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Comment by steveklabnik | Hacker News Reader

I would agree that if that were "the business model" instead of "a thing that generates some revenue," it would be laughable. However, nobody, including BlueSky, believes that this is solely enough to power the business.

I agree that a healthy Bluesky PBLLC is a good thing, and hope they manage to pull it off. Time will tell.

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Well hopefully they take it more seriously.

Because based on them raising $8m in a seed round middle of last year they aren't going to have much time to decide and implement a strategy before they will need to start thinking about raising a Series A. Or maybe Jack does become a bigger investor.

Either way I think it's insane to prematurely rule out advertising.

I don't think they're not taking it seriously.

I also don't believe (and again, don't work there, just a huge fan, so maybe this is wrong) I'm not sure that the revenue was the reason for shipping this feature. It's best thought of as an accessibility feature, for folks who do not know what a "DNS record" is and have never hosted a domain. Without this, more technical users get something special that non-technical users do not: a nicer username. The money is just a side effect of the fact that purchasing a domain name already requires money, and so a partnership with a revenue split just makes sense.

> Either way I think it's insane to prematurely rule out advertising.

I hear you in an abstract "that's the way you make money in this space" sense, but I also think it's a smart reaction to the public sentiment around this stuff. People do not like advertising. It is a differentiator. We'll see if it works out for them or not.

The whole point of Bluesky is to build a social network that is not incentivized by advertising. They don’t rule it out completely, but it can’t be a major part of their revenue.

> They don’t rule it out completely,

Well,

> Are you thinking about advertisements at all?

> There will always be free options, and we can't enshittify the network with ads. This is where federation comes in. The fact that anyone can self-host and anyone can build on the software means that we'll never be able to degrade the user experience in a way where people want to leave.

https://www.wired.com/story/bluesky-ceo-jay-graber-wont-ensh...

This reads as definitive to me personally.

In their business-plan post, they stated: “We set out to build a protocol where users can own their data and always have the freedom to leave, and this approach means that advertising couldn’t be our dominant business model.” Which reads like advertising could still be a possibility, but not as a dominant factor.

Fair!

> enshittify with ads

> we'll never be able to degrade the user experience in a way where people want to leave

Neither of those is the same as "no ads". They're just saying that they can't make the ads so bad that most people want to leave, because then people will leave and the ads won't be shown to anyone.

Reddit destroyed Apollo so they could inject ads into the Reddit experience.

Bluesky doesn't have the ability to do this. There's no API key to revoke that could stop someone else from running parallel apps/infrastructure/etc. The network is completely open.

Reddit had ads long before they destroyed Apollo. Thanks for providing additional evidence for my point.

Sure, but Apollo made it easy for users that didn't want ads to use Reddit without them. Destroying Apollo removed that ability for most people.

I'm about as anti-ads as it gets but I don't object to other people using apps with ads in them, if that's their choice.

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