cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/27733087
Social networking startup and X competitor Bluesky is working on subscriptions. The company first announced plans to develop a new revenue stream based on the subscription model when detailing its $15 million Series A back in October. Now, mockups teasing the upcoming Bluesky subscription, along with a list of possible features, have been published to Bluesky’s GitHub.
$8/72 per month/year seems too high for most people.
Had Twitter added a paid tier early on as it scaled up - when it was still largely the only short form blogging platform - we could potentially have avoided…so much shit we now live in. Twitter was never profitable, so it just kept adding ads until that wasn’t sustainable. And then dipshit bought it and really turned it into the nazi place.
Twitter always had problems, but I think we can generally agree it wasn’t a pretty good service for lots of things. Breaking news, sports, even science, etc. It had actual (not amazing, but existing) moderation. There’s maybe a world out there where a Twitter that isn’t owned by some idiot doesn’t help influence an election that we now have to deal with for decades to come.
That’s all wishful thinking, of course, and Twitter is not THE REASON the U.S. is trash. But there was a path where Twitter didn’t turn into just Truth Social 2.0.
Adding a paid tier to Bluesky might sound like “enshitification,” but if it simply keeps the company afloat then there’s potentially less chance of it becoming Twitter 2.0, so to speak. Otherwise, there’s probably a straight path to ads then creditors calling in debts then selling then elon just buys it, too.
Twitter was never profitable, so it just kept adding ads until that wasn’t sustainable.
Okay, so Bluesky started the same way, with no plan to monetize from the get-go, waiting to monetize later. So far, they’ve not been profitable yet, either. They keep taking money but until seemingly just now have not articulated a plan on how to pay any of it back. That’s exactly like Twitter, honestly.
I think the bigger issue is who they took money from and the kind of investment returns they expect. Because if this model doesn’t pan out enough for their greedy little hearts, they’ll demand ads and worse, too.
Because of capitalism’s never-ending desire for more, I expect to see both subscriptions and ads.
Well done everyone, you jumped ship from one pile of shit over to something that isn’t quite a pile of shit yet
Gee whiz wow who could have possibly seen this coming.
But people have been assuring me that it is a federated protocol, so I guess I’ll just join another instance. I’m sure there is a list somewhere… It’s coming… Any day now…
Sped ran it here lol
Fedi is the future, most people just don’t know it yet.
People keep acting like hosting this shit and developing it is free. Its not. Donate to your instance and the development of the back end and all the opensource software you use. Bluesky has 20 million people using it it’s no surorise they are looking for a profit model that won’t scare the base off. I would rather it be subs instead of endless ads and algorithm tweaks.
Preach it, that money is far more well spent on supporting a community.
I am happy to pay for a service I’m using and getting value from if the price is fair, and if they can find a model where it’s sustainable with some % paid and some still free so that it’s available to everyone, and do that without ads or data scraping or treating users as a commodity I think that’s as close as we’ll get to tech utopia.
The “users are the product” tech model needs to die. We will need to start paying for our stuff. But I think that will create a better internet.
- Bluesky+ profile badge
- Custom app icons
- Profile customizations
- Higher video upload limits
- High quality video resolution
- Inline post translations (coming soon)
- Post analytics (coming soon)
- Bookmark folders (coming soon)
These seem fair ideas? They’re not paywalling critical functionality and you can’t run a massive social network for free. It’s not the same attitude as the wider Fediverse, and I understand why that rubs people the wrong way, but it’s hardly outrageous.
It’s refreshing to see them not including “Ad-free” as a feature
… and this is why I’m glad I’m just on the fediverse
Just playing devil’s advocate here, but they have to make money somehow, right? It’s either this or advertisements. And I fucking hate advertisements. I say the only way they could truly drop the ball is if they opt for both subscriptions and advertisements. The only other option is donations. And I honestly can’t see that as a viable strategy for something like Bluesky.
Donation model would be completely viable if they actually allowed other people to run federated servers.
But it’s been a VC Trojan horse from the start.
Isn’t a subscription on a free platform just donating with extra steps? Either way it’s optional but with one of the options you get perks. I’m not discounting the obviously shady things they are doing, I’m just pointing out that they’re basically the same thing from the perspective of the consumer but you get bonus shit.
Donation model works for Wikipedia and they’ve got a fuckin warchest of god damned money.
If fuckin Bomis Gooner Jimmy Wales can figure it out, so can we.
Just playing devil’s advocate: Nobody forced them to take loans from Venture Capital firms. They could be developing just as slowly as Mastodon, but instead they took the influx of cash so they could “move fast and break things.”
It’s solidly their choice to have taken on so much investment money without a plan to pay it back yet. Leaning on growth and then figuring out how to actually monetize it down the road, which is literally not a different path than any previous social media. These are choices they made.
They could have easily found different sources of funding, worked with smaller staff, smaller funding, and slower progress.
They’re literally following the path of every previous social media ecosystem. Get investor cash, enshittify to pay back, profit.
Well… my wallet is certainly hurting after the latest $0 price increase on my $0 Mastodon subscription.
(kidding, in fact, I actually donate monthly to my instance.)
Quite. Servers aren’t free and someone needs to pay the bills and increasingly distribute the moderation load. I’m happy with my Mastodon and following a few federated accounts on threads and bsky. But I’m not going to someone they are a bad person for choosing something that is familiar yet a little different while escaping x/itter.
Lmao and all these idiots will gladly pay it because it’s a slick corporate product, and they’ll turn CryptoQueen Jay Graber into another fucking billionaire leech on our fucking system.
Great job everyone, meanwhile Mastodon still exists and you won’t be contributing to building another billionaire crytpo freak to control our country’s politics by using it. Also, all Mastodon features will continue to be free to everyone.
Jay Graber literally got her start in tech working on Zcash, a privacy-focused crypto-currency. She was happy to make a deal with Blockchain Capital, a Venture Capital firm made up entirely of cryptobros and ‘effective altruism’ freaks.
But I mean, this is America, where we say “Fuck community projects!” the corporations I hate and bitch about all the time pamper me like a baby and I must have that pampering!
“Corporations rob us of our dignity and independence.”
why does that mean she’s a crypto queen? the hype around crypto clearly makes it a stable job to get started with, and being junior developer doesn’t mean she was a magnate at all. i don’t get the characterization of her or why there are much more reasons to hate her than reasons to hate gabe newell.
But I mean, this is America, where we say “Fuck community projects!” the corporations I hate and bitch about all the time pamper me like a baby and I must have that pampering!
well, the sad truth of corporate america is that corporations just have more capital and resources to make for a better user experience.
she’s a crypto queen
Gunpowder, gelatin
Dynamite with a laser beam
Guaranteed to blow your mind
Anytiiiime!
the hype around crypto clearly makes it a stable job to get started with
You’re gonna have a hard time convincing me anyone who sees crypto as a “stable job” and not “a fucking con” isn’t sucked into this psycho TESCREAL bullshit and that they won’t start being a fucking pox on our nation like Musk,who is also a TESCREAL freak.
Jay Graber was personally chosen by Jack Dorsey. Jack Dorsey is all in on TESCREAL, too.
You’re telling me she’s completely uninfluenced by the psycho freaks surrounding her and their unhinged ideologies? I just don’t god damned buy it. Those views are almost endemic in Silicon Valley at this point.
TESCREAL
Never heard of this, it sounds terrible from a brief web search.
Here’s a TESCREAL adherent’s manifesto, by world’s biggest asshole Marc Andreesen:
https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
And here’s a good response to that psychotic manifesto:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2023/10/techno-optimism-is-not-something-you-should-believe-in
I mean, my instance is a testing ground run by the founding maintainer of the Fedi software the server runs on (mbin), and that person happens to be a crypto believer. His activities and communications absolutely do not sound like what you describe.
This news article I found cited by Wikipedia about Graber’s hiring doesn’t say anything about Dorsey’s choice, and it sounds like she was hired for her technical qualifications and interest in the project.
They’re really speedrunning the enshittification, aren’t they?
You forgot “it’s not my job to contribute to a community project” and “if they do enshittify it, I’ll just move to the next Big Thing, making more billionaires who screw us over in the process.”
Lol, I just got that response in another thread about them leaning in on the justification accounts because I assumed the next step would be taking existing joke accounts over like most of these platforms have done.
Bluesky is certainly speedrunning it.
Why is my cursor finding ways to delete my Bluesky account?
…and we’re back to where we started.
Shove your subscriptions up your gravy ring. Mastodon >>>>
