"…and does not depend on venture capital to survive,” wrote Rochko, subtly jabbing at one of Bluesky’s potential weaknesses with that last bit.
it wasn’t a subtle jab, it’s the primary reason everything else has gone to shit. it is the MAIN selling point of the fediverse.
Bluesky plans to generate revenue via subscriptions at some later point and by providing other paid services, like access to custom domains.
This looks like a very important point. I doubt we’ll see true federation with “access to custom domains”.
Its so blatantly obvious that bluesky is already looking for ways to make profit. The enshittification cycles are getting shorter and shorter. Soon they will try to travel back in time to create even more shit.
From what I can gather, they aren’t selling the ability to link custom domains as your user handle. They are acting as a domain registrar to allow users to buy domains and link them to their handle in one step, then likely skimming some profits off the top. Imagine they sell a “custom username with domain” for $20 per year, they pay the wholesale fee (around $9 for a .com) and pocket the rest. That seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Ah yes “perfectly reasonable” to give away control over your supposedly freely federated service to some profit motivated company. Toddler ass logic. They can revoke that right at any moment for whatever reason.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but servers cost money. Developers cost money. Bandwidth costs money. If you want to run a reasonably successful social media company, you need money.
Bundling domain registration (already a thing) with custom usernames (already a thing) and taking a profit from that transaction is not enshittification. Enshittification would be if they took away the ability to link your own domain and required everyone to buy domains through Bluesky. This would just be giving less savvy users the ability to link a domain to their username without having to learn DNS.
Enshittification would be if they took away the ability to link your own domain and required everyone to buy domains through Bluesky.
And that (including other restrictions) is exactly what they will do as soon as anyone that is selfhosting does something that they or their investors dont like. Whats so hard to understand about this.
Ofcourse they need money, but the problems is that the money will be dictating their entire decision making progress. Thats how for profit companies work. If you think companies are your friends then im sorry for you.
it is the MAIN selling point of the fediverse.
Debatable, I would say it’s the ability to selfhost and not be under the mercy of “the platform” or the admin’s subjective morals, you can also not federate and make the place your own
do you think any of that could happen if it was beholden to capital?
Not necessarily, it all depends on the software license, people don’t usually care about who funds their software, ( even if they’re funding it themselves with their data ), plus If we’re talking about selling points, saying that you can control your online presence is a much successful sell than saying it’s not VC funded, like I never used that argument when I try to convince my friends to hop on Mastodon
Edit: but I’m not saying it’s not a valid argument, it’s very valid
Even if Mastodon and other Fediverse platform gains are 1% of the gains of BlueSky or anything else, it’s still cause for celebration and to welcome new friendly faces with open arms.
When the Reddit API-calypse happened, I don’t think anyone expected Lemmy to have more users than Reddit or anywhere even close to a similar number. But Lemmy.ca went from around 40 active users in April 2023 to hundreds, and then to 2k over 3 months, most people being friendly and ready for something different.
Quantity isn’t everything. There is an innumerable amount of things that could be better about Mastodon, Lemmy and other Fediverse software and sure, mass-adoption could help with niche content. However the way the Fediverse is set up, it is resistant to all the sacrifices other platforms had to make in the long run to be more profitable. Musk-boi could “buy” Mastodon, Spez could “buy” Lemmy.world and ml, and Zucker-bot could “buy” Pixelfed tomorrow, but that wouldn’t stop anyone from forking those platforms and leaving the main instances. The distributed nature makes it hard for a monopolist to capture.
Musk-boi could “buy” Mastodon, Spez could buy Lemmy.world and ml, and Zucker-bot could “buy” Pixelfed tomorrow, but that wouldn’t stop anyone from forking those platforms and leaving the main instances.
Or going someplace in the Fediverse that’s neither Mastodon nor Lemmy nor Pixelfed.
People just very badly want to not know about other fediverse platforms for some reason.
Reason #1: It overloads them mentally. It was hard enough to wrap their minds around Mastodon not being the one website they thought it is.
Reason #2: They got so used to their nice and cosy and fluffy and friendly woolly mammoth being the entire Fediverse, and everything they ever interact with being Mastodon, that everything they (might) have to interact with that is not Mastodon is too much of a disturbance. There being something else in the Fediverse other than Mastodon simply feels too wrong.
Quantity isn’t everything
That right there hits the nail on the head. There is a certain critical mass, an activity level that makes satisfy most discussion needs for most users. It’s a tiny fraction of the total traffic of a place like Reddit or Twitter.
But if we have that, and keep the quality level up, we can succeed.Success to me doesn’t mean killing Reddit and Twitter. It means creating a place where smart people can come and find enough content and discussion that they don’t need Reddit and Twitter.
is no one calling it the X-odus and why?
The fediverse will have the same growths as most foss. It will start slow and continue to grow slowly forever. It will always be a bit behind the cutting edge but it will never get worse only get better. Its like evolution it gets forked the best fork wins the reat die repeat.
Every enshitification cycle we will gain a few people and once we have them we have they stay a lot longer than most other platforms. We will not win through mass adoption but through a long slow a painfull proccess of gradual accumulation.
And at some point it will become dominant eg blender, a bunch of standards, and linux in the server space. The tech companies live on the edge forever trying to outrun the snail that will kill them instantly when it touches them. Foss is coming it cannot be stopped it will find them and it will kill them
The fediverse needs to outlast BlueSky, so that when its VC backers call time and demand a profitable exit (i.e. enshittification), there’ll still be a fediverse.
What makes you think VC won’t have another product in the pipeline to take over from most users exiting BlueSky? Just like they had BS ready to scoop up most of the Xodus.
Not a critique really, the Fediverse will still be there and will get some people every time.
I love the Fediverse and see it as the only reasonable choice. Everywhere else you must eat shit and like it.
I’m a bit late on this one, why’s there been another exodus?
From Wikipedia:
In November 2024, following Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 United States presidential election and Elon Musk’s nomination as a co-executive of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency, Bluesky experienced a surge in new user registrations as people migrated from other social platforms, particularly Twitter. Many came from the United States, United Kingdom (where Bluesky had previously seen growth during the 2024 UK riots following Musk’s commentary), and Canada. The social app added over 4 million registered users in that week, becoming the most popular app in the US App Store and Play Store.
X is full of white supremacists.
Has been for over a decade
Maybe I should say it’s reached a real tipping point.
I think I saw two or three “exodus from Twitter”, every time most of the users go back after two weeks or so.
Most definitely go back, but some stay, and those who do stay, cause a growth over time. The activity stays somewhat elevated and never goes back to exactly where it was. It’s always just a little bit higher.
Most of the exodus where coming from iOS ecosystem, mostly Americans ig. Nonetheless, the destruction of Xitter will give fediverse the momentum to grow. Achieving 800k active users is wild (tho i do notice some spams too, which I wish there’ll be easier tool sets to deal with them). Now, let’s see which approach of social media will win in the long run: the Bluesky or Mastodon.
Twitter/X should be called Twix and a tweet should be a twext.
I’m embarrassingly proud of this.
