Soundtrack:

In my previous piece, I looked at Bluesky as a social media platform from the standpoint of its features and how it’s fundamentally built to try and judge it on its merits as purely as possible.

I deemed it to be a good thing for the free and open internet that Bluesky exists.

This week we’ll look at how it can stay a net positive as is, or as it expands, which will require looking at its current user base, and what kind of new users it’s realistically positioned to attract.

The first thing we need to examine is who tends to make internet platforms built for openness and collaboration, as it explains much of the baggage that comes along with these platforms, and makes a case that we need to accept some drawbacks or at least have patience as particularly painful growing pains manifest.

Table of Contents

• Who Makes What Kind of Platform

• Care Lords, Centrists, and Grifters, Oh My!

• Culture Warfare Ceasefire

• Growth COULD Be a Solution

• Greenbacks For Bluesky

• The Product Itself / Features

• Where It’s AT (Protocol)

• How To PaaS / GaaS

• Anti-Ads Addendum

Who Makes What Kind of Platform

We need to get on the same page about something real quick before we go any further.

1. To some people, politics and ideology are NOT an ever-shifting mask, dictated by personal whims, or a costume you briefly put on to get what you want.

2. Authoritarianism vs. anti-authoritarianism, and the general desire for control vs. acceptance of others peoples’ agency and autonomy, is an important political axis that exists independent of many modern American political ideologies as most people understand them.

“Move fast and break things” was not a rebellion on behalf of real change, it was a pre-authoritarian Mark Zuckerberg attacking old power structures, not because he wanted to free anyone from them, but because he wanted to create new ones that would be owned by him rather than the old powers.

If this is where you start saying something about The Zuck loving capitalism and free speech, which means he can’t actually be an authoritarian, this post isn’t for you, and this whole blog may not be either, which is totally fine, gg and gl.

The thing about Bluesky, and other similar open frameworks for a new social web, is that Authoritarian people don’t build them.

If you like the ideas of Bluesky, but you’re waiting for Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or Peter Thiel or Marc Andreesen or whoever to build their version of it before you jump in, here’s the thing: those guys aren’t going to build anything that’s genuinely liberating, because they’re authoritarians.

Any time they’re against a status quo, it’s so they can replace it and, usually, wield power even more unilaterally.

Alright, let’s talk about Bluesky’s current problems, the problems it may face as it scales, and the problem of eventually having to make money.

Care Lords, Centrists, and Grifters, Oh My!

The joke you will mostly hear about Bluesky is that it is zone where people seem unable to react normally to jokes:

I think this is fair and accurate as generalizations go, and it reflects something pretty simple:

Bluesky is overfilled with people who care deeply about something, and believe that these things are currently so important that no discussion of anything, ever, can ignore them.

There’s a great place to see the most egregious examples recorded for posterity, an account called “The Louvre of Bluesky.” Here are some of my personal favorite pieces:

Now that you’ve seen these I want to make a key distinction by highlighting what is NOT going on here:

This is not a bunch of “radical leftists” getting upset at JD Vance acolytes for telling jokes about their pronouns being “American/Patriot” or whatever; it is a bunch of people of diverse political affiliations being constantly harassed by people who simply do not think it is appropriate to tell any kind of joke online right now.

Unfortunately, this is basically a side effect of creating a platform that is for People Who Care A Lot, Maybe Even Too Much.

There have been multiple versions of this phenomenon in different eras on Tumblr, a place for insanely passionate fandoms and (outside of the brief porn ban) a very liberal approach to sexual self-expression.

There’s a version of this happening on Mastodon. We could go through a whole history of the beginnings of decentralized, democratic communities online and see something similar.

An angsty adolescence is something all these platforms go through and as the now-parent-aged (well, speaking for myself) denizens of the internet, it would be a good deed if we could all have a little patience with high potential platforms as they grow through this.

Culture Warfare Ceasefire

Conventional culture war screaming matches are not as common a phenomenon on Bluesky as you would expect, as the availability of tools like the “Nuclear Block” and other elements have allowed a more enlightened Posting Class to fully embrace the proper doctrine, which is to completely ignore most people who try to argue with you online.

This is a perfect metaphor because much like World War 1, arguing with people online is a tragic waste of life and resources, ultimately with no purpose and no value.

Echo chambers? Everywhere online that people argue is an enormous room enveloped in a deafening roar that dulls your senses and scrambles your brain; it doesn’t matter how much “cognitive diversity” is involved, none of you are really learning or adopting each others’ ideas or getting any smarter.

So if you like hanging out in a place on the internet and enjoy the ideas you come across there, that’s great, and don’t let someone who just wants to use ideas you will never agree with to make you miserable convince you that you have some sort of duty to be yelled at by people who hate you on Threads.

Lol, just kidding, nobody on Threads even has a real opinion on anything to yell about or be yelled at about.

Growth COULD Be a Solution

The last thing I want to suggest here is Growth At All Costs For Growth’s Sake. Specifically, the notion that Bluesky needs to keep pace with Threads or catch X is misguided, I think.

However, more users interested in a broader range of topics would do a lot to alleviate this.

Right now, there are nascent communities built around discussing all kinds of things. College sports, comic book history, film criticism, game development, you name it!

However, these don’t just want for more participants-they tend to sometimes get run over by the Solemnity Police, simply because that user type is so ubiquitous and active:

The reason I said growth COULD be a solution is that there is current user pain that should be addressed before it’s potentially exacerbated by adding more people into the equation.

It’s also possible that I’m wrong to assume that simply “diluting” these annoying users away just won’t be effective. It’s possible XX% of the new users the platform brings on could also be this kind of menace, or that these accounts are so persistent and powerfully odious that even doubling or tripling the user base won’t make them less noticeable.

I think something needs to be done for the experience before any major growth push begins, and if you read my first post, it won’t surprise you:

I think they should test eliminating the algorithmic Discover feed as even an available option for a cohort of new users, and possibly even disable the Top Accounts To Follow list as well.

This could put some drag on new user retention, but if this forces people to use Starter Packs more, or some other way can be found to not completely kill retention while preventing Discover feed related angst, I think it could be great for the long-term health of the platform.

Once it feels safe to grow, I think some ideas that probably feel a little “old fashioned” in the social app world need to be dusted off, which is maybe appropriate, given Bluesky has a bit of an old-school feel to it.

Brand positioning and message discipline will be extremely important, because no matter what communications tools are used to grow the brand, they will not only need to do the work of pre-qualifying users to get the right ones and prime said users to behave well on the platform, but also change the general cultural perception and conversation around Bluesky even for people who will never log on.

Social media platforms are a bit like luxury sports cars in one regard: it matters a lot what people think when they look at someone using the product.

This is frequently evoked in the luxury sports car advertising to explain why it would be folly to do hyper-targeted advertising aimed only at the people with the money to buy the cars.

If you stop convincing the general public at large that a Lamborghini is cool, than the general public will eventually cease to think that anyone who drives a Lamborghini is cool, and then far less of those wealthy people who can afford a Lamborghini are going to be interested in them.

The social media equivalent is that nobody wants to feel like a scold or a serious dork because they use Bluesky. The best way to help Bluesky users avoid this fear is to make it such that the general public does not think Bluesky is a place for scolds and dorks.

Greenbacks For Bluesky

When it comes to selling out, Bluesky’s principal advantage may be that they don’t even have to. Well, at least not as hard.

They’re a Public Benefit Corporation, which means they have an equal duty, legally, to advance their stated mission and generate profits for investors. Their stated mission is “to develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation” which means they shouldn’t have to compromise on any of their interoperability and transparency goals for profit, in theory.

When they do need money, it’s my opinion that they should avoid the force that has otherwise entirely funded the social media era (advertising) and instead embrace what I would call their anti-moat: the elements of their charter and platform that appear to be the exact opposite of an anti-competitive advantage, but in fact, could be leveraged to make money without resorting to anything like a Zuckerbergian bait-and-switch.

The Product Itself / Features

We’re now decades into experimentation on monetizing social media, and a lot has been tried, historically, besides ads. I’m not an app developer not have I ever been CEO of CFO of an app based business so I’m not going to go to deep and make anything resembling a “recommendation,” but I will sketch out what look, to me, like some likely paths Bluesky will try to take to profitability.

Bluesky sits at the nexus of two modern strategies for growth and monetization: being Community Centered, versus being Creator Centered.

Newsletter platforms like beehiiv and Substack and Medium represent the new-ish wave of being creator centric-the idea is that the creator has an audience, brings them to the platform, and there’s some degree of portability with those audiences, as their email addresses are accessible and exportable.

Discord is centered more around communities, organized centrally on servers; while a creator could be the raison d'être for a server and its sole admin, there’s not the same kind of auteur structure.

Before both of these and pioneering some in-between strategies was Tiwtch, which like Discord has also been experimenting with layering user-centric features on this.

I think Bluesky would do well to embrace a triple decker club sandwich approach to interoperability and portability. It would look something like this:

Here, you can offer three people things that cost money and let them own it:

1. Servers can add assets and features, for users AND creators, paid for by the server and conditional on the right type and level of membership.

2. Creators can have assets and features particular to them, available to their direct followers, independent of server membership.

3. Users can buy features and assets, or a general packet that guides them to some strong basics like Discord Nitro or Twitch Turbo.

Absolutely nothing here is revelatory-the above is basically Twitch, with the addition of a Discord style server.

What could make it revelatory is if Bluesky really nail the detailed planning and execution to make this all feel free and interoperable, without being a pain in the ass.

It’s a classic “strategy is nothing, execution is everything” situation, in my opinion, so it will be genuinely interesting to watch it unfold.

Where It’s AT (Protocol)

The open framework that Bluesky operates on is a complete non-starter in the old world of internet business when it comes to supporting a long-term profit strategy.

It’s a good thing that, according to absolutely everyone, the old world of internet business is dying faster and more violently than ever before.

We’re hearing, in fact, that software isn’t a moat anymore.

You think your locked-down, laced-up, product managed SaaS tool with a beautiful website and social proof is ironclad?

Someone’s going to vibe code a prototype that eschews all the features you regret building in order to focus on those few next-killer-apps that keep getting pushed from sprint cycle to sprint cycle as you drown in tech debt, and once they hire a small tiger team to make it reality, you’re yesterday’s news.

And that vibe coding tool that killed you, that thinks it’s the new cat’s pajamas and will be forever? Someone reverse engineered it and found out it’s basically three kid-sized prompts stacked on top of each other in a Claude trenchcoat. It’s so over for them.

There’s no more moats-there’s only excellence in ideation and vision, coming from elite talent at that global thought leader level that keeps us all on the bleeding edge with an all-AI agent team at their back.

So I certainly don’t believe all that is true now, and I don’t believe it will be terribly soon, but I could be wrong, and I suspect plenty of you disagree with me anyway and think this is all very imminent, in which case…

…isn’t a company founded by serious software engineers that is little more than a vision, an ethos, and great publicity, with no serious reliance on infrastructure or code…the ultimate business of the future?

I can conceive of the new business model: PaaS / GaaS

Pioneering as a service. Prototyping as a service. Governance as a service. Growth as a service.

No code, all vibes, but in a much more serious way than most enterprises that have touted such advantages to date.

How To PaaS / GaaS

The best thing about advertising as a business model for a social media platform is that instead of having to extract a tiny amount of money regularly from tens or hundreds of millions of people is that you instead get your money from between a few thousands and several million corporations.

There is another way to become this kind of powerful business without ruining your precious product with ads, though: sell enterprise software + services powered by the consumer product.

To make it more appealing, gussy it up with events series, and maybe a landmark conference once a year for enthusiasts of all kinds.

This is a deeply precedented idea. RedHat Enterprise Linux is the model for moving an open-source software project to an enterprise software support offering that people find real utility in.

As conventional consulting models are allegedly dying, and what people want them to turn into is technology-centric change management with a very heavy dose of building and execution, which sounds to me kind of like what an organization of software engineers who made and manage a famous project would be perfect for.

Using the Bluesky project as the technical backbone and also taking cracks at enterprise business cases that aren’t yet addressed by that project could help Bluesky profitably grow into a whole universe of federated, open source technology and fairly compensated experts on tailoring it to the world’s many different potential needs.

With the stronger cultural cachet Bluesky is going to have than any other project like that, they could try tacking on a major gathering that’s something like a mix between TwitchCon and Dreamforce, with all of the former’s actual elements and only the profiteering spirit of the latter.

Anti-Ads Addendum

I could spend a whole article on this but mostly, I do not want to beat a dead horse.

Twitter was not a success as an ad-monetized platform at its MAU peak several years ago.

It wasn’t profitable then and whatever kind of fight you want to have about the state it’s in currently, its ownership clearly don’t believe strongly in ads as a way to turn the ship around, given the addition of subscriptions and constantly teasing things like banking.

Bluesky is different, but it’s also currently smaller than any major social platform that monetizes via ads, and I don’t think it should be subjected to the growth pressure or temptation to compromise its mission that comes with chasing those.

If people vehemently disagree or anything changes, maybe I will revisit this, but for now, I expect they will avoid an ad platform, and I think that’s smart.