this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2023
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Is Bluesky Billionaire-Proof? (The Intercept) (theintercept.com)
submitted 2 years ago by da_peda@feddit.de to c/technology@lemmy.ml
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[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 28 points 2 years ago (4 children)

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
[–] CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml 21 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] JillyB@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago (3 children)

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.

[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] JillyB@lemmy.ml 5 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I can see a potential path for it's downfall.

  1. A competing service starts using AT and starts to get popular.
  2. BS starts losing money and slowly steers AT protocol to be more friendly to themselves and less friendly to competition.
  3. Competition forks AT, fragmenting the communities and the whole thing implodes.
[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 years ago

That is also part of people's worry if one instance gets way too big on Lemmy, Mastodon etc. There is potential to change their federation scheme, closing themselves off from outside servers through unique features made incompatible to federate, eventually returning to a centralized model of its own.

[–] robador51@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

If the API standard is dictated by a for profit, there's always the chance that at some point it'll incorporate unfavourable features or impose limitations. To me Chrome/Chromium comes to mind, or even 'embrace, extend, extinguish'. I'm not familiar with pbllc though, it might be different, but I'm sceptical all the same.

[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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"

[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.).

[–] LimitedBrain@beehaw.org 3 points 2 years ago

I'm no expert but I'll go through it. DDoS can be mitigated, but it's a scaling issue. Usually it's a problem for medium sized services. Lawsuits will fall mostly on individual server owners. And even then, the links are being hosted elsewhere. Botspam is a huge issue. I expect that to be one main problem. And also monetization. That will also be a big problem.

[–] cavemeat@beehaw.org 2 points 2 years ago

Enshittification

[–] Ada@kbin.social 21 points 2 years ago

@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.

[–] loki@lemmy.ml 18 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] noodlejetski@beehaw.org 1 points 2 years ago

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

[–] Kichae@kbin.social 16 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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

[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 6 points 2 years ago

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

[–] bigbox@lemmy.ml 15 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] 3rd_eye@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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

[–] bigbox@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 years ago (1 children)

But why use it over Mastodon?

[–] 3rd_eye@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

I haven’t tried mastodon yet, I will at some point. BS has a good vibe so far. If that changes I’ll move on to something else

[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 years ago

While Mastodon is a scrappy nonprofit, Bluesky PBLLC is a for-profit startup.

JFC. Was The Intercept always this bad?

[–] CodeCompost@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Why all the Bluesky hype? I'm OOTL

[–] Buttermilk@lemmy.ml 11 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I wonder how the AT protocol will compare with activitypub?

[–] Cal@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

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.

[–] nutomic@lemmy.ml 3 points 2 years ago (1 children)

I think the streams project already has this functionality on Activitypub.

[–] Buttermilk@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

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.

[–] Cal@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

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