Chris KendallMy latest bluesky post not getting a lot of love 😬
Frances Coppola 
@ottocrat as I am shortly going to have to migrate my Mastodon account to a different server because my current host doesn't find it economic to continue paying the hosting costs, I am less than enthusiastic about Mastodon's business model.
@Frances_Coppola Well that’s definitely the downside. I hear you.
Andrew Gallagher@ottocrat @Frances_Coppola the question is, is this just the growing pains of an untested model and will therefore settle down over time, or is instance churn an intrinsic feature? I suspect a little of both…
Peter Shaw@ottocrat @Frances_Coppola - That's "econtwitter" not wanting to pay Mastodon a fee, or have I misunderstood? Mastodon seems confusingly decentralised in its mammoth family tree, I just took the most obvious branch: for interpersonal/public social media use. But I suppose if you are looking for a professionally specific definition of Mast (is "econtwitter" that?), it may be someone asks someone else tfor a fee, tho for what special(ist) services I don't know. Does e.g. BSky help in that regard?
@pcsoblahdeehell @Frances_Coppola Hosting costs are about renting server space - Mastodon don’t charge for using their client
@pcsoblahdeehell @Frances_Coppola Bluesky meanwhile host the content themselves and are paying for the server space. So currently they’re burning through VC investor money.
@pcsoblahdeehell @Frances_Coppola The weakness but also the strength of Mastodon is that it is federated - Mastodon provide the client software but anyone can host it on their own servers. That means servers can go down whenever a server host can’t afford it or be bothered any more, but otoh you can easily migrate to another server, or host your own.
@pcsoblahdeehell @Frances_Coppola (sorry if I’m splaining)
@ottocrat @Frances_Coppola - So what is the bsky business model? Introduce Elmo fees later? Gradually introduce more advertising? As you describe it, it's clearly not sustainable for long.
@pcsoblahdeehell Well that’s (literally) the $$$$$ question. We don’t know. But as a VC-financed private initiative it’s likely to follow the same enshittification path as all the other VC-financed techbro platforms. (For ‘enshittification’ see definition of @pluralistic)
BashStKid@Frances_Coppola @ottocrat I’d heard from some others that econtwitter was having problems, sympathies.
There could be a tiny net benefit if a whole bunch of erudite professionals send Rochko their experience of regular users having to migrate and the pitfalls.
Small irony in the economics group with an uneconomic server?
Tim SchofieldIt is relatively simple to move servers though...