and premium subscriptions features in the future.
I can already see the timeline for BlueSky over the next few years:
- Receive startup venture capital
- Provide a useful, user-friendly service
- Grow a userbase <-- (you are here)
- Add a few more useful features, continue growing
- Dominate the market, run at a loss
- Add less useful features like ads, premium features, subscriptions
- People complain, but most are too hooked in to leave
- The useful features added earlier start getting removed, content gets sanitized <-- (Imgur, Reddit is here)
- Big fundraising campaign, IPO, or bought out by big corp or the melon husk of the day.
- Content quality goes way downhill, actively making life harder for users, volunteers and staff, bots rampant, more stupid features, monetization monetization monetization <-- (Twitter is here)
- People leave for another useful, user-friendly service
Any service backed by a business person will follow this timeline. This is why we need to move to self-hosted, federated, and community based platforms. Capitalism ruins everything it touches.
In the article, they outline how Blue sky is resistant to that path through the PBLLC structure and ability to move your account when you don’t like the web site.
Time will tell if this model works in practice but it could be interesting as an alternative to Twitter without the usability issues normally associated with federation.
I won’t knock BlueSky for trying. I think it will go well to replace Twitter, and run strong for some years. I’m still a bit on the skeptical side, especially until we see the ActivityTracker protocol on a non-BlueSky server in action, that BlueSky won’t be bought out and puppeted by some wealthy group.
I can see a potential path for it’s downfall.
- A competing service starts using AT and starts to get popular.
- BS starts losing money and slowly steers AT protocol to be more friendly to themselves and less friendly to competition.
- Competition forks AT, fragmenting the communities and the whole thing implodes.
You see this ad disguised as an article on the Intercept? so no, it’s not billionaire proof.
also as per Betteridge’s law of headlines “Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.”
This imo, was a PR statement about their upcoming release of their sandbox environment.
@da_peda They explicitly allow hate speech. There is no world in which I will put myself in a social media space that allows that ever again.
Bluesky is just a knock-off version of Mastodon that is for profit. It claims to be decentralized yet the only instance running on their AT Protocol is Bluesky. Plus I’ve heard they plan on having an algorithm based feed, which just sounds like exactly what I’m trying to avoid.
It… It’s already backed by billionaires. Owned by billionaires. How is this a question?
While Mastodon is a scrappy nonprofit, Bluesky PBLLC is a for-profit startup.
JFC. Was The Intercept always this bad?
Why all the Bluesky hype? I’m OOTL
People want a Twitter replacement because Musk is terrible. This has the legitimacy of tech start up money and Jack Dorsey who started twitter. Those are the main reasons, but it also incorporates federation tech so in theory if it catches on you can migrate servers or incorporate other services. I’m skeptical, and much of what I like about the fediverse is that it isn’t just counting the days before they can work towards profitability.
Removed by mod
I wonder how the AT protocol will compare with activitypub?
The one feature I’m aware of that I wish activitypub had is completely transferable accounts. Imagine if your Mastodon or Lemmy host did something you didn’t agree with, you could just take your full account username and settings to another federated server. I haven’t managed to get account on Blue sky yet so I don’t know what it looks like exactly. At this point though, I don’t think they have that feature implemented yet.
I think the streams project already has this functionality on Activitypub.
The point the article makes is that it requires cooperation from your first server to initiate migration to a second one. But seems a little bit grasping for issues to me when they assume people would lock that down.
That’s pretty cool. I didn’t know that was on the roadmap
