They captured some hype but nowadays you often see people complain that the userbase isn’t diverse and that all they talk about is US politics, there’s lots of dormant accounts and the active user statistics have been looking pretty bleak since early 2025.
Assuming they don’t actually have 100M in funding already secured (which i doubt) I think there’s some doubt over how long they’ll actually be able to continue operating this way.
TORFdot0@lemmy.world 2 days ago
If twitter but with less right wing voices is what the people wanted then they will be sorely disappointed when bluesky enshittifies with no real recourse to prevent it. If everyone just hops on over to blacksky or whatever other 3rd party relay exists, they’ve still got the same problem. All the power resides in a single entity. Bluesky’s basic defense of their platform is that if they enshittify then ATProto allows some other benevolent corporation to take their place but has one major flaw. Corporations are not benevolent
Auth@lemmy.world 1 day ago
You’re assuming the only way to run the network is to be benevolent? Do you think there is no way they can raise enough revenue to cover costs without enshittifying? Normal people have a pretty high tolerance for monetization. Premium subs, ads in app purchases will probably easily cover running costs and I wouldnt consider that to be enshittified.
Also the amount of right wing voices on the platform doesnt matter. The tools make it easy to block them out.
TORFdot0@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I am skeptical that it can grow to be a network the size of twitter, be ran as a for-profit, and not enshittify. I can’t think of a single example that hasn’t. Bluesky has ran as a public benefit corporation so far, but it has to keep the lights on somehow.
It took twitter years to run somewhat profitably. Even then Twitter was enshittified before Musk bought it. Premium subs are probably the least enshittified way to raise revenue, but ads and algorithms meant to raise engagement towards those ads are very much enshittification in action. That “normal people” have a high level of monetization they are willing to tolerate, is just grease on the wheels toward enshittification.
I admittedly have a limited understanding of the full operation of ATProto so please correct me if wrong. Appviews/lists/feeds are supposed to be the defense of ad/algorithm enshittification, anyone could write an appview with a different algorithm.
And this is why I assume that the network can only be run without enshittification, is by a benevolent provider. If Bluesky becomes hostile to an Appview that allows users to bypass ads or engagement farming, users can move their PDS to another relay that isn’t hostile to it. But there still remains the underlying reason that Bluesky would theoretically have become hostile to it. I don’t see how blacksky, for instance, wouldn’t also have to eventually take the same steps.
Auth@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Majority of the companies dont enshitify, we only notice the ones who do. The hosting costs wont be the majority of the costs it will be staff mainly moderation. Because bluesky has better tools for users to moderation it might lower that burdern. All that being said I hate bluesky and everything it is. It feels like its wearing open source decentralized culture as a skin to lure people in.