this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2024
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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.
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.
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.
The "extra steps" are exactly what concerns me.
Look, I know that a lot of people find valuable community and information from platforms like Bluesky, Threads, etc. They are worlds better than the Nazi Bar that used to be Twitter. But the repeated lie that they are a part of the fediverse or that they benefit the fediverse or an open internet is cynical and misleading.
We live in a world where Mastodon exists, and is actually pretty good even though there is a learning curve to it. If we are volunteering efforts to promote a microblogging platform, I personally don't think that it should be one backed by billionaires and built for profit. They have a budget for that. the Fediverse only has us. We are the marketing department.
I think it would be really interesting to see a Peertube instance (for example) create a paid tier with better quality uploads and analytics. Those cost money to maintain. The difference is that it would exist in a federated ecosystem where everyone would be able to benefit from that content.
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.