Well that didn’t take long. Looks like they’re going the discord route and locking uploads + basic customization behind a subscription. You know, because we don’t already have enough of those.
Bluesky is working on a premium subscription that will add features like higher-quality video uploads and some profile customization options.
If they want to keep existing they are going to need to make money somehow. Cosmetics and power user features without any ads would be the most favorable, right?
It’s that or donations, I guess. But with the people running it, I don’t think they’d crowdfund a lot of money.
If only there was an already existing federated microblog that somehow figured this out a decade ago! Maybe BlueSky and ATP would work better if, you know, it wasn’t entirely centralized as it currently is.
Definitely. The fact that it’s centralized will eventually lead to ads anyway. That’s why they can’t throw millions at something like Mastodon or Lemmy, because then they can’t control it when it’s mass adopted.
I feel you can support a few thousand users as a hobby. Hundred of thousands, rapidly trending towards millions? Get the fuck out of here. I’d question your motives quite a bit harder if you were running a social media site at a loss and seemed to have no true desire to change that.
Mastodon supports over 10 million accounts because ActivityPub is actually decentralized instead of BlueSky/ATP’s “I have the concept of plan.”
Mastodon itself gets about $21,000 per month through Patreon alone, and Mastodon.world gets about $900 per month. They’re not running the services for free. Also, there are currently just under 1 million active users - a far cry from the 10 million you quoted.
If they were a true decentralized platform they wouldn’t need to worry as much about monetization, but that never really was what they cared about. It’s another centralized corpo dom daddy that you suckers will fall for time and time again.
One would think that, if they wanted to be a “centralized corp dom daddy,” they wouldn’t have added federation to the software. It’s not like there’s a massive market for federated social media in particular that rivals that of Big Tech platforms. Most people have no idea what federation even means, and they don’t care.
We have yet to see any decentralization of Bluesky, and I doubt we will.
They get quite a bit of money from donations. At least, .world and .social used to when I checked last year. I don’t see bluesky getting the benefit of charity.
is bluesky without ads?
At the moment, but this piece of news came out today so it’s not looking good: https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/05/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-is-reshaping-social-media-but-advertising-isnt-off-the-table/
I would not even call it enshittification, this actually seems like a good trade off. How else they would make money? Ads? If they run ads that would be instant no from me
People somehow think this stuff costs nothing I guess. The era of everything free on the internet has really made people blind to the fact this all costs money, one way or another.
I better never see you complain about adblock or YouTube Premium. ✌️
Lemmy instances run off donations.
It’s degradation of service, no new benefits, and it will only get worse over time. This is textbook lock in and enshittify.
Because it’s the only way the service can continue to exist. I don’t understand where people think the money to run these things come from. It’s either advertising or subscriptions. Bandwidth is not free, storage is not free the idea that you can host a service that lets literally anyone just constantly upload a continuous stream of whatever fucking dumb garbage is in their head for the day without ever asking for any kind of monetary value is the thoughts of the mentally incompetent.
It sounds like most of the features are still going to be free they’re just going to offer higher quality and some other perks if you pay so that they can actually keep running the damn service
I would gladly host myself.
But at that point a single user mastodon instance would be better.
Lol except that’s not true at all. There are many other ways to pay the bills. Like here, for example.
But then you’ll bring up how “it’s different” and I agree, but that is a new and different discussion.
How does “here” pay the bills?
The most straightforward answer is that anyone can spin up their own “here” for family and friends in about 20 minutes, and they don’t need to worry about anyone else footing the bill.
Or the larger instances take donations, which go towards server costs.
So you’re saying pass on the cost to the individual? You know it’s not a one-and-done kind of deal, right? Someone has to maintain the service.
How is essentially exploiting someone’s passion as free labor any better? Is it okay because it’s your family member working for free? Is his knowledge and time not worth anything to you?
It also has the cost of how fragmented the service has become. And is a large part of why Lemmy failed to take over for Reddit despite the amazing chance it was given. It’s not that people didn’t care enough, it’s that the experience on Lemmy is garbage from a ux perspective. People don’t care about self hosting or Federation they want One login one URL one place to find everything
Agree with you 100%.
Pretty much this, I’d be willing to bet that even the most popular Lemmy instance likely has half or less of the active users and daily added content compared to where blue sky is right now.
Sure Blue Sky could Federate as far as I’m aware it is possible I think they technically have a back end for that somewhere but it wouldn’t have gained popularity like that because normally users absolutely hate the ux of multiple instances. To be honest I kind of do as well I’m here because I’m not going to use Reddit anymore. But the ux of finding content on Lemmy is atrocious. So many spread out instances tons of duplicated content between them but you kind of need to follow a lot of them for the non-duplicated content and just kind of find a way to deal with the duplicate cross-posted threads between instances… even then finding stuff can be annoying it’s just not a good experience
That is the point. It depends what instance, and there are various answers.
Some strong “concept of a plan” energy you have there.
So either you misunderstood or you’re just purposely being misleading. They aren’t saying “locking uploads” would be part of this, they’re saying you’d just be able to do higher quality uploads.
Right. There’s a difference between enshitification and adding features that just aren’t free.
Limiting the quality of uploads for non subscribers isn’t adding a feature.
Hosting images is not free though, and the cost of it scales with the quality of the images. People that host Mastodon also have to manage excessive disk space usage, and if you want to use more of it, compensating the entity that provides this storage, whether a company or a person, is not unreasonable.
I hope none of you ever complain about adblock because hosting isn’t free.
I would not complain. Things cost money. In other news, water is wet.
From what I understand, the quality of uploads is already limited presumably because they can’t afford better servers with no income.
Adding better quality uploads at a price is adding a feature, not degrading an existing one.
Subscriptions are much better than it is being ad-supported.
Otherwise the clients are the advertiser’s, not the users.
Discord eventually started adding sponsors, so this won’t age well
Literally the same logic as with streaming services not having commercials. Why would you ever think they won’t just say fuck you and do both?
I was arguing what the case should be for sustainability.
I agree with you, as long as the goal of investment is short term gain and pump and dump the flavour of the month, enshitification will continue.
I think this was known to be the gameplan beforehand for Bluesky so this isn’t a trick, bait and switch or anything like that. I think it can be reasonable to support the network and infrastructure with subscriptions. However, there are no guarantees as to what the subscription would provide or that the rates will not increase randomly without warning. So long as BlueSky users know that.
A Donation-based model might net less, but it will be centered around what people can pay.
I expected that and vastly prefer that over ads. I also support my home server in the fediverse, and I encourage people to provide monetary support to their homeservers and most used servers.
ITT: People just want shit for free. Servers cost money, you goobers.
Uh, are you paying a subscription for Lemmy?
I actually donate a few dollars on patron and for a few other projects.
I do my service and give a dollar a month or something to lemm.ee
Oh, absolutely! I pay for startrek.website too. My point what that the Fediverse works just fine when people volunteer their time and money to keep it running. The only reason you would need a subscription is to generate a profit to pay the executives.
I’m not the one complaining about having to pay for goods and services. If lemmy required a sub I would evaluate it against competing products and make a decision.
I would not, however, make a post complaining about a company trying to fund its operations.
My point was that the Fediverse works just fine without a subscription, the people upset about a subscription are not upset about the cost, but about what it represents (or more specifically, what it doesn’t).
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Maybe it’s time we start restructuring our economy and society to not require everything to have a profit motive?
I mean ya, sure. I have no particular love for capitalism. That is the economic system we currently exist in though, for better or worse.
Except it is not. Bluesky can decide for itself how much profit to aim for.
Except it is not.
Lol. It is. We live in a capitalist economy. That’s not up for debate, it’s a fact.
I just don’t see how a social media site can be healthy/safe AND profitable.
If it has to make money it’s going to sell user data and force narratives, and the entire argument that it has to make money allows human beings to shrug responsibility for exploiting their userbase.
Even if you take out the profit motive they still have costs.
Obviously in a non capitalist system our taxes would actually pay for public goods and services.
We wouldn’t make a social media entity pay their own operating costs if we were intentionally funding it as a public service.
Just like PBS and NPR.
The Fediverse offers a superior experience and it doesn’t even have profit motive!
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No ads, don’t sell my data, cancel and delete data anytime, and I’d pay a fee. Running servers ain’t free. Plus the added benefit of keeping the trolls at bay.
I mean, could have been hell of a lot worse.
What are they supposed to do without ads? Locking things behind a paywall that nobody really needs (hello discord) sounds pretty reasonable.What are they supposed to do without ads?
Decentralize/federate like they claimed they were planning to do?
And hows that gonna help them again?
we see how Decentralization made lemmy and mastodon so much more popular than bluesky.
the only thing that did was make actually start using it so much more annoying and confusing to do than it should be.It’s not that confusing.
And hows that gonna help them again?
By vastly reducing infrastructure costs, so that they don’t have to resort to advertising/enshittification for funding. I thought it was pretty clear from context.
Those costs don’t go away by being spread out. Decentralized or not, hosting costs money. Many fediverse hosts are scraping by or out of pocket, and they’re spending their free time on maintenance and administration. We’d be hugely ungrateful to them by pretending that’s not the case.
I’m not making an argument for big centralized social media, or I wouldn’t be here – but I’m a “premium subscriber” to my Lemmy instance.
You’re just going to get angry “disagreement” downvotes. They’re all in the honeymoon phase. We’ll have the “I told you so” phase soon enough.
What’s with the “My opinion is better than yours” attitude? Can’t we just have nuanced discussion?
I don’t know why you think your post is better or fundamentally different to the one you were replying to.
You’re either the product or the consumer, or the company goes under.
Or in fediverse parlance: you’re either a contributor or a leach. If you don’t get enough contributors, then the leaches kill the platform.
This situation should surprise no one. Bluesky has exactly the same business model problems old Twatter had. Expecting any other outcome than enshitification or acquisition for propaganda purposes is insanity.
Laughs in mastodon
And then people complain about paying subscriptions and not having enough to live on. My god people, no one needs to pay for this. This shit didn’t even exist 2 months ago.
Of course they are, them doing so was never in doubt. They’re running on Venture Capital and sooner or later the investors want their money back. Bluesky has to figure out how to do that and transition their users into to before they run out of money.
