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Comment by forgotoldacc | Hacker News Reader

Does bsky have an actual plan for how they'll make money long term?

The users are all in a honeymoon phase about how it's so different from twitter, but it seems like it's only a matter of time until they're directly selling data for AI training, offering paid corporate accounts, intrusive ads, etc. In the end, I imagine it'll end up just like twitter but with a different CEO. I use it simply because lots of others who I follow migrated, but I'm under no delusion that it'll be any different long term.

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Long long term is anyone's guess, but I think if the team stays mission driven and doesn't get distracted they won't have any problems with money. The company is still owned by employees, and the entire team is just 20 people. They don't seem to have a bloated stack or unnecessary features. They got a sizable initial war chest of $14 million from Twitter. When that runs out I bet adding just a "donate" button somewhere on the site will be enough to cover expenses.

Already raised another 15 million from Blockchain Capital. Not a donation, but a Series A. They could have walked the nonprofit donation route like Signal but they dance with VCs instead.

https://www.blockchaincapital.com/blog/bluesky-13m-users-and...

14 million pays for a couple salaries and a few server bills. That burns away fast when users get higher and higher into the tens of millions.

Being mission driven and not getting distracted is nice, but that doesn't put money in their pockets. Firefox and other products that are/were beloved by similar crowd have been asking for donations for years and it hasn't worked out. Wikipedia seems like the rare exception that pulls it off, and that's because they're aggressive with their campaigning for cash and they're basically an indispensable public service at this point.

The scale is also completely different. In terms of storage Wikipedia is not that big. Around 10TB for the English version. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia). That is relatively small potatoes. Hosting costs in 2022-2023 were around 3 million (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2...).

They say no ads (https://www.thekeyword.co/news/bluesky-says-it-has-no-plans-...). Seems like they will pivot to subscriptions (https://www.theverge.com/2024/10/24/24278666/bluesky-working...). I remember reading somewhere they also wanted to add payments from user to user, so they could take a cut from that. If that is enough to cover their expenses is left to be seen.

There's a statement here (July 2023) with some info,

https://bsky.social/about/blog/7-05-2023-business-plan

but selling domain services doesn't seem it will go very far. I've seen some other rumors about paid accounts for extra features (posting longer or high-quality videos, etc).

Does anyone know if being a "public benefit corporation" is significant? Or will the same monetary pressures build up?

Well they recently published the AT protocol that they use.

It’s an open protocol, so they’re going for some kind of community angle maybe?

They could probably sell instances like mastodon, but I don’t think that will scale how they probably want.

I think they will eventually find a way to either monetize the data or add an ad extension to AT proto.

I mean, I think a lot of people would settle for another pre-Musk Twitter, tbh.

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