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Comment by rglullis | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, this is a non-answer. Is there a business model in mind or not?

We've announced one business model and do intend to iterate and add others, but that's all we've announced for now. The plan is definitely to be sustainable over the long-term.

Honestly this is fucking whacko to me. "We've incorporated a legal entity whose entire purpose is to make money, but we have no idea how that's going to happen." How is this even allowed?

Anyway the answer is ads. This just means it's going to be ads. It's always fucking ads. No one has ever gone into a capitalistic venture sans business plan and ended up doing anything besides selling fucking ads.

I really hope they do freemium.

If they can run it with a small enough team, then freemium could be feasible. Sell special tools and functions to the power users.

Ads are the most frequent answer, but it's not the only one. There's also the team getting acqui-hired, or getting bought by a competitor & shut down, or just plain old going out of business and sold for parts. None of those are good for users, obviously, but they are all viable paths for repaying VCs in absence of a business model.

Sure, I guess I meant for long-lived products.

Relax bro, you're just looking at it upside-down.

The ads let you know what services are not worth your time, or only worth consuming with sufficient adblocking.

They're really doing you a great service by advertising that you're the product.

Also, hope is not lost for ad-free capitalism. For the first time ever I'm actually paying for subscription services that don't have ads (yet). Mostly to do with search and AI.

Look, those underpants aren't going to collect themselves, are they.

And don't worry about Phase Two. Phase Three is when the profit will happen.

> "We've incorporated a legal entity whose entire purpose is to make money, but we have no idea how that's going to happen."

That's quite the reach. The actual information you got, is them not telling you publicly. Either because they can't, or don't want to.

I mean, I do sympathize with your frustration, tho. Every time I read this lobotomized "Rampart-AMA" PR shit, a few of my own brain cells commit suicide. It's insulting.

A bit macro and optimistic view about sustainability (in general, not specific to Bluesky):

If everything goes according to the prediction of economists for 2024, a light crisis should decrease consumer confidence in the US.

One of the solution to re-energize the economy might be to lower interest rates.

Which means that if interest rates go down in 2024, companies are going to be able to borrow at extremely low cost.

In such environment, does the question of business model even matter ?

If your task is to raise debt, what you need is to sell a dream, not have a way to generate money.

Back to Bluesky:

The bigger danger for the company now is most likely its own users.

"Open ecosystem"/"Freedom"/"Free-speech" users tend to be greedy and consider everything should be free, and at the same time are very active when it's about criticizing.

The "normies" of Twitter / Instagram, are likely higher spender because of the importance that vanity / self-promotion has in their life.

One key could be for Bluesky to focus more on content, than on technology.

Even on Telegram, people join groups and people, they don't really care if the source-code is here or not, or who controls what (because no matter how, this can change in the future).

Speaking as someone who has been stubbornly offering paid-for-access Mastodon/Lemmy/Matrix (and now Funkwhale) accounts at communick.com for 5+ years, I learned already that very few individuals are willing to put their money where their mouth is. Everyone loves to complain about the exploits of the tech companies, but no one really cares about paying for a service unless it gives some sense of exclusivity.

What is going to make or break the alternative social media networks is the institutions. If/When newspapers (not journalists) start setting up their own instances, if companies put up support accounts on their own domain, if influencers start mirroring their social accounts on their own sites to try to their push their own brand... then I'll start believing that we have a chance.

It's difficult, we compare two different views, one from tech-perspective, and one from user-perspective.

I understand your arguments about the technology, they are absolutely correct, but they attract a typology of niche users, which are extremely demanding and very difficult to convert to paying users.

Twitter, the platform is very glitchy, the owners are who they are, the developer access is horrible, but still, I am using it, because there is exclusive and fresh content.

Bluesky is an interesting project, but I can strongly suggest leaning toward content/user-focus than pure-tech, in order to secure a stronger business-model (and eventually, as a consequence, a sustainable + open ecosystem).

Focus on onboarding great content first, and then walk back to the tech, not the other way around.

For example, to support more extensively those newspapers or institutions to onboard the platform, and most of all, all these unofficial content creators.

There are also some things which feel very strange, like the main description of Bluesky when you search for it on Google: "Simple HTML interfaces are possible, but that is not what this is".

This sounds interesting to me, but visiting communick.com I can't figure out how much the service costs, nor see any way to find out. I see a sign up page, but it also has no pricing info.

Can you direct me to that in info?

Yeah, I am in the process of simplifying the offering and split down the site for managed hosting and the "standard" service. https://communick.com/packages/access should you give a link to the package: $29/year for Mastodon/Matrix/Lemmy/Funkwhale.

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