- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.zip
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/27733087
Social networking startup and X competitor Bluesky is working on subscriptions. The company first announced plans to develop a new revenue stream based on the subscription model when detailing its $15 million Series A back in October. Now, mockups teasing the upcoming Bluesky subscription, along with a list of possible features, have been published to Bluesky’s GitHub.
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I get so many bots following me and wanting to hook up. I’m an ugly redhead, you’re not fooling me.
While a lot of us hate ads and subscriptions, I have the unpopular opinion that they are generally still viable considering the state of how we use the internet today.
The thing is, I think that if there are ads, there should be the ability to pay to remove them, and if there is a subscription, there should be an ad-based tier as an alternative.
Let your users choose, respect their preference for funding model, and allow them to choose if they want to support a given monetization policy.
Of course, seeing as how they raised $15m from VCs, I doubt this will be nothing but what will inevitably devolve into a pay-for-reach scheme similar to Twitter Blue (or, sorry “X Premium”) that just leads to those with wealth getting more engagement, and a louder voice.
I’ve never seen an ad-based tier on a Mastodon instance and they do just fine 🤷♂️
Among every server that “do just fine,” there are more instances that are just gone for not having proper funding, especially for non-Western instance where paying for social media in not a common thing. I’m from Indonesian, and almost every Indonesian instance are cease to exist except for Misskey.id.
While Mastodon does not support ads, other fediverse software like Misskey support it. Misskey.io, the second biggest fedi instance after Mastodon.social, runs ads and subscription simutaniously.
Their ads is merely community ads. Letting their community promote their indie games, manga serialization, artbook release, online event gathering, etc. I think that might be replicatable for Western instance like Mastodon.art or Pixelfed.art.
However I don’t see blue sky following this model, I do support user funded content and It’s infuriating that we as an open source community have to recreate it time and time again. Large corporations buy up the social media and monetize it and mine it for metadata and AdSense. Meta, alphabet, Microsoft and to a greater sense now OpenAI.
Server hardware isn’t free. At the end of the day, SOMEONE has to pay the bills. Either you are the customer, or the product. If you insist on being the product, you don’t get to be surprised when platforms focus on the actual customers that actually pay the bills, by enshittifying the platform.
When you are not a predatory bussiness your “clients” are not your enemy. So donations come in.
People are willing to pay for something that they use. What people don’t like is paying for making someone rich without working.
Because most mastodon instances are running off donations, and have a relatively small user base.
The kind of people who use Mastodon are substantially more likely to be heavily invested in the technology and the vision, and thus more likely to donate.
Expand that out to the billions of people who use social media, and you have a funding problem.
Not to mention the much lesser need for moderation due to more homogeneous and well-intentioned micro communities and substantially lower rate of bots, which all means less “staff” you have to pay too.
It’s not a matter of minimum viability, it’s a matter of scale.
Ads and monetization have ruined the internet compared to what it was. Early Internet was completely without ads, and things were run by people who were actually interested in the content presented, not in profits.
I have donated a couple of times to Lemmy.world, because servers and work is needed for it to work. But I refuse to accept any ads anywhere. Ads do NOT improve content IMO, it merely concentrates content with commercial sites.Ads and monetization have ruined the internet compared to what it was. Early Internet was completely without ads, and things were run by people who were actually interested in the content presented, not in profits.
How early are we talking here? If you mean pre-Web, in the Usenet era it was standard practice to pay a subscription to join a Usenet server. If you mean the early Web, ads were already everywhere by the mid-90s.
There’s distinction between targeted ads and community ads.
Mainstream internet is bad for targeted ads and for-profit site that plaster ads as maximum as possible.
Fediverse instance like Misskey.io runs ads, but all of them community ads. Letting their community promote their indie games, manga serialization, artbook release, online event gathering, etc.
The early internet also couldn’t provide most of the larger sites and platforms we now use. As it grew, it had to monetize in order to actually operate. If you want something outside the scope of a passion project, you need funding outside the scope of a passion project. The early internet did so well with people who actually cared because they didn’t have to operate platforms that couldn’t just care. They were operating things like personal sites and chatrooms, not social networks, document editors, or newsrooms.
Federated servers with donation-based models can function as of now, but you’d have a hard time covering hosting costs if every normal social media user began using federated platforms. There’s simply too many of them.
I’m not saying ads improve content, I’m not saying they’re the best model, and if you refuse to accept ads anywhere, that’s fine, but sites simply can’t all provide services for free, and if we want sites with the same functionality we have today, they need to monetize somehow.
Donations are definitely an option (I mean, hey, look at Wikipedia) but it isn’t necessarily viable for every online venture. For a lot of platforms, monetization must be compelled in some way, whether it’s by pushing ads, or paywalling with a subscription. The best option a platform can offer if it’s not capable of just running off donations alone is to let users choose the monetization they prefer to deal with.
There is no larger site the internet wouldn’t be better without.
Google, Meta, Twitter, Youtube are all part of the monetization disease.
The internet scaled on the back of subscribers, not big monetization, which frankly suck performance with tracking and ads rather than adding to it.
We are on Lemmy, and lemmy would obviously work even better without competition from big monetized platforms.
Communities doing passion projects serve the project. Without youtube we could have alternatives that worked better, because Youtube wouldn’t be there to attract all the attention.Back in the day we had indexing sites, fora, and also search before google. All things that helped finding interesting sites. The interesting sites of passion projects have become rare. And almost the entire internet is now driven for profit instead of interest and passion. I tell you, I can really see the difference, there is 100 times more irrelevant noise for the same amount of content.
The problem is that today ads are against privacy so the ad-tier are really invasive in term of tracking and because their services tracks you when using ad-tier they will when using noad-tier. For example if you pay YouTube premium you’ll not have ads in YouTube but your consumption habits will serve google ads services to serve you ads on all almost all sites of the world
True, but that’s a matter of technical implementation that I believe should be changed along with any proposed change to monetization models like I’d previously mentioned.
For instance, the site should delay ad loading until you pick “yes, I want to see ads,” or if you pick “I have a subscription” and sign in, it shouldn’t load them at all.
This isn’t impossible to do, it’s just something they haven’t made as an easy implementation yet, since things like Google’s ad services auto-load when a page is loaded, since no site really has a mechanism to manually enable or disable the core requests to Google based on user input.
You’re right, I fought that people are exasperated of seeing ads but when they are not present BUT their system is tracking you the same way, so people are okay with it as long as nothing pop on their screen. Loading trackers in the background or not.
The problem with ads is advertisers want to be able to target specific groups of people, which means the platform needs to violate your privacy to get that information.
It’s not violating your privacy when you agree to let them access all your data in the EULA. That’s why they exist.
Edit: I’m not saying it’s a good thing, that’s just how it works.
Those EULAs aren’t enforceable in the EU
One of the big problems with the 2 tier system you describe, is the most valuable users to advertisers are the ones with the type of money to pay for a subscription to not see ads. So by having an ad free version, you are devaluing your platform to advertisers. I’m not saying the 2 tier system can’t work, it does for plenty of things, but it is why a lot of websites don’t offer it, or avoid it for as long as possible.
This isn’t really much of an issue, practically speaking. The likelihood of someone buying a subscription is different than buying a product from an ad.
For instance, while I’m highly likely to pay for a subscription to a streaming service that lets me watch videos from creators (in my case, Nebula) I’m not likely to buy any products from a sponsorship or YouTube ad. (and haven’t, thus far)
My likelihood of paying for a product in an ad is entirely separate from paying for the service those ads are on, and this is commonly true for many people.
If there’s an independent news outlet I want to support, I’m going to feel more inclined to pay them than I am to buy a product in an ad, just because each carries different incentives for me. I want to support the news outlet, I don’t want to buy a product somewhere else.
This is anecdotal, and I understand that, but as someone else had also mentioned before, even companies like Netflix are promoting their revenue from the ad tier, and having both is a good mechanism to keep the business afloat and allow it to acquire customers who don’t want to spend too much.
Where have you heard about that?
I can think of a counter example in how Netflix is boasting about the revenue of its cheaper ad tier.
Ads could just occur in the background & relevant to What you want to see & the content
Would love to hear about Mastodon in the news (or by anyone with a following) for once instead of Bluesky
Mastodon needs to be newsworthy first. Otherwise the news we’d constantly hear is “Mastodon exists. Nobody cares”.
Then it’ll have to become more popular and user friendly.
I think the Xitter or even Discord model is poisonous for a community. It essentially creates a caste system where equal exchange can’t happen. In part because it attracts a very special kind of user base that creates a special kind of culture.
It essentially creates a caste system where equal exchange can’t happen.
If you experience Nitro members being seen as more important than others, you’re in the wrong Discord communities.
I’ve never seen someone being glorified because they are a Nitro user, and although I’ve seen some member pretending to be superior because they have Nitro, they were quickly to be ridiculed and put back in their place for trying to gloat about paying for it.
Source: been on Discord for over 9 years.
You’re thinking about it too literally. It really comes down to emotes, stickers and the like. That’s the Discord currency and before you say you can just post pictures, that’s not the same and not treated alike. It’s not about being ridiculed. It’s about being excluded from the conversation. You simply won’t be acknowledged the same way if you can’t communicate in the same style. It’s not even about one party being better. It’s more of a small rift between the two. The divide is subtle. Perhaps too subtle for most to care but it’s there.
You and I are on very different Discord communities.
Yeah, this sounds like the whole “green bubble” thing that I heard about. Where kids were seen as poor if they had a green bubble in iOS, because that signified you weren’t on an iPhone. That was way after my time in high school, but if it had been a problem when I was there, I know I would have not wanted to associate with any kids being that judgy.
Perhaps too subtle for most to care but it’s there
I’d rather say it’s only something to care about when you are in high school or peaked in high school.
Nobody cares in community servers who’s got animoji and who can send a sticker from another server.
People keep acting like hosting this shit and developing it is free. Its not. Donate to your instance and the development of the back end and all the opensource software you use. Bluesky has 20 million people using it it’s no surorise they are looking for a profit model that won’t scare the base off. I would rather it be subs instead of endless ads and algorithm tweaks.
Preach it, that money is far more well spent on supporting a community.
The Twitter format is crap. It’s bad for search (Mastodon users don’t wanna be searchable). There is a huge recency bias: observed in echo waves of circlejerk memes (CEO stuff being the most recent one). It limits discussion depth compared to the reddit format. Here on lemmy people often read all comments, and I like it even if mine get downvoted :)
The subscription model rarely works. Netflix now shows ads, Twitter is still in the red. The donation/self-hosted model is even less successful. I have an unpopular opinion that ads are still the best way to pay for servers and staff. Reddit users hated ads, and that led to them turning into a data repo for Gemini.
I hope Fedi becomes more accepting of ads, but it’s a tall order given that it’s still mostly pinkos and nerds.
Mastodon users don’t wanna be searchable
Debatable. People don’t want their private account searchable. Creators and news account want their account and their post to be discoverable.
The subscription model rarely works.
It’s not that the subscription model doesn’t work. It’s the investor that demands things to grow even more all the time. There are plenty of service that simply deliver good stuff without investor demand and ended being sustainable for years.
Fedi becomes more accepting of ads
At least, some non-Western fediverse instance runs ads. Notably the second biggest instance in fediverse, Misskey.io. Their ads are community ads, like promoting indie games, vtuber, comic books, IRL gallery event, etc. They also did subscription providing additional cosmetics like Discord. Everyone’s happy.
As it appears to me Mastodon is public like Twitter. I didn’t know about private instances. Why use this format when there’s chat rooms?
What subscriptions do you have?
Thanks, I’ll take a look at misskey.
The notion that Mastodon (and/or) Twitter as public conversation is not universal.
There’s a lot of people, especially in other language that use the social media as microblog or casual coversation. I’m Indonesian, and a lot of people here using Twitter as “anon” account for random rambling (basically microblog) without even interacting with anyone (except IRL friend).
Even Mastodon (and other fedi software) has feature for followers only post or quiet posting (cannot be viewed in live feed, or discovery).
Thanks for explaining. I use group chats for IRL friends. It’s strange that some prefer mastodon because of the twitter format. I suppose it’s like private Facebook groups.
I like the sharp distinction between private stuff and searchable stuff. So it’s good to have them as IM vs forum formats.
The subscription model rarely works
when the objective is profiteering and endless growth
I have an unpopular opinion that ads are still the best way to pay for servers and staff
I think that’s acceptable if it’s not based on datamining and profiling and personalization, but on context, and if ads are honest and not too attention grabbing. yeah advertise your product/service, with its benefits, and do not try to persuade people into paying for garbage
ARPU is a sadistic metric.
The subscription model rarely works
when the objective is profiteering and endless growth
I have an unpopular opinion that ads are still the best way to pay for servers and staff
I think that’s acceptable if it’s not based on datamining and profiling and personalization, but on context, and if ads are honest and not too attention grabbing. yeah advertise your product/service, with its benefits, and do not try to persuade people into paying for garbage
Is making a profit = profiteering? I agree with endless growth. I hate the big data model that assumes large numbers of users, huge churn, low success rate.
The ads I had in mind would be topic-based. If you’re on a supplement sub, you see suggestions for a vendor. If you’re on a web dev sub, you see VPS vendors. Nothing crass like Betterhelp or Masterworks.
Is making a profit = profiteering?
no, what I wanted to mean is wanting to make lots of money just for the sake of it, or to increase value
The ads I had in mind would be topic-based. If you’re on a supplement sub, you see suggestions for a vendor. If you’re on a web dev sub, you see VPS vendors.
yeah, exactly, that’s not so bad
Subscription models for services, even internet services, have worked for a very long time for all sorts of things. I’m not talking about streaming video, I’m talking about things like people paying for online courses or access to something like Harper’s Magazine’s website (or even the local newspaper’s website; my mother has an online-only subscription to the local newspaper). Because is charge is generally reasonable and is also not endlessly rising year over year. Subscription costs to those things go up, but not at the rate of things like Netflix.
Perhaps activitypub services can be viable as a service. I don’t think so, but I hope I’m wrong.
Lmao and all these idiots will gladly pay it because it’s a slick corporate product, and they’ll turn CryptoQueen Jay Graber into another fucking billionaire leech on our fucking system.
Great job everyone, meanwhile Mastodon still exists and you won’t be contributing to building another billionaire crytpo freak to control our country’s politics by using it. Also, all Mastodon features will continue to be free to everyone.
Jay Graber literally got her start in tech working on Zcash, a privacy-focused crypto-currency. She was happy to make a deal with Blockchain Capital, a Venture Capital firm made up entirely of cryptobros and ‘effective altruism’ freaks.
But I mean, this is America, where we say “Fuck community projects!” the corporations I hate and bitch about all the time pamper me like a baby and I must have that pampering!
“Corporations rob us of our dignity and independence.”
why does that mean she’s a crypto queen? the hype around crypto clearly makes it a stable job to get started with, and being junior developer doesn’t mean she was a magnate at all. i don’t get the characterization of her or why there are much more reasons to hate her than reasons to hate gabe newell.
But I mean, this is America, where we say “Fuck community projects!” the corporations I hate and bitch about all the time pamper me like a baby and I must have that pampering!
well, the sad truth of corporate america is that corporations just have more capital and resources to make for a better user experience.
she’s a crypto queen
Gunpowder, gelatin
Dynamite with a laser beam
Guaranteed to blow your mind
Anytiiiime!
the hype around crypto clearly makes it a stable job to get started with
You’re gonna have a hard time convincing me anyone who sees crypto as a “stable job” and not “a fucking con” isn’t sucked into this psycho TESCREAL bullshit and that they won’t start being a fucking pox on our nation like Musk,who is also a TESCREAL freak.
Jay Graber was personally chosen by Jack Dorsey. Jack Dorsey is all in on TESCREAL, too.
You’re telling me she’s completely uninfluenced by the psycho freaks surrounding her and their unhinged ideologies? I just don’t god damned buy it. Those views are almost endemic in Silicon Valley at this point.
TESCREAL
Never heard of this, it sounds terrible from a brief web search.
Here’s a TESCREAL adherent’s manifesto, by world’s biggest asshole Marc Andreesen:
https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/
And here’s a good response to that psychotic manifesto:
https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2023/10/techno-optimism-is-not-something-you-should-believe-in
I mean, my instance is a testing ground run by the founding maintainer of the Fedi software the server runs on (mbin), and that person happens to be a crypto believer. His activities and communications absolutely do not sound like what you describe.
This news article I found cited by Wikipedia about Graber’s hiring doesn’t say anything about Dorsey’s choice, and it sounds like she was hired for her technical qualifications and interest in the project.
$8/72 per month/year seems too high for most people.
Just FYI, you accidentally typed “l” instead of “)”.
Gee whiz wow who could have possibly seen this coming.
But people have been assuring me that it is a federated protocol, so I guess I’ll just join another instance. I’m sure there is a list somewhere… It’s coming… Any day now…
Sped ran it here lol
Fedi is the future, most people just don’t know it yet.
Ya know people have to pay money for the fediverse to even operate right?
Monetization is different model relying on donations of the dedicated shitpoaster;)
Nobody is hiding or gate keeping the platform
I don’t see enshittification.
It works how the internet should work properly imho
Hopefully we can scale it.
People who are able to should be reminded to donate twice per year.
maybe, but I came from kbin. which I now consider dead and gone.
RIP
Mbin is still being developed but yeah I am salty about main kbin server going down.
Oh, never even heard about mbin. I just now the same error has been on kbin for 8 months now
this is not the bluesky you’re looking for
Bluesky enables experimental science at the lab-bench or facility scale.
Bluesky is a collection of Python libraries that are co-developed but independently useful and may be adopted a la carte.
Had Twitter added a paid tier early on as it scaled up - when it was still largely the only short form blogging platform - we could potentially have avoided…so much shit we now live in. Twitter was never profitable, so it just kept adding ads until that wasn’t sustainable. And then dipshit bought it and really turned it into the nazi place.
Twitter always had problems, but I think we can generally agree it wasn’t a pretty good service for lots of things. Breaking news, sports, even science, etc. It had actual (not amazing, but existing) moderation. There’s maybe a world out there where a Twitter that isn’t owned by some idiot doesn’t help influence an election that we now have to deal with for decades to come.
That’s all wishful thinking, of course, and Twitter is not THE REASON the U.S. is trash. But there was a path where Twitter didn’t turn into just Truth Social 2.0.
Adding a paid tier to Bluesky might sound like “enshitification,” but if it simply keeps the company afloat then there’s potentially less chance of it becoming Twitter 2.0, so to speak. Otherwise, there’s probably a straight path to ads then creditors calling in debts then selling then elon just buys it, too.
Paying for a product does not prevent enshitification.
If by “enshitification” you mean things like invasive ads, invasions of privacy, etc, then the idea is absolutely that making money through a paid tier can stave off the company having to resort to those means.
Twitter was never profitable, so it just kept adding ads until that wasn’t sustainable.
Okay, so Bluesky started the same way, with no plan to monetize from the get-go, waiting to monetize later. So far, they’ve not been profitable yet, either. They keep taking money but until seemingly just now have not articulated a plan on how to pay any of it back. That’s exactly like Twitter, honestly.
I think the bigger issue is who they took money from and the kind of investment returns they expect. Because if this model doesn’t pan out enough for their greedy little hearts, they’ll demand ads and worse, too.
Because of capitalism’s never-ending desire for more, I expect to see both subscriptions and ads.
Well done everyone, you jumped ship from one pile of shit over to something that isn’t quite a pile of shit yet
The timelines are vastly different here. Twitter had like 15 years to figure it out.
How does that even work for those hosting their own? Do I just give myself Bluesky+? Because all those features I already have by virtue of hosting my own data.
Yep.
You can also host your own website without paying WordPress.
Just playing devil’s advocate here, but they have to make money somehow, right? It’s either this or advertisements. And I fucking hate advertisements. I say the only way they could truly drop the ball is if they opt for both subscriptions and advertisements. The only other option is donations. And I honestly can’t see that as a viable strategy for something like Bluesky.
Donation model would be completely viable if they actually allowed other people to run federated servers.
But it’s been a VC Trojan horse from the start.
Donation model works for Wikipedia and they’ve got a fuckin warchest of god damned money.
If fuckin Bomis Gooner Jimmy Wales can figure it out, so can we.
Isn’t a subscription on a free platform just donating with extra steps? Either way it’s optional but with one of the options you get perks. I’m not discounting the obviously shady things they are doing, I’m just pointing out that they’re basically the same thing from the perspective of the consumer but you get bonus shit.
The “extra steps” are exactly what concerns me.
Look, I know that a lot of people find valuable community and information from platforms like Bluesky, Threads, etc. They are worlds better than the Nazi Bar that used to be Twitter. But the repeated lie that they are a part of the fediverse or that they benefit the fediverse or an open internet is cynical and misleading.
We live in a world where Mastodon exists, and is actually pretty good even though there is a learning curve to it. If we are volunteering efforts to promote a microblogging platform, I personally don’t think that it should be one backed by billionaires and built for profit. They have a budget for that. the Fediverse only has us. We are the marketing department.
I think it would be really interesting to see a Peertube instance (for example) create a paid tier with better quality uploads and analytics. Those cost money to maintain. The difference is that it would exist in a federated ecosystem where everyone would be able to benefit from that content.
Just playing devil’s advocate: Nobody forced them to take loans from Venture Capital firms. They could be developing just as slowly as Mastodon, but instead they took the influx of cash so they could “move fast and break things.”
It’s solidly their choice to have taken on so much investment money without a plan to pay it back yet. Leaning on growth and then figuring out how to actually monetize it down the road, which is literally not a different path than any previous social media. These are choices they made.
They could have easily found different sources of funding, worked with smaller staff, smaller funding, and slower progress.
They’re literally following the path of every previous social media ecosystem. Get investor cash, enshittify to pay back, profit.
They’re really speedrunning the enshittification, aren’t they?
What enshittification? I haven’t noticed any dark patterns in the Bluesky app.
I’d gladly pay a subscription for a useable service than have ads plastered all over it. It’s infinitely better than the shitshow that is X.
Read the article, it shows the plans in detail.
I am happy to pay for a service I’m using and getting value from if the price is fair, and if they can find a model where it’s sustainable with some % paid and some still free so that it’s available to everyone, and do that without ads or data scraping or treating users as a commodity I think that’s as close as we’ll get to tech utopia.
The “users are the product” tech model needs to die. We will need to start paying for our stuff. But I think that will create a better internet.
Fully agree with this. I’d rather pay for the things I use and get a good product.
- Bluesky+ profile badge
- Custom app icons
- Profile customizations
- Higher video upload limits
- High quality video resolution
- Inline post translations (coming soon)
- Post analytics (coming soon)
- Bookmark folders (coming soon)
These seem fair ideas? They’re not paywalling critical functionality and you can’t run a massive social network for free. It’s not the same attitude as the wider Fediverse, and I understand why that rubs people the wrong way, but it’s hardly outrageous.
This isn’t the last stop on the enshitification express.
correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t enshittification mean that the provider reduces functionality? it seems to me that didn’t happen
It’s refreshing to see them not including “Ad-free” as a feature
