Comment by rvnx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rvnx | Hacker News Reader

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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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