Is Bluesky Billionaire-Proof? (The Intercept)

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.
I wonder if because of decentralization the fediverse apps like Lemmy are insulated from going more than two more bullet points further past the "you are here"
- That is the hope... Lemmy and other Fediverse servers will still have challenges ahead of it in the future, including combatting botspam, targeted attacks to force servers offline (through DDoS, threats of lawsuit, etc.).
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.
Enshittification

@dapeda 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.

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.

Ian Betteridge is on Fediverse, by the way :D @ianbetteridge@writing.exchange

It... It's already backed by billionaires. Owned by billionaires. How is this a question?

Can't be ruined by billionaires if it's already in that state upon its creation taps forehead

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.

I’ve been on there for a couple weeks now. I think they will likely introduce ads at some point. But for now it’s a nice little ad free space.
As for the feeds, they just introduced custom feeds so you can pick and choose what feeds you want to see. All the feeds are open source as well so you can see the details of each feed, and make your own if you like.
Initially the only feed was What’s Hot which was posts with 12+ likes. Now I have 10 or so custom feeds I can switch between. It’s not perfect but it’s a step in the right direction. My big looming concern is how they will eventually monetize
- But why use it over Mastodon?

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.

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.

That's pretty cool. I didn't know that was on the roadmap