"…and does not depend on venture capital to survive,” wrote Rochko, subtly jabbing at one of Bluesky’s potential weaknesses with that last bit.
it wasn’t a subtle jab, it’s the primary reason everything else has gone to shit. it is the MAIN selling point of the fediverse.
Bluesky plans to generate revenue via subscriptions at some later point and by providing other paid services, like access to custom domains.
This looks like a very important point. I doubt we’ll see true federation with “access to custom domains”.
Its so blatantly obvious that bluesky is already looking for ways to make profit. The enshittification cycles are getting shorter and shorter. Soon they will try to travel back in time to create even more shit.
From what I can gather, they aren’t selling the ability to link custom domains as your user handle. They are acting as a domain registrar to allow users to buy domains and link them to their handle in one step, then likely skimming some profits off the top. Imagine they sell a “custom username with domain” for $20 per year, they pay the wholesale fee (around $9 for a .com) and pocket the rest. That seems perfectly reasonable to me.
Ah yes “perfectly reasonable” to give away control over your supposedly freely federated service to some profit motivated company. Toddler ass logic. They can revoke that right at any moment for whatever reason.
I hate to be the one to break this to you, but servers cost money. Developers cost money. Bandwidth costs money. If you want to run a reasonably successful social media company, you need money.
Bundling domain registration (already a thing) with custom usernames (already a thing) and taking a profit from that transaction is not enshittification. Enshittification would be if they took away the ability to link your own domain and required everyone to buy domains through Bluesky. This would just be giving less savvy users the ability to link a domain to their username without having to learn DNS.
Enshittification would be if they took away the ability to link your own domain and required everyone to buy domains through Bluesky.
And that (including other restrictions) is exactly what they will do as soon as anyone that is selfhosting does something that they or their investors dont like. Whats so hard to understand about this.
Ofcourse they need money, but the problems is that the money will be dictating their entire decision making progress. Thats how for profit companies work. If you think companies are your friends then im sorry for you.
it is the MAIN selling point of the fediverse.
Debatable, I would say it’s the ability to selfhost and not be under the mercy of “the platform” or the admin’s subjective morals, you can also not federate and make the place your own
do you think any of that could happen if it was beholden to capital?
Not necessarily, it all depends on the software license, people don’t usually care about who funds their software, ( even if they’re funding it themselves with their data ), plus If we’re talking about selling points, saying that you can control your online presence is a much successful sell than saying it’s not VC funded, like I never used that argument when I try to convince my friends to hop on Mastodon
Edit: but I’m not saying it’s not a valid argument, it’s very valid
I wouldn’t say it’s the main selling point. Because if it is, there is no selling point.
The fediverse is a series of social networks. Social networks rely on being SOCIAL. So in order to have a healthy social network you need a large number of people. The more people, the better the platform. It’s that easy.
The current audience for Lemmy/Fediverse is a niche group. This group highly prefers linux. It cares (and knows about) federation. It cares about adblocking. It highly prefers political discussions. It cares about privacy.
As for the majority of the country? They don’t give a shit. About any of that. At all.
Linux is a platform that if you based user numbers on features, it SHOULD be the number one operating system. It’s not. It’s not even close. I’ll put it this way. The Dallas Cowboys play in a stadium that can fill 100,000 people. If you filled a sellout crowd for an event, the ticketing ushers would outnumber the linux users in that building.
And the reason for this, is the average American does not give one shit if something has enshitification. Or even notice enshitification. That’s the reason products keep shrinkings, ads keep appearing. If people stopped using the products, they would stop doing that. It’s only profitable because people don’t care.
So if the major selling point is “we don’t have corporate enshitification”, and the majority of people don’t even know what that means, then it’s not a selling point is it?
The current audience for Lemmy/Fediverse is a niche group.
A niche group who is here because capital destroyed other platforms we loved.
I don’t think my statement is untrue but I also don’t think it will remain true for much longer for exactly the reasons you put forward.
edit: @LEVI@feddit.org
The current audience for Lemmy/Fediverse is a niche group. This group highly prefers linux. It cares (and knows about) federation. It cares about adblocking. It highly prefers political discussions. It cares about privacy.
But it’s not, actually. The instances you choose tend to federate with similar instances while the instances for the people who are not like that, are just not shown to us as a group. And I’m perfectly fine with that. Does it make Lemmy a bubble to some degree…sure. And are the vast majority of instances exactly as you describe…yes, I’m not denying that.
But outside of our circle of instances, there are hundreds of little instances that are just for themselves; their family groups, their workplaces, their DnD Campaign, etc… We don’t see them because we aren’t federated with them, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
Lemmy is more than just where we sit, typing away at each other. Lemmy is the technology itself, and it’s used in far more places than just our little bubble of politically minded privacy respecting tech nerds.
Edited: Heck, I’d be willing to be you that somewhere out there right now, there is a dark-universe Lemmy made up of all the Nazi, right-wing instances that federate with each other, and we would just never see them in our feeds because that’s the beautiful thing about federation/defederation.
I’m going to disagree. Lemmy as a whole is 60k people as of 3 months ago. There’s probably little tiny packets of closed instances of a small group of friends, but there aren’t enough of those closed groups to even register on a count. Meaning there’s probably less than 100 people, collectively, in those small instances.
And how is that anything that disproves the “niche” title? 8 Billion people on earth, 100 people or less fit into the catagory you describe. Hell, even all of Lemmy at 60k still would be classified as niche.
As for the nazi instances, I don’t see that. And I don’t mean I’m not federated with them. I mean, they don’t exist. Those types of people like to make noise. They like the idea of being offensive. They go where the people are. I’d say bluesky is too small for them, much less lemmy.
10 years ago twitter was considered left wing leaning. It’s also where the people were.
Now, we have a new twitter owner, and it’s a nazi hangout. It was attractive to nazis, because nazis could be seen there.
They can’t be seen on public lemmy instances, because this place is a ghost town, and losing users by the month.
Whereas twitter is NOW losing users, but at their peak it was like 700 million users. Now it’s at 250 million as of a few months ago.
So one post on twitter by a nazi will still be seen by more left leaning people who haven’t left yet, than 20 messages on lemmy. Even if they somehow DON’T get moderated.
The more people, the better the platform. It’s that easy.
Hard disagree, quality matters as much or perhaps more than quantity. A billion Nazi network is still Nazi, see Xitter for instance.
Even if Mastodon and other Fediverse platform gains are 1% of the gains of BlueSky or anything else, it’s still cause for celebration and to welcome new friendly faces with open arms.
When the Reddit API-calypse happened, I don’t think anyone expected Lemmy to have more users than Reddit or anywhere even close to a similar number. But Lemmy.ca went from around 40 active users in April 2023 to hundreds, and then to 2k over 3 months, most people being friendly and ready for something different.
Quantity isn’t everything. There is an innumerable amount of things that could be better about Mastodon, Lemmy and other Fediverse software and sure, mass-adoption could help with niche content. However the way the Fediverse is set up, it is resistant to all the sacrifices other platforms had to make in the long run to be more profitable. Musk-boi could “buy” Mastodon, Spez could “buy” Lemmy.world and ml, and Zucker-bot could “buy” Pixelfed tomorrow, but that wouldn’t stop anyone from forking those platforms and leaving the main instances. The distributed nature makes it hard for a monopolist to capture.
Musk-boi could “buy” Mastodon, Spez could buy Lemmy.world and ml, and Zucker-bot could “buy” Pixelfed tomorrow, but that wouldn’t stop anyone from forking those platforms and leaving the main instances.
Or going someplace in the Fediverse that’s neither Mastodon nor Lemmy nor Pixelfed.
People just very badly want to not know about other fediverse platforms for some reason.
Reason #1: It overloads them mentally. It was hard enough to wrap their minds around Mastodon not being the one website they thought it is.
Reason #2: They got so used to their nice and cosy and fluffy and friendly woolly mammoth being the entire Fediverse, and everything they ever interact with being Mastodon, that everything they (might) have to interact with that is not Mastodon is too much of a disturbance. There being something else in the Fediverse other than Mastodon simply feels too wrong.
Quantity isn’t everything
That right there hits the nail on the head. There is a certain critical mass, an activity level that makes satisfy most discussion needs for most users. It’s a tiny fraction of the total traffic of a place like Reddit or Twitter.
But if we have that, and keep the quality level up, we can succeed.Success to me doesn’t mean killing Reddit and Twitter. It means creating a place where smart people can come and find enough content and discussion that they don’t need Reddit and Twitter.
is no one calling it the X-odus and why?
I mean Elon missed the opportunity too. He could have cold Twitter spaces to spacesX but nope
The fediverse will have the same growths as most foss. It will start slow and continue to grow slowly forever. It will always be a bit behind the cutting edge but it will never get worse only get better. Its like evolution it gets forked the best fork wins the reat die repeat.
Every enshitification cycle we will gain a few people and once we have them we have they stay a lot longer than most other platforms. We will not win through mass adoption but through a long slow a painfull proccess of gradual accumulation.
And at some point it will become dominant eg blender, a bunch of standards, and linux in the server space. The tech companies live on the edge forever trying to outrun the snail that will kill them instantly when it touches them. Foss is coming it cannot be stopped it will find them and it will kill them
*if we can fund it
I’m probably going to start donating $5 a month to the Lemmy devs (or whomever is the best to donate to) Vote with your wallet people!
I would reccommend donating to ur instances over the devs. The instances have ongoing costs that if not paid will shut down the fediverse far quicker than a slowed development cycle
Ty I figured someone would point me in the right direction. On an aside, absolutely no one irl I’ve talked to has ever heard of Lemmy or the fediverse which is disappointing. I wonder how we get fediverse stuff to grow
The .world instance is very well funded - they take more money than they spend. Not profit since they’re a nonprofit, they save it as well as give to others. Meanwhile the Lemmy developers still don’t have proper full time funding. This information is public. If I were you I’d subscribe to fund the developers for now. Lemmy.ca is also well funded.
The fediverse needs to outlast BlueSky, so that when its VC backers call time and demand a profitable exit (i.e. enshittification), there’ll still be a fediverse.
It will outlast bs. Mastodon has been around for many years now. It already outlasted Google+, which was bigger and had more funding. And since it has a broad base of support it’s unlikely that it will all just fall apart. Unlike the commercial social networks, no single person can pull the plug the fediverse. (Lemmy is younger, but it also seems very strong right now. I just hope lemmy still gets some exposure on the outside now that the major drama at reddit has died down.)
What makes you think VC won’t have another product in the pipeline to take over from most users exiting BlueSky? Just like they had BS ready to scoop up most of the Xodus.
Not a critique really, the Fediverse will still be there and will get some people every time.
The Xodus
Seriously. What the fuck TechCrunch?
I love the Fediverse and see it as the only reasonable choice. Everywhere else you must eat shit and like it.
I thought the name x was stupid, but now I love the idea of eXodus. If I were starting a site, that’s what I would call it.
Right?
It’s so obvious. Journalism today, sheesh.
Quick! Create an instance called Lemmy.eXodus!
I’m a bit late on this one, why’s there been another exodus?
From Wikipedia:
In November 2024, following Donald Trump’s victory in the 2024 United States presidential election and Elon Musk’s nomination as a co-executive of the proposed Department of Government Efficiency, Bluesky experienced a surge in new user registrations as people migrated from other social platforms, particularly Twitter. Many came from the United States, United Kingdom (where Bluesky had previously seen growth during the 2024 UK riots following Musk’s commentary), and Canada. The social app added over 4 million registered users in that week, becoming the most popular app in the US App Store and Play Store.
X is full of white supremacists.
Has been for over a decade
Maybe I should say it’s reached a real tipping point.
Yeah, that makes sense
Most of the exodus where coming from iOS ecosystem, mostly Americans ig. Nonetheless, the destruction of Xitter will give fediverse the momentum to grow. Achieving 800k active users is wild (tho i do notice some spams too, which I wish there’ll be easier tool sets to deal with them). Now, let’s see which approach of social media will win in the long run: the Bluesky or Mastodon.
I think I saw two or three “exodus from Twitter”, every time most of the users go back after two weeks or so.
Most definitely go back, but some stay, and those who do stay, cause a growth over time. The activity stays somewhat elevated and never goes back to exactly where it was. It’s always just a little bit higher.
Kind of like Elvis’s colon. He expelled MOST of the fecies everyday, but some stayed permanently, until he died on the toilet with 25lbs of fecies inside him that never came out.
I guess in this example, I’m saying that people are shit
Sorry but what the fuck is that analogy
I’m not a fan of humans.
As a Spaniard this one feels different. Mastodon never really took off, but Bluesky is going up and up with lots of media personalities, politicians, influencer and most importantly, shitposting accounts
Twitter/X should be called Twix and a tweet should be a twext.
I’m embarrassingly proud of this.
