Bluesky teases paid subscription, Bluesky+, in new mockup | TechCrunch
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Social networking startup and X competitor Bluesky is working on subscriptions. The company first announced plans to develop a new revenue stream based on

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.

    • phoneymouse@lemmy.worldEnglish
      20·
      11 months ago

      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.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldEnglish
        5·
        11 months ago

        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.

    • foremanguy@lemmy.mlEnglish
      18·
      11 months ago

      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

        • foremanguy@lemmy.mlEnglish
          3·
          11 months ago

          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.

    • Corgana@startrek.websiteEnglish
      10·
      11 months ago

      I’ve never seen an ad-based tier on a Mastodon instance and the network does just fine 🤷‍♂️

      Without executives leeching money from going to the actual cost of servers things seem to work better! Go figure!

      • nasi_goreng@lemmy.zipEnglish
        13·
        11 months ago

        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.

        • horse_battery_staple@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          11 months ago

          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.

      • pup_atlas@pawb.socialEnglish
        4·
        11 months ago

        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.

        • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          3·
          11 months ago

          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.

        • Corgana@startrek.websiteEnglish
          1·
          11 months ago

          “Many small instances that can survive with a couple of donations” seems much more sustainable than a handful of large ad-selling business “powered by Mastodon”.

    • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
      9·
      11 months ago

      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.

        • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2·
          11 months ago

          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.

            • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
              1·
              11 months ago

              If you want social media, no matter if it’s Lemmy or Reddit, it costs a hell of a lot of money to host that.

              Seems to be doing fine, if scaled up cost and contributions would even out. IMO you actually proved my point.
              The scale of the internet is mainly based on ISP’s and those are paid by users. Sites can be distributed, the technology to do that has existed since the mid 90’s.
              These distribution models work fine, and do not have to deal with the added tasks of ads and trackers commercial sites use.
              You could pretty easily build a youtube like site around it.

                • Buffalox@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  2·
                  11 months ago

                  So of course, they’re going to be more likely to donate. Once you scale outside of those groups into groups of people who don’t care as much, and are less invested in the technology, you get less donations.

                  This is true with how things are now, but an ad free internet would look very different, and users would behave differently and have different expectations.
                  Note that I’m not arguing for a total non commercial Internet, things like subscriptions and Steam are fine, it’s things like Google Meta Twitter and the likes, where the users are actually the product, and the customers are the advertisers.

                  PeerTube exists if you’re interested, by the way.

                  Yes I know, but youtube makes it irrelevant, because everybody post there.

      • nasi_goreng@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        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.

      • Patch@feddit.ukEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        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.

    • GreyBeardEnglish
      3·
      11 months ago

      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.

      • tb_@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2·
        11 months ago

        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.

    • ZeroOne@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      11 months ago

      Ads could just occur in the background & relevant to What you want to see & the content