Remix.run Logo
Remix clone Hacker News
new | show | ask | jobsGithub
▲ isodev 4 days ago

I wish Bluesky would finally announce how they plan to monetise it all. It feels like things are stuck in-between trying to be “open to the community”, gather developer momentum around ATProto, the promise of decentralisation and independence… and the unknowns of their roadmap ahead?

It’s all very nicely written but the risk of committing oneself (as a user, as a developer, as a social/marketing person, etc) only to get surprised by what/how they generate profit from is just unsettling.

▲jacob2161 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

I believe this isn't as much of a problem as it appears to be at first glance because of the scale of social apps like Bluesky.

For example, Wikipedia generates >$180M/yr just by running ads for itself requesting donations. Requesting donations is the least effective monetizing strategy and yet it still works because of scale.

Donations would probably work but Bluesky has additional options. They could create a premium app for power users that just adds nice-to-have features (which may cost real money to provide and maintain), they can resell domain names, they can sell merch, etc.

Bluesky doesn't need to generate billions of dollars to be highly sustainable and profitable. It was built and scaled with fewer than 20 full time employees.

The most important and most difficult part is getting to sufficient scale, and that's mostly a matter of just making the app even better than it is today.

I posted a bit about this here: https://bsky.app/profile/jacob.gold/post/3lr5j6o7emk2t

▲isodev 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Bluesky doesn't need to generate billions of dollars

Are you sure their investors share this vision?

▲jacob2161 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

1. I believe they actually could generate (low) billions of dollars without compromising at all, if they manage to reach true mainstream scale (>1 billion MAUs)

2. I really don't care if the investors/shareholders are disappointed as long as the PBC's mission is fulfilled. Also their control is relatively limited.

Maybe I should have written added this:

Disclaimer: I am a shareholder in Bluesky Social, PBC (former employee)

▲ijustlovemath 3 days ago | parent [-]

Aren't they at ~10M MAU and falling? At least that's the impression given by https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats

▲jacob2161 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, I'd love to see growth improve but Bluesky is already in an exclusive club of social apps that have "broken through" in some significant way. It's not going anywhere.

And it's the only open network built on an open protocol to ever do so.

▲cmxch 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Not open, just ideologically optimized.

▲ijustlovemath 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

the open network aspect is extremely cool, but it's hard to take seriously considering how difficult it seems to be to set up an alternate host. I do love the idea that you can just build an entirely new UX and bring the social graph for free!

▲cmxch 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Open only to the ideologically favored.

▲uwemaurer 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Here are more detailed stats:

https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth

▲toomuchtodo 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Investors might get soaked, such is the risk of capital investment. Everything built on AT Protocol would survive.

▲Jensson 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> Everything built on AT Protocol would survive.

Will it? How much of that doesn't run on investor backed servers today? People often say stuff like this but I haven't seen that work in practice.

▲skybrian 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah, that’s more of a hope about the future. It’s up to other people to build it.

I’ve seen posts about some poorly-publicized, proof-of-concept alternative implementations that would probably fall over if they got real attention, but I think that shows that it’s not a problem with the protocol itself.

Good enough, as far as I’m concerned. It’s just about posting comments on the Internet, not bank accounts. If something went fatally wrong, we would move again, just like we moved off previous social networks.

▲ 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]
[deleted]
▲krainboltgreene 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> such is the risk of capital investment

Everyone says that right up until they read the news where the US Government bails those investors out.

▲toomuchtodo 4 days ago | parent [-]

It is highly unlikely the US gov bails Bluesky investors out, and I wouldn’t care if they did. $36M raised to date is couch cushion money.

▲Suppafly a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>For example, Wikipedia generates >$180M/yr just by running ads for itself requesting donations. Requesting donations is the least effective monetizing strategy and yet it still works because of scale.

Plus most of that goes towards other wikimedia projects, wikipedia itself despite being huge and used by most of the internet costs a fraction of that to run yearly.

▲hinkley 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

It’s also possible to run an annual event that makes a profit. Which might be something a social network could figure out.

The first club I belonged to as a teenager worked this way. In lieu of high membership dues there was volunteer time spent helping out at or before the event. I was surprised as an adult to learn that some events lose money or only break even.

▲extraduder_ire 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

Their largest operating income thus-far has been from selling two batches of t-shirts. Alongside some minor affiliate revenue from sending people to a domain registrar which they don't advertise anywhere prominent. (all handles are domain names, getting one that doesn't end in .bsky.social means getting one elsewhere)

▲Onavo 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

They better start putting together an avant garde Blue Sky art gallery then. Real estate in NYC and SF aren't cheap.

▲hinkley 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Which means this is going to end badly. A non profit version would be better off headquartered somewhere lower rent.

▲onionisafruit 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

How about an annual pancake breakfast at the fire station like the local scouts do?

▲ttiurani 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> the promise of decentralisation

AFAIK actual decentralization needs still a big engineering effort.

I personally can't even imagine a world where their VC investors would ever sign off a "let's make it possible, easy and risk free the users to exit our silo" project, over the many ways they try to squeeze profit out of their users.

▲jacob2161 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Bluesky is built on atproto, which is designed to be "locked open" in a way that can't be rescinded. That was a core design constraint.

VCs funded Netscape which did more than any other company to launch the web and they made a lot of money without having to destroy the ideals of the web.

▲evbogue 4 days ago | parent [-]

The PDSes (personal data servers) can be independantly hosted, but Bluesky itself indexes and presents the messages these servers contain in their social-app. Bluesky also maintains the directory of these servers.

▲jacob2161 4 days ago | parent [-]

Anyone else is also free to run these services (app views, relays) and a few people already are doing this.

An atproto PDS is like a structured-data blog hosted on a web server. Anyone is free to index, relay, and render the data.

▲evbogue 4 days ago | parent [-]

Yes, and running these things is prohibitively difficult such as I've only witnessed two full index attempts and no alternative plc directories.

Bluesky should make these easier so your average Linux admin can attempt to host the full stack, as opposed to only being able to host a PDS. This would eliminate the criticism about Bluesky's design.

▲anon7000 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

AT Proto isn’t really supposed to be about individuals self hosting the whole thing. The system is supposed to be global, distributed, and shared, not isolated to one person self-hosting the whole stack. One person should be able to host a resource and connect it to the network (esp to host their own data). It’s just a different design goal compared to full-stack self-hosting. Fundamentally speaking, you can’t run Twitter at scale on a home laptop. But if lots of people band together their resources by hosting distributed microservices, they can self host it together. That’s what AT Proto is trying to solve

▲jazzyjackson 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

If it was more DNSy it could be hierarchal. I should be able to run my own stack and treat is like an RSS feed, subscribed to the various domains and individuals I'm interested in. Larger (but not huge) players could create plc directories of users and various aggregated feeds. Why have the expectation to host the global firehouse just because you want to customize how relays and appviews work?

▲culi 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Agreed. If you wanna be able to host the whole stack you should just use Mastodon

▲bnewbold 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you want a service which indexes every post in the public network, including from folks you don't follow, that is just going to require resources. I think $200/month for a full-network index (as zepplin does) is very reasonable and approachable for organized groups without external funding. Many Mastodon instances cost more than that, and provide a must smaller scope of indexing.

If you want a small scaled down setup for just a small community, which still interoperates with the full network but doesn't have a complete network, there are setups like AppViewLite, which can run on, eg, an old laptop at home: https://github.com/alnkesq/AppViewLite

Personally, I don't think individualist self-hosting is a necessary or helpful goal for indexing the network. Most humans are not interested in spending the time or learning the skills to do this, even if it was as easy as setting up a self-hosted blog with RSS. I think small collectives (orgs, coops, communities, neighborhoods, companies, etc) exist and can fill this role.

Regardless, this is moving the discussion, which was about whether it was possible to decentralize each component the network, not whether it was pragmatic for individuals to self-host the whole thing.

▲ttiurani 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I think $200/month for a full-network index (as zeppelin does) is very reasonable and approachable for organized groups without external funding.

I didn't know about these recent attempts, they're impressive for sure. However they write[1] about zeppelin:

"The cost to run this is about US $200/mo, primarily due to the 16 terabytes of storage it currrently uses"

So when you here give that $200/mo cost as a price point for "organized groups", you are forecasting that the cost of storage will go down as fast as the BlueSky data size grows? At what rate right now is the data size growing? Because the last numbers I saw were something like 2TB, so it being already 16TB sounds like $200/mo is not going to be enough very soon.

[1] https://whtwnd.com/futur.blue/3ls7sbvpsqc2w

▲dingnuts 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> I think $200/month for a full-network index (as zepplin does) is very reasonable and approachable for organized groups without external funding.

That's crazy cheap! Everybody on HN should be able to run one of these, just cancel your Claude Code Max subscription

All kidding aside, that's incredibly cost effective and heartening to read. I expected the cost of running a relay to be much higher.

▲bnewbold 3 days ago | parent [-]

"A Full-Network Relay for $34/month" https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lo7a2a4qxg2l

▲evbogue 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Most humans are not interested in spending the time or learning the skills to do this[...]

Well, this is exactly my point. ATProto's infrastructure is too hard for most humans, and that is the reason for the centralization complaint.

The team's goal should be to make it easier, so the complaint goes away.

▲jacob2161 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I agree there's a lot of room for improvement in making it easier.

But certain things like full-network relays/app views just have inherent bandwidth/storage/compute costs associated with them but it's definitely something a non-profit (like Internet Archive) could easily afford to do.

The PLC service could likely be hosted for ~$40/mo.

▲bnewbold 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

hundreds (thousands?) of users have signed up for Bluesky Social, then moved their accounts to independent hosts. folks can use https://zeppelin.social/ as a totally free-standing bluesky posting experience that interoperates with the full network.

Bluesky Social still clearly dominates the ecosystem, but there is no single component of the system that does not have a open/alternative option for exit.

Do you disagree? Is there a specific centralized component you take issue with?

▲ttiurani 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

> there is no single component of the system that does not have a open/alternative option for exit.

Users can move their follows, followers and posts to zeppelin.social fron BlueSky transparently?

Now you can of course debate on what "decenttalized" means, but in a social network easy migration between servers is the crucial feature that would allow the decentralized network to emerge.

Edit. Does the network actually work over at zeppelin.social alone if Bluesky servers go down?

▲bnewbold 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yes, all of those social graph relationships are hinged off a permanent identifier (DID) and everything comes along when accounts migrate PDS instances. Folks can use zeppelin.social from any PDS instance. The DID PLC directory is currently hosted by Bluesky, but the directory can be forked, and did:web identifiers can be used as an alternative (and several independence-minded folks in the network do so).

Migration between servers is so seamless that is causes confusion and doubt that the protocol even supports migration, because there is basically zero in-app visibility of which users are on which server.

Yes, the network continues to work on zeppelin.social if Bluesky servers are down.

▲jcgl 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Now you can of course debate on what "decenttalized" means, but in a social network easy migration between servers is the crucial feature that would allow the decentralized network to emerge.

I totally agree. However, a lot of people in the fediverse/ActivityPub world apparently (?) disagree, seeing as your domain is tightly coupled to your server, i.e. no name portability. Seems like a wild oversight to me, and getting massive instances like matrix.org and mastadon.social seems like an inevitable consequence.

Lack of name portability implies greater risk when choosing a server. Greater risk when choosing a server means choosing comparatively less risky servers. Choosing comparatively less risky servers means choosing more well-known servers. Thus you have the GMail-ification of the fediverse.

▲FiloSottile 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Users can move their follows, followers and posts to zeppelin.social fron BlueSky transparently?

Yes, even if Bluesky was down (as long as they have a backup) which is not the case for ActivityPub.

▲isodev 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Even if set aside the details on dependence on bluesky infrastructure, the effort to host “all components” is quite expensive and technology-intensive with significant cost for storage and compute. For example, a deployment of “all the things” (just for you) is in the ballpark of 70-100€/month because the way things are designed to work. And that’s not even factoring the burden of managing the whole range of technologies involved.

Making it hard to setup or run, complex to understand or change are also forms of discouraging independent use.

▲egypturnash 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

zeppelin.social just gives me a black page with a stylized yellow scarab on it on desktop Safari, Mac Firefox, and Mac Chrome, with or without adblock.

▲isodev 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Same, that’s why I said “the promise of”. Also how do they plan to bill actors in this decentralised system? Is it going to be developers footing the bill? Some premium features only “the main Bluesky instance” has? It’s not clear to me at all.

▲add-sub-mul-div 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The best way to think about it is to assume you'll want to leave someday, and you'll be going to whichever is the best of the choices at that future time that are early enough to be years away from needing to monetize.

Don't let yourself get attached to any one place. That's the lesson. Staying ahead of monetization is the move. Nothing will stay good forever.

▲mr90210 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's possible that they are uncertain about the path to monetisation. As far as I see, it's either subscriptions or selling ads.

▲isodev 4 days ago | parent [-]

Their uncertainty is magnified on the outside tbh. e.g. There are other things at play that can (probably will) cost a lot of money. The protocol (ATProto) they’re developing and advocating as a “platform”.

Say I’m building a cool app around that, how do I plan how much is this going to cost me and can I stomach the risk of binding myself to this “supposedly open” platform without knowing how it will work in 6 months?

▲lenerdenator 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

My guess is, they're going to have to be okay with only reaching break-even or slightly over. That's the point, after all. If you're dissatisfied with how any of these decentralized protocol platforms are running things, you're technically free to start your own, and plenty of people have.

Enshittification can't consume low barriers-to-entry markets.

▲dpow 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

[dead]