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.
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.