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Is BlueSky similar to the Fediverse? No.

The Fediverse is owned by the people and communities that use it. A basic server costs $5 a month all inclusive, anyone can make one. It's ad-free, made by volunteers, funded by donations, servers are independent.

BlueSky is a for-profit corporation funded by VC money. Its technical structure makes servers dependent on expensive corporate-run relays. BlueSky's business setup is eerily reminiscent of Ello: waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-dea

Waxy.org · The Quiet Death of Ello's Big Dreams - Waxy.orgEllo launched in 2014 with big dreams, but the artsy social network suddenly shut down last year, deleting nine years of posts without warning. What happened?

@FediTips
And apparently it is growing faster than Mastodon

@askans

If it's not community-owned, it's not sustainable. Eventually VC-owned networks enshittify because the VCs want to see a return on their investment, and we end up with another Twitter/X or Meta/Facebook situation. Once they stop growing users, they start trying to squeeze more money out of each user etc etc, or else sell the company to someone awful.

The entire point of the Fediverse is to do things differently, to have slow sustainable growth so that enshittification doesn't happen.

@FediTips @askans

This is a false dilemma: you can have commercial alternatives that are neither VC-owned nor "community owned", and you can have plenty of profit-based service providers that will be completely happy to serve a large-but-limited number of customers.

Give me 10-15k paying customers, and I will be able to run communick forever, even taking some of the profits to reinvest into development of the underlying projects. None of the "community owned" instances can do that.

@raphael

There is a world of difference between making a sustainable stable profit and taking VC money.

If you receive enough money to keep a business going, that's great. You have built a sustainable business. 👍

If you take VC money to run a business at a loss in pursuit of growth, you will eventually have to start enshittifying in order to keep the VCs happy because they're partial owners of your business now. They don't just want profit, they want growth of profit.

1/3

@raphael

If you look at the Ello article linked in the original post, it goes into detail about the problems of accepting VC money.

BlueSky isn't just for-profit, it's taken VC money and will therefore have to provide VCs perpetually growing profits. This will eventually become impossible unless they enshittify.

VC money is incredibly corrosive to the online world and real life world, because it demands that everything grows all the time, it's impossible to just stay at a steady state.

2/3

@FediTips

I am responding to your "If it's not community-owned, it's not sustainable" statement. This is the meme that needs to die.

I'd actually think it's the opposite: aside from instances that require payment from all members, I'm yet to see any service that can call itself sustainable.

@raphael

Perhaps we disagree on what sustainable means?

I'd mean continuing to operate over a long period without exploiting users ("enshittifying"). There are plenty of instances that have done this, some of them date back to 2016 or before.

VC-backed services tend to demand growth within such a time frame. Continuing to exist in a stable state is incompatible with VC ownership.

@FediTips

What about the other side of the equation? How many instances disappeared due to moderator and admin burn out?

How many instances were created by enthusiastic people who were simply not able to manage it properly and shut their instances down when got their first wave of spam? How long do you think regular folks will be willing to keep hopping around because they picked an instance ran by amateurs?

@raphael

That's a totally fair point, maybe the biggest challenge for the Fediverse. I just don't think that VC is the answer to it.

VC tends to turn a service to crap while the VC people walk away with the money and don't care what happens to the service itself. They just wanted the money all along.

@FediTips

> They just wanted the money all along.

Again, doing things for money is not the problem and it is not something that only "evil VCs" do.

I don't expect to get food on my table out of goodwill of a "community-focused" farmer. I don't expect electric power in my home out of the community. Why should I expect social media services to be provided out of "community"?

If developers still go to VCs for funding projects, it's because "the community" is not valuing their work.

Raphael Lullis

@FediTips

You are stuck in the VC-community duality and refusing to acknowledge an alternative that does not require infinite growth, but does require more than feel-good promises of support.

Let me try a different approach... If VCs are not acceptable, what would be best:

- commercial providers like communick, or omg.lol, or mastodon.green (all charging 20-30 USD per year?) from all members?

- donation-based instances that historically never get to 2% of the user base to contribute?