Are We Decentralized Yet?

Re:Are We Decentralized Yet? by gary_0 on Saturday August 30, 2025 @04:57PM (#45077947)

Off the top of my head: Paid hosting/services on top of the protocol, reddit-gold style tipping and gamification, being a transactional middleman (there are a lot of artists selling things, famous people promoting things, and so on), promoted posts and ads (easily blockable, but some users wouldn't bother).

Bluesky is a small team of like ~30 people, if they keep running lean they have at least a chance of a decent profit margin. But none of that will make anyone a multi-billionaire, so never mind.

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Re:Are We Decentralized Yet? by YetAnotherNick on Saturday August 30, 2025 @07:32PM (#45078949)

I think you are wildly overestimating the user's willingness to pay online, and underestimating the costs to run a large scale site. Even if you remove developer's salaries and server costs, the fines could be worth 10s of millions of dollar per country just for delay in removal of hate speech[1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_Enforcement_Act

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Re:Are We Decentralized Yet? by miki123211 on Sunday August 31, 2025 @03:15AM (#45081076)

They could also follow the Gmail playbook.

For consumers, plenty of ads and plenty of tracking. For businesses, heavily-restricted user-to-server APIs and features gated behind subscriptions, think custom domains with Bsky hosting, multi-user post approvals, integrating DMs with customer support systems etc.

You can do all of that while still being fair to and interoperable with the rest of the ecosystem. As long as you don't want the convenience, features and UI of Gmail, you can still communicate with Gmail users from any other provider, and the same could be true about Bsky.

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