Regular reminder that Bluesky is a VC-funded company which inevitably is headed for the same fate shared by all VC-funded companies. It must maintain hypergrowth until it either:
- folds
- sells
- IPOs
Maybe tuning into another re-run of the social media VC show is appealing to some, but it certainly isn’t for me.
Headline: “Wow, Bluesky managed to get $8 million in funding”
What you should be reading:
“Bluesky took on an additional $8 million in debt, which they will need to be pay back with interest one way or another”
How are they going to be doing that, you wonder? Well reader, certainly not just by selling domain names at a slight markup.
The obvious answer here of course will be ads. It usually tends to be ads.
Or maybe since Bluesky was originally founded by a shitty crypto person and just took on more debt from shitty crypto people it’ll be some new revolutionary conical-shaped money scheme.
Who knows. I don’t care enough to find out.
No no Yosh, you’ve got it all wrong you see. Bluesky is a “public benefit corporation” that means that they’re not just out for money. Instead they’ve got to, uh,
…
umm,, let’s check Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
> “Their activities may or may not differ much from traditional corporations.”
…oh.
“No but like, Bluesky’s protocol is good! Even better than ActivityPub.”
Sure, I have no doubt. Talented people have worked on it. But what does it mean when the money people come knocking?
Absolutely nothing. Just because a company published docs online on how to access their API for free provides no guarantee they’ll keep granting you access to their API free of charge in the future.
Twitter once had a public API. So did Reddit*. Both wanted to make more money. Now they no longer do.
@yosh I've seen some interesting technical analyses that leave me feeling like Bluesky is decentralized and federated in the "you pay for their servers" sense, rather than Mastodon's independent governance model.
I haven't done the work to verify, but it's enough to make me sideeye the claimed benefits of AT Proto over AP.
@xgranade @yosh everything I've read suggests the same. Basically Jack Dorsey sold us a parody of federation. Over here we have the real deal and it's only getting better as the diversity of servers increases. Because this isn't a business it can't truly die nor is it subject to the pressures that make everything that's a business terrible.
We still have to put in the work of having good moderation to make it a good space but that's at least a problem we're capable of solving. Trying to do that on x for example is just building on a foundation of sand.
@fluffykittycat @xgranade @yosh
Since all data using AT Protocol has to roll up to aggregation servers somewhere, even if you run your own PDS, they still pull your data for their dumbass “algorithmic choice”. It’s not decentralized at all. They have several vectors through which to inject ads and collect usage data to sell.
Now, you CAN run your own AT Protocol infrastructure end to end and leave their servers out completely but nobody is ever, ever going to do that.
@yosh True, that's often the dilemma hackers vs corporations, this is the basic topic of this book:
"Resistance to the Current: The Dialectics of Hacking"
https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-monograph/5494/Resistance-to-the-CurrentThe-Dialectics-of-Hacking
@yosh if your principled stance is against all companies which take investment, then sure, that is a consistent reason to distrust Bluesky. being a Public Benefit Corporation is nice-to-have but is pretty unproven and far from being a non-profit.
our goal is to build a system which is resistant to the enshittification cycle, and I think we are well on our way to that goal.
@yosh we have demonstrated a lot of core functionality which has been discussed for years but never implemented in other protocols and app ecosystems. even if the whole atproto project implodes, I think it is provided a lot for protocols like AP to learn from (as we have from them).
we are going to try many other business models before ads, and have time/money to do so. our current board has pretty legit folks on it. original funding was a contract for no equity, not VC.
@mastodonmigration @yosh we announced we are working on a couple revenue models recently:
we already sell domain names. this is a multi-billion dollar commodity market with great margins.
we are going to do paid subscriptions, where users pay us directly. some just want to support us. can also redistribute to other projects in the ecosystem. similar to discord nitro. "aesthetic flair", not pay-for-ranking.
longer term, we are interested in facilitating payments, like ko-fi/patreon
You seem like a nice guy, and you probably believe what you are posting. But what you will learn in due course, if you stay in the tech industry, is that money does not work the way you think. Your bosses are lying to you. And if they are not, they are deluded too. When the inevitable parting of ways between the idealistic entrepreneurs and their benevolent benefactor (sarcasm intended) venture capitalists arrives, the money wins. Every time.
@yosh Amazing that people, tech-minded people even, are still bright-eyed about platforms (especially social ones) made by for-profit companies.
I just assume any project that isn't community-run and GPL'd is going to stab its users in the back for profit at some point.
Also why did this platform pick up steam so much faster than other fediverse software? I've see more articles about Bluesky than Mastodon since day 1. Did some of those VC dollars wound up in tech publications pockets?
@Lehmanator @yosh "Did some of those VC dollars wound up in tech publications pockets?"
Having observed from the periphery of a similar field, yes but not directly. It's structural. No one wants to upset the magic money tree. 1) ads "need" to be sold, so hype is good. 2) where is your next job? 3) there is a strong culture of contempt for anyone not making as much money as possible, non-profits are looses (and women, because misogyny).
Such incentives means there doesn't need to be a direct quid-pro-quo. It's capitalism, not corruption.
I assume the protocol is likely good, since:
1. I know the folks working on it; some of whom are even former colleagues, and they’re definitely talented
2. They’re seemingly well-funded,m
3. It was designed from scratch and had time to bake inside of a product before being released
But like, however good the protocol might be, when monied interests are involved you *have* to be locked into hypergrowth or else you’re done.
@yosh you’re preaching to the choir about the problems of hypergrowth and the sustainability of vc investing!
i’m curious about this particular case because it looks like there’s (at least!) a good start at a decentralized platform with data portability, so in a sense it’s got the same problem as npm did from a vc perspective: they’re giving the valuable part away for free. that does not bode well for employees of bluesky but does not necessarily spell doom for users of their protocol.
I think a better way of thinking about this is like: Bluesky is a private company with a public api you can use to access their servers with, free of charge. They also won’t sue you if you want to replicate their API yourself, and they even helpfully provide you with an SDK.
Like, I feel like we might be getting distracted by the fact that they call their API a “protocol”?
This reminds me of the early 2020’s meme on the nature of exponential growth. If the curve is exponential, it doesn’t matter where on the graph you look — it’s all exponential. Instead a lot of people only notice the last bit in the chart where the differences become impossible to ignore.
I feel like Doctorow did a good job explaining the lifecycle in his “enshittification” post. Bluesky seems locked in, even if right now it’s still early in the cycle and people can’t always tell.
@yosh Not quite -- if they'd took on *debt*, they could pay it (with interest) and the funders would go away.
Instead, they sold shares in the company. The investors (being VCs) presumably intend to sell those at a profit at some point, if all goes well -- but bsky management likely can't say much about when or to whom, and can't do anything to make them go away in the meantime. (The VCs also got a board seat, which investors often get, but would be very rare for a lender to have.)
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