this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2023
27 points (100.0% liked)

Technology

34842 readers
15 users here now

This is the official technology community of Lemmy.ml for all news related to creation and use of technology, and to facilitate civil, meaningful discussion around it.

Ask in DM before posting product reviews or ads. All such posts otherwise are subject to removal.

Rules:

1: All Lemmy rules apply

2: Do not post low effort posts

3: NEVER post naziped*gore stuff

4: Always post article URLs or their archived version URLs as sources, NOT screenshots. Help the blind users.

5: personal rants of Big Tech CEOs like Elon Musk are unwelcome (does not include posts about their companies affecting wide range of people)

6: no advertisement posts unless verified as legitimate and non-exploitative/non-consumerist

7: crypto related posts, unless essential, are disallowed

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
MinutePhrase@lemmy.ml
27
Is Bluesky Billionaire-Proof? (The Intercept) (theintercept.com)
submitted 1 year ago by da_peda@feddit.de to c/technology@lemmy.ml
24 comments fedilink hide all child comments
top 24 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 27 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Right in the article they are discussing adding ads and premium subscriptions features in the future.

I can already see the timeline for BlueSky over the next few years:

  • Receive startup venture capital
  • Provide a useful, user-friendly service
  • Grow a userbase <-- (you are here)
  • Add a few more useful features, continue growing
  • Dominate the market, run at a loss
  • Add less useful features like ads, premium features, subscriptions
  • People complain, but most are too hooked in to leave
  • The useful features added earlier start getting removed, content gets sanitized <-- (Imgur, Reddit is here)
  • Big fundraising campaign, IPO, or bought out by big corp or the melon husk of the day.
  • Content quality goes way downhill, actively making life harder for users, volunteers and staff, bots rampant, more stupid features, monetization monetization monetization <-- (Twitter is here)
  • People leave for another useful, user-friendly service
[–] CalcProgrammer1@lemmy.ml 20 points 1 year ago

Any service backed by a business person will follow this timeline. This is why we need to move to self-hosted, federated, and community based platforms. Capitalism ruins everything it touches.

[–] JillyB@lemmy.ml 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

In the article, they outline how Blue sky is resistant to that path through the PBLLC structure and ability to move your account when you don't like the web site.

Time will tell if this model works in practice but it could be interesting as an alternative to Twitter without the usability issues normally associated with federation.

[–] robador51@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago

If the API standard is dictated by a for profit, there's always the chance that at some point it'll incorporate unfavourable features or impose limitations. To me Chrome/Chromium comes to mind, or even 'embrace, extend, extinguish'. I'm not familiar with pbllc though, it might be different, but I'm sceptical all the same.

[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I won't knock BlueSky for trying. I think it will go well to replace Twitter, and run strong for some years. I'm still a bit on the skeptical side, especially until we see the ActivityTracker protocol on a non-BlueSky server in action, that BlueSky won't be bought out and puppeted by some wealthy group.

[–] JillyB@lemmy.ml 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I can see a potential path for it's downfall.

  1. A competing service starts using AT and starts to get popular.
  2. BS starts losing money and slowly steers AT protocol to be more friendly to themselves and less friendly to competition.
  3. Competition forks AT, fragmenting the communities and the whole thing implodes.
[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

That is also part of people's worry if one instance gets way too big on Lemmy, Mastodon etc. There is potential to change their federation scheme, closing themselves off from outside servers through unique features made incompatible to federate, eventually returning to a centralized model of its own.

[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wonder if because of decentralization the fediverse apps like Lemmy are insulated from going more than two more bullet points further past the "you are here"

[–] Rentlar@lemmy.ca 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That is the hope... Lemmy and other Fediverse servers will still have challenges ahead of it in the future, including combatting botspam, targeted attacks to force servers offline (through DDoS, threats of lawsuit, etc.).

[–] LimitedBrain@beehaw.org 3 points 1 year ago

I'm no expert but I'll go through it. DDoS can be mitigated, but it's a scaling issue. Usually it's a problem for medium sized services. Lawsuits will fall mostly on individual server owners. And even then, the links are being hosted elsewhere. Botspam is a huge issue. I expect that to be one main problem. And also monetization. That will also be a big problem.

[–] cavemeat@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Enshittification

[–] Ada@kbin.social 20 points 1 year ago

@da_peda They explicitly allow hate speech. There is no world in which I will put myself in a social media space that allows that ever again.

[–] loki@lemmy.ml 18 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You see this ad disguised as an article on the Intercept? so no, it's not billionaire proof.

also as per Betteridge's law of headlines "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."

This imo, was a PR statement about their upcoming release of their sandbox environment.

[–] noodlejetski@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Ian Betteridge is on Fediverse, by the way :D @ianbetteridge@writing.exchange

[–] Kichae@kbin.social 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It... It's already backed by billionaires. Owned by billionaires. How is this a question?

[–] bionicjoey@lemmy.ca 5 points 1 year ago

Can't be ruined by billionaires if it's already in that state upon its creation taps forehead

[–] bigbox@lemmy.ml 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Bluesky is just a knock-off version of Mastodon that is for profit. It claims to be decentralized yet the only instance running on their AT Protocol is Bluesky. Plus I've heard they plan on having an algorithm based feed, which just sounds like exactly what I'm trying to avoid.

[–] 3rd_eye@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I’ve been on there for a couple weeks now. I think they will likely introduce ads at some point. But for now it’s a nice little ad free space.

As for the feeds, they just introduced custom feeds so you can pick and choose what feeds you want to see. All the feeds are open source as well so you can see the details of each feed, and make your own if you like.

Initially the only feed was What’s Hot which was posts with 12+ likes. Now I have 10 or so custom feeds I can switch between. It’s not perfect but it’s a step in the right direction. My big looming concern is how they will eventually monetize

[–] bigbox@lemmy.ml 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

But why use it over Mastodon?

[–] 3rd_eye@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

I haven’t tried mastodon yet, I will at some point. BS has a good vibe so far. If that changes I’ll move on to something else

[–] OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 year ago

While Mastodon is a scrappy nonprofit, Bluesky PBLLC is a for-profit startup.

JFC. Was The Intercept always this bad?

[–] CodeCompost@lemmy.ml 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Why all the Bluesky hype? I'm OOTL

[–] Buttermilk@lemmy.ml 10 points 1 year ago

People want a Twitter replacement because Musk is terrible. This has the legitimacy of tech start up money and Jack Dorsey who started twitter. Those are the main reasons, but it also incorporates federation tech so in theory if it catches on you can migrate servers or incorporate other services. I'm skeptical, and much of what I like about the fediverse is that it isn't just counting the days before they can work towards profitability.

[–] Cal@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

That's pretty cool. I didn't know that was on the roadmap