I'd be willing to bet that it's valuation is completely detached from the social network and is simply a way investors are using to bet on Trump's brand. The social network is just tagging along for the ride.
Similar to Tesla's stock and it's occasional fluctuations in value coinciding with SpaceX developments.
With Mastodon there isn't really anything to sell. The software is FOSS and the network is not controlled by any one company. Bluesky is still fairly centralised and thus has more ways of getting enshittified.
I believe they are planning to decentralise more but this will be a lot harder now with 700M incentives not to do so.
> Bluesky is being valued at around $700M in new funding round.
Also known as:
> Bluesky takes a loan of other people's money. It'll then need to pay it back, probably by enshittifying their product in order to extract the money out of its users.
Unless Bluesky finds a source of money that is not venture capitalist funding, the above will happen.
There are 2 broad classes of financial assets. VC money is almost always the other kind, not a loan.
I would rather you had written something like, "Bluesky has sold part of itself. If the leadership of Bluesky is not committed enough to Bluesky's making a profit, the owners of Bluesky can vote to have the leadership replaced. This sale makes it less likely that the owners will overlooking any laxness on the part of the leadership in pursuit of profit."
There are two kinds assets of financial assets, but both of them work the same way - you pay back the investors or face the consequences, i.e. the loss of control over how the company functions.
In other terms, it doesn't matter to the end user who exactly introduces the resulting enshittification - Bluesky's current leadership that doesn't want to lose control of the company, or Bluesky's future leadership that replaces the current one.
Well you don't even have to pay them back in some cases. If your market value keeps increasing that's usually fine for them too. Most shareholders aren't in it for the dividend but are gambling on an upwards value.
Of course what goes up can't go up forever. This is when the enshittification starts.
I thought the whole point is that it’s built on an open protocol and decentralized? Granted a number of people couldn’t or wouldn’t, but you could self host if it gets too enshittified is what I’ve always understood.
Decentralized? Not in practice. ATproto fundamentally requires every participating node to index/process every message being sent around the network. The whole thing about AppView can be summed up as "a global indexed view of every event from every node".
ATproto delegates all the crappy parts (identity management, moderation) to those that would like to participate in the network, but all of that is pointless if your messages are not shared with the AppView servers.
This has been Bluesky's intent from day one: by letting people host their own data at their own PDS, but by ensuring that the communication is only meaningful if passing through their indexers, they are effectively aiming to be to the "Social Web" what Google became to the old www.
Let me present you with a use case: let's say that the New York Times (55.2 million followers on Twitter) decides to leave Musk's land and that they will fully embrace decentralized social media. Let's pretend that they learned their lesson and that they swore to never rely on someone else's platform to broadcast their own information, so they are looking to do anything they need to own the infra needed to publish all their content and reach anyone who wants to access them.
In our scenario, they don't care where their 55M followers are hosted, but they do care about giving accounts to their ~5k employees and they want to be able to follow any of the newsworthy people and institutions: politicians, entertainment celebrities, athletes, etc.
What would be the requirements and associated costs for the NYT to provide this, and how do these costs change if/when more institutions decide to follow suit?
An appview doing partial sync of the atmosphere is going to have two drivers of its cost: 1. number of users being synced, 2. number of direct users of the appview. #2 because some additional work is done for the direct users, such as computation of the following feed.
I won't have exact numbers until we actually finish that distro and deploy it, but my ballpark for 5k direct users with, say, 100 follows on average leading to 500k synced users, I'd say $100-200/mo with a max of $500. If you're not running a big instance, you're not paying big costs.
EDIT: I should clarify that the partial sync runmodel that we're developing will still operate on atproto's "shared heap" approach which means that activity outside of the selected sync-set (the 500k users) will not be visible to the NYT users. How we solve that limitation is an open question. We could introduce message-passing to notify about that activity, for instance. I think that's the most notable downside compared to a comparable AP deployment, which inherently operates on message-passing.
You absolutely buried the lede. Of course the idea is for the NYT to see all messages from its followers as well, not just their own follows. They should also be able to search and discover anyone that is on the atmosphere (after all, the first thing that journalists will want to do when investigating a person is to see their social media presence). With that in mind, what would be a real estimate for operating costs?
I'm really taking your "EDIT" as admission that ATProto will only be able to claim "actually decentralized" once it changes into something that resembles ActivityPub.
It hasn't fully delivered on that part just yet, so it's still in the "maybe it might happen" zone. The moment it happens, I'll change my mind.
In addition, every round of VC funding also requires them explaning their VCs how implementing an open protocol and decentralization is going to help them pay their investment back - I do not expect such talks to go well the moment the VCs realize that both of those make it possible for the platform to effectively resist enshittification attempts.
Numbers of users on Bluesky: 26 million
Valuation: $700m
Number of users on Truth Social: 2 million users
Market cap (DJT): $7.32bn
it's almost like valuations in public markets are prone to major and sustained sentiment-based dislocations from fundamentals.
I'd be willing to bet that it's valuation is completely detached from the social network and is simply a way investors are using to bet on Trump's brand. The social network is just tagging along for the ride.
Similar to Tesla's stock and it's occasional fluctuations in value coinciding with SpaceX developments.
New funding is both good and bad for a social platform.
The VC funders obviously expect a sizeable return on their investment.
The pressure to achieve this paves the road toward enshittification --- just like it has at X.
Growth will handle that for a while, so I don't think enshittification will start just yet. But eventually it will go the same way as all the rest.
Yes, this is probably the beginning of the end for Bluesky.
Luckily none of the vultures are circling Mastodon yet.
With Mastodon there isn't really anything to sell. The software is FOSS and the network is not controlled by any one company. Bluesky is still fairly centralised and thus has more ways of getting enshittified.
I believe they are planning to decentralise more but this will be a lot harder now with 700M incentives not to do so.
I wonder is Mark Cuban managed to get on the cap table in this round. He has mentioned the desire, and has been very active in promoting the platform.
https://archive.ph/XRuOJ
> Bluesky is being valued at around $700M in new funding round.
Also known as:
> Bluesky takes a loan of other people's money. It'll then need to pay it back, probably by enshittifying their product in order to extract the money out of its users.
Unless Bluesky finds a source of money that is not venture capitalist funding, the above will happen.
There are 2 broad classes of financial assets. VC money is almost always the other kind, not a loan.
I would rather you had written something like, "Bluesky has sold part of itself. If the leadership of Bluesky is not committed enough to Bluesky's making a profit, the owners of Bluesky can vote to have the leadership replaced. This sale makes it less likely that the owners will overlooking any laxness on the part of the leadership in pursuit of profit."
There are two kinds assets of financial assets, but both of them work the same way - you pay back the investors or face the consequences, i.e. the loss of control over how the company functions.
In other terms, it doesn't matter to the end user who exactly introduces the resulting enshittification - Bluesky's current leadership that doesn't want to lose control of the company, or Bluesky's future leadership that replaces the current one.
Well you don't even have to pay them back in some cases. If your market value keeps increasing that's usually fine for them too. Most shareholders aren't in it for the dividend but are gambling on an upwards value.
Of course what goes up can't go up forever. This is when the enshittification starts.
I thought the whole point is that it’s built on an open protocol and decentralized? Granted a number of people couldn’t or wouldn’t, but you could self host if it gets too enshittified is what I’ve always understood.
> open protocol and decentralized
Open? Yes.
Decentralized? Not in practice. ATproto fundamentally requires every participating node to index/process every message being sent around the network. The whole thing about AppView can be summed up as "a global indexed view of every event from every node".
ATproto delegates all the crappy parts (identity management, moderation) to those that would like to participate in the network, but all of that is pointless if your messages are not shared with the AppView servers.
This has been Bluesky's intent from day one: by letting people host their own data at their own PDS, but by ensuring that the communication is only meaningful if passing through their indexers, they are effectively aiming to be to the "Social Web" what Google became to the old www.
Our intent is to make an open social network that is able to scale past 100M users without breaking down, and to debind identity from providers.
It is also not necessary for AppViews to index the entire network. Partial syncs of the atmosphere are suitable for realworld usecases.
Let me present you with a use case: let's say that the New York Times (55.2 million followers on Twitter) decides to leave Musk's land and that they will fully embrace decentralized social media. Let's pretend that they learned their lesson and that they swore to never rely on someone else's platform to broadcast their own information, so they are looking to do anything they need to own the infra needed to publish all their content and reach anyone who wants to access them.
In our scenario, they don't care where their 55M followers are hosted, but they do care about giving accounts to their ~5k employees and they want to be able to follow any of the newsworthy people and institutions: politicians, entertainment celebrities, athletes, etc.
What would be the requirements and associated costs for the NYT to provide this, and how do these costs change if/when more institutions decide to follow suit?
An appview doing partial sync of the atmosphere is going to have two drivers of its cost: 1. number of users being synced, 2. number of direct users of the appview. #2 because some additional work is done for the direct users, such as computation of the following feed.
I won't have exact numbers until we actually finish that distro and deploy it, but my ballpark for 5k direct users with, say, 100 follows on average leading to 500k synced users, I'd say $100-200/mo with a max of $500. If you're not running a big instance, you're not paying big costs.
EDIT: I should clarify that the partial sync runmodel that we're developing will still operate on atproto's "shared heap" approach which means that activity outside of the selected sync-set (the 500k users) will not be visible to the NYT users. How we solve that limitation is an open question. We could introduce message-passing to notify about that activity, for instance. I think that's the most notable downside compared to a comparable AP deployment, which inherently operates on message-passing.
You absolutely buried the lede. Of course the idea is for the NYT to see all messages from its followers as well, not just their own follows. They should also be able to search and discover anyone that is on the atmosphere (after all, the first thing that journalists will want to do when investigating a person is to see their social media presence). With that in mind, what would be a real estimate for operating costs?
I'm really taking your "EDIT" as admission that ATProto will only be able to claim "actually decentralized" once it changes into something that resembles ActivityPub.
It hasn't fully delivered on that part just yet, so it's still in the "maybe it might happen" zone. The moment it happens, I'll change my mind.
In addition, every round of VC funding also requires them explaning their VCs how implementing an open protocol and decentralization is going to help them pay their investment back - I do not expect such talks to go well the moment the VCs realize that both of those make it possible for the platform to effectively resist enshittification attempts.