291–300 of 561 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you're describing there is the "actual work" which can either be done by someone else and funded by investor capital (see the beginning of this thread) or you learn to do it yourself and in return you are not beholden to investors who will eventually try to extract a profit from you and your peers. Easy is seldom truly free.
Plenty of free software is easy to install. Why should it take "actual work"?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Openness",as far as for-profit businesses are concerned, is a marketing strategy. Once enough users are locked in, there is no reason to offer a valuable feature for free.
> there is no reason to offer a valuable feature for free. Well that's of course OK with me : Bluesky should make their users pay. 10 % of users paying 1€/month, 1 % paying 10 €/month, for instance. That's ok, we're paying a service. But the API access and federation should remain free.
Nevertheless, it is my strong opinion that offering paid service is the only way to a healthy ecosystem, healthy competition, products that actually benefit the user, and the market that works as the market is supposed to (and that Big Social innovating[0] the subversion of this model is a tradegy with net negative effects on society).
Not offering paid[1] service to customers means ultimately either 1) dying or 2) making someone else your paying customer (e.g., the advertisers being offered the users as the product).[2] That “someone else”, by being the source of revenue, will dictate how the service evolves, and their interests will not be aligned with the users’ except by sheer accident.
In case of services like Bluesky, I doubt API access can be excluded from the equation, since it costs money, and when inevitably abused a lot of it, sadly.
Federation overhead could in theory be subsidized by paying customers, or there could be smart controls such as letting certain servers federate for free if it benefits paying users while charging others an honest fee[3].
Finally, let’s not forget the good old “charge for the app”. Sure, being open means someone can build another, cheaper app, and someone will use it, but believe it or not—that’s normal competition; make your app better, respect your users, turn profit.
Bluesky’s accepting large investment is a signal of not going in this direction, and is therefore worrying.
[0] It could be said that some companies (e.g., Adobe and Microsoft) did something like that earlier, subverting the market via offering a product for free by not seriously chasing pirates. When someone’s choice is between two paid products—instead of free awesome product everyone pirates vs. some mediocre paid product—the competition works much better. However, their core offers were still paid, and crucially those were not social media services that prey on our attention and anxiety.
[1] Before someone mentions the disadvantaged: offering subsidized options to those who need it is not mutually exclusive with a straightforward commercial model.
[2] There’s also 3) becoming another Wikipedia, which happens every so often… Let’s be realistic.
[3] A lot of courage would be required, as I can already hear the “walled garden” outcries.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I found it a lot easier to set up my BlueSky instance than Mastodon. Mastodon to me feels like it was built with the explicit goal to keep out anybody non-technical, and for technical people, only the type that wants to corner you at a party and discuss the deep philosophical and moral choices of your Linux desktop environment.
You didn't really set up a completely separate server that can exist without Bluesky's central servers (because that's not possible), so it's not a fair comparison. No, Mastodon was not designed to keep out anybody non-technical. In any given social circle, there is almost undoubtedly at least ONE person who can fire up a server and administrate it. You only need one sysadmin for your whole community - the rest can b…
Poor and uneducated people exist.
When Bluesky announced they were taking on large amounts of capital to handle the growth that's when I knew their days were numbered. Capital requires returns, and a lot of the degradation of the user experience in the past few years is due to catering to investors and advertisers (who are the actual customers). Decentralization as is promised is one way to mitigate this, but there's no economic incentive to go throu…
I can't remember the last time I visited Wikipedia. Genuinely don't know why anyone would use it when you have perplexity, gemini, chatGPT search, etc. at your disposal.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I feel like there's a lot of appealing to prevailing HN sentiment in this post. So much so that there's little substance. What actual things are you worried about or unhappy regarding with Bluesky? It's not perfect, and if you have problems with its decentralization posture, Christine Lemmer-Webber has a fantastic post [1] detailing her problems with the protocol. Bluesky has the AT Protocol underneath it and has inf…
| What actual things are you worried about or unhappy That it is following the same funding model that resulted in the problems we've seen. Bluesky currently doesn't generate any significant revenue. At some point they will have to in order to satisfy investors. If they were concerned about preventing the problems previous social media sites experienced, they would have sought out a different funding model. | if you…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess then Bluesky will ban alternative clients and start charging for API, a-la Musk?
They don't need to because the normies are profitable enough.
Reddit went through this around their IPO.
A similar but I think simpler approach is to just act like a celebrity or a brand. When X celebrity joins a social network, their fans follow them on that platform. When the celebrity leaves and goes elsewhere, the fans follow. The value follows the celebrity because the celebrity’s value isn’t in the content on the social network, it’s in their personal brand itself. Therefore if you’re going to invest in creating v…
>their fans follow them on that platform A percentage of their fans, and it can be a small percent. You see this phenomenon all the time on people leaving X to Bluesky they expect their audience to just follow them and the engagement to be comparable and when it just isn’t you see them either quietly come back or just cross post and pretend they’re not back.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"every user is attached to a server and the server operator holds all the power, while the user holds none" So run your own server.
How many people are running their own mail outside of large orgs or privacy/security niche? How many of those have had trouble sending mail to eg gmail?
Had to set up SPF/DKIM/DMARC, then it started working again.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Openness",as far as for-profit businesses are concerned, is a marketing strategy. Once enough users are locked in, there is no reason to offer a valuable feature for free.
> there is no reason to offer a valuable feature for free. Well that's of course OK with me : Bluesky should make their users pay. 10 % of users paying 1€/month, 1 % paying 10 €/month, for instance. That's ok, we're paying a service. But the API access and federation should remain free.
I predict Bluesky will add some form of targeted advertisements in the future once the user base has grown to a certain size. Isn't that obvious? I'd assume that's also why investors are willing to invest.
They are trying to avoid that. I hang around there pretty much. I expect premium services subscriptions will be the first try. If that works, and I think it could, that will be fine. The fact of it being a public benefit LLC makes the profitability requirement much less pressing. Also, there will be revenue opportunities from being the canonical AT Proto first mover. It’s way too early to tell, or worry.
I am, on the other hand, familiar with the likes of Blockchain Capital, from whom Bluesky has accepted 15 million dollars in Series A funding. At some point they're going to get crypto wallets and air drops integrated just like Keybase did and the profits will come out of scamming the uninformed.