Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is reshaping social media, but advertising isn't off the table
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is reshaping social media, but advertising isn't off the table
Bluesky has blown up this year thanks to a vibrant community of posters, user customization choices, and a decentralized protocol that doesn't lock users
Use Mastadon, Bluesky will eventually have to enshittify as they are a corporation.
119They literally owe money to *checks notes... Blockchain Capital. A bunch of fucking cryptobros venture capital firm.
Enshittification is coming, people are stupid for falling for this again. I'm sick of fucking hearing about how all-volunteer created & funded Mastodon isn't as slick as the fucking venture capital funded Bluesky. "It's too hard to use!" Wah, go cry about it into a corporate teat some more, sucker.
64people are stupid for falling for this again.
It's a better, more usable platform than mastodon for the average user today, it makes sense people will move to it instead - it's human behavior.
I wish more than people treated these platforms as disposable like they are. Just dump their ass like a shitty ex if they start abusing the platform. Remind folks that Yahoo, Myspace and Digg seemed unreplaceable at one point, and now they are irrelevant.
34UX is always going to be the number one priority for a SoMe, when people have to pick one. People are not suckers for wanting proper solutions. FOSS projects need to prioritise this much higher that many of them do, otherwise they will never crawl out of the shadows and in to the light and forever stay with the nerds willing to accept an inferior UX.
21
Much like lemmy, my mastodon feed and general engagement has started to fizzle out. I’m seeing people I used to follow on mastodon no longer active, but now on Bluesky. 🤷♂️
16It's hard for communities to switch from twitter to bluesky eve with starter packs, custom feeds, etc. Not all people are into programming and that's basically the only community in mostodon.
5I have no complaints about Lemmy, but posting on Mastodon is basically screaming into the void - I've been trying for more than a year, and I basically hardly ever get any reaction at all. In comparison, in the first week on Bluesky I found multiple people following me, commenting on my silly wine and cactuses posts, and in general just interacting.
Don't get me wrong, I still prefer Mastodon technically and ethically, but it's just so goddamned barren and dead I feel completely unmotivated to post there...
5My Lemmy feed is bangin'. Live long and prosper 🖖
5
can we "use" mastodon if we already have lemmy accounts?
5Yes (somewhat), just like you can post on Lemmy with Honk, but note that all ActivityPub software, while speaking the same protocol, interacts best with its own kind. Yet.
2
Yep. They’ve only raised $15M so far which is a modest amount by relative standards. If they paid it back right now then I would give them some breathing room for these naive, grandiose statements. Oh but then how would their staff get rich without an IPO? If they could become profitable NOW they could maybe go employee-owned and avoid selling their ass to the stock market.
Of course none of that will happen. Optimistically they will take on more investment money and then go public or get acquired by some other entity and these hippie-ass remarks from their CEO will look like what they are: pipe dreams brought on by their first blush of success. And that’s charitable. Her comments are so naive it’s plausible she’s straight up lying through her teeth right now.
Everyone in tech wants to get buy-a-house rich and quit. No one is in this for humanity.
3They have already started letting transphobic journalists harass people without consequence. They are repeatedly unbanning Jesse Singal. Its already enshittified.
1Tried mastodon, went through three instances, at the end hosted my own single user, ultimately decided the hassle was not worth it. I would rather use nothing than mastodon.
1Using nothing is preferable to feeding the beasts that consume and control us.
0
Venture capital and crypto money do not last forever and they need to maintain and run a for-profit corporation.
The question is not IF they will sell some soft of “pro accounts” and have advertising, the question is only WHEN they will have it. My guess is before Q3/2025.
44Exactly, they're in the "growth" part of the business stage, where they get investors giving them money because of the explosion of user growth. In other words, the explosion of available eyes to put ads in front of. They're literally investing based on the growth of the user base, which is tied to how much ad-buy can be involved.
9Growth phase = lucy holding the football
3
I expect subscriptions soon. I don't mind subscriptions as much as I mind advertisment honestly. Advertising is negative content for these types of services. It detracts and makes the service way less useful but subscriptions at least will fund upkeep at a greater efficiency of user per dollar than ads.
To lurkers, consider financially supporting the fediverse particukarly the homeservers you use if you aren't running your own.
7And at the same time they will offer a premium plan in which there are no ads.
3
They are VC backed. Enshittification incoming.
35I mean, of course they will. They've got bills to pay, after all.
21Out of curiosity, I checked her wikipedia page. How did she jump from a relatively regular tech career to CEO of BlueSky in 2 years?
9This is just my opinion.
There were only 50 employees in BlueSky in 2021. She was probably one of the few people that started a company out of those employees. That's what I got from her Wikipedia.
I'm gonna guess is she is liked by her coworkers, she does well in presentations.
Also bluntly, her background of being Chinese and Swiss is a good look if they plan on marketing internationally. Her age probably plays a big role. No one wants to follow a company with a CEO that's too old or too young.
15That's what I thought, too.
1
Got to wait until the network effects make it hard to get the momentum to go elsewhere before really turning the enshittification screws. Look at how much it's taken to dent twitter significantly.
8I watched her talk and she is clearly not being honest. She uses a lot of buzzwords without any of the deeper philosophical underpinnings that would be necessary to truly create an open platform.
She plays like it will always be the way it is now which is frankly a lie being a for-profit entity with startup money from crypto bros.
Their terms of service will be changed when it suits them and already allow for their complete control of anything you share with them. Retaining your copyright means nothing if they can do whatever they want with what you share with them.
Finally we see the coupe de grace of binding arbitration in their terms. This is just another corporate attempt to be the next big social media thing. They will be hovering up all your personal details and selling it to marketers and AI bros before you can finishing signing on.
7It's a company, they need to make a profit. that's fair enough when you sell an actual service or good, but in this care you just rent out a platform for people to talk from, financed by shareholders.
Renting out a speech platform for money from shareholders and being open and fair are not compatible with eachother. Even if she is genuine, she will have to respond to shareholders, she will need to make as much money as possible.
Shareholders are almost never a good thing, but for internet platforms, they're the worst
1
As long as that philosophy doesn't reach FOSS philosophy, that's fine. Imagine if Fediverse social media suddenly didn't really want to "enshitify" their platforms, but included trackers and ads?
5See that's kind of the thing though, Ads is a broad spectrum. We can think of it as small things like the old google one blue line of text off to the side in the old days, the huge popups that force you to view them etc...
Bottom line there's a scale there.
|few and easy to ignore] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [ Many and forces you to pay attention to them before you can reach what you came for]
and the bottom line is, far left on that spectrum, is negligable profit. If you can tune out the ads easily and just focus on the content you want... that means the advertisers aren't getting new sales/visits etc.. that they want. Which means, they will pay very little for them.
Point is, the hypothetical hope of "well when their investors ask them to make it profitable, they will just put a tiny banner in the far corner", is a no go.
2Not to mention the algorithms that lock your attention to the ad. YouTube does this a lot. I just watch all the commercial, because it knows well (through diffing and other techniques) what I will watch completely. I guess I'll get used to it. I have also been clicking more on ads around the webpages, but I don't think this is to my liking. The technology is just getting better. This is really bad, but it's beyond salvation right now. I believe all we can do is mitigate the effects of ads on the Internet. I'm glad we have alternatives.
1
I reject the idea that things like Mastadon, Bluesky, Lemmy, etc will ever actually be good things.
Elon turned Twitter alt right, but it was a shithole for years before he bought it. Twitter started being a bot infested outrage farm echo chamber with questionable moderation practices in like 2014.
Reddit was in some ways better before it went corporate, but in a lot of ways it was much worse. Like all things considered I'd rather be on a website that has a shitty mobile app and mods that sell access to corporations than a website where there are communities dedicated to softcore child porn and teenagers getting death threats over jackdaws.
Even if the fediverse fulfills its promise of not going down the corporate rabbit hole, they are still going to end up being a collection of inherently toxic echo chambers.
3I reject that you lump a commercialized platform with decentralized ones. It kind of makes me think you are full of it to begin with.
What happened to Twitter after Muskrat can't be compared to anything I have ever seen. It is a disservice to reality to try and play like Twitter was already like that. It is now purely a propaganda platform used to subvert democracy.
Reddit was way better before going corporate. You have to be a real bootlicker to think the corporation improved it. You cite some questionable reddits as proof corporate cleaned it up. I just see them commercializing the hard work of millions of people without compensation.
The Fediverse has already fulfilled it promise. While it may not be the final version of the future of decentralization, it is a great start.
I will never give my information or time to another corporate ran social media platform. They proved they are all abusive fucks aand are at war with the very users that allow their platforms to exist.
3So, this is a lot.
I guess I'll start with you calling Elon Musk "Muskrat". This is like a middle school level insult. It makes your already immature argument seem even more immature. I'm straight up not sure if I'm arguing with a literal child at this point.
Two, Twitter was better before Musk bought it, but it wasn't in any way good. A million different toxic trends either started or blew up on Twitter. The 2010s was filled with a million different dumbass pearl clutching moments that started with a bunch of terminally online Twitter users making a mountain out of a molehill. It was basically just a constant stream of outrage and sanctimonious nonsense.
That's not to mention there was plenty of hate speech and attempts to undermine democracy, because the moderation team only really enforced the rules when it came to conservative talking points. You had NYTimes reporters tweeting out how white people should all kill themselves without consequences, while Twitter went around banning people for clowning on laid off journalists by telling them to "learn to code". Donald Trump was banned, but the Supreme Leader of Iran was welcome with open arms.
Even then, Twitter played a huge role in the formation of the alt right because they were always at least six months too late when it came to banning anyone. The culture war doesn't get off the ground if Twitter just blacklists a bunch of straight up Russian propaganda websites and banhammers Milo. They also were extremely late to the party when it came to banning those ISIS recruitment videos, which is even more inexcusable.
I reject the idea that reddit was ever really that good. It was better in some ways, but a lot of the most toxic reddit moments happened before it went corporate. Off the top of my head:
- The softcore child porn
- The stalker pictures of women
- The time they had a huge thread where they all collectively gained sympathy to rapists
- The "seduction" subreddits that basically attempted to convince naive young men that "seduction" meant putting women into a situation where they consented due to extreme social pressures.
- The time they identified the wrong person as the Boston bomber
The non toxic content was extremely hit or miss. You'd get more in depth discussion, but it would be between a ton of extremely myopic pseudo intellectual posts. Basically half of reddit was something like:
- Religion bad, but only Christianity
- I am euphoric because my atheism and intelligence enlightens me
- Republicans bad
- I have literal superpowers now that I stopped masturbating
- Some half true historical fact that gets repeated a million different times because it fits everyone's worldview
- Keanu Reeves
- Rage comics
- DAE hate sportsball ???
Finally, a huge portion of the reason reddit went downhill was the unpaid mods. They were often unwell individuals who used their position to push progressive politics. There was a good five years where basically every sub over a certain size was essentially a progressive politics sub, because they were all modded by the same people who saw the users as a captive audience.
Social media just isn't a good place for unique content or discourse. That's not gonna change no matter who the owner is.
1
i like jay but they need to do something about the brewing aaron rodericks/jesse singal drama and actually ban him permanently if they want to keep the trust of trans users
2Just another parasite leeching folks...
2"thanks to vibrant community of posters" ,,🤣
0Bluesky is already coming apart. My partner uses it and last night she got a video of a person being shot in her feed. No warning. No label. Just blam!
Their influx of new users don't all want to participate in labeling and moderation and they don't seem to be able to handle it.
-6Let's just hope that Jay Graber is another Jack Dorsey and that the company Bluesky is bought by an Elon Musk 2.0
-9