no paywall
BlueSky has already received funding from venture capital, and so will need to find a way to monetise its user base. Once enough people depend on the site for their social connections and friend circles, the promise of decentralisation will be quietly removed, APIs will be restricted (as on Reddit/Xitter), terms of service updated to ban circumvention, and the user-controlled algorithms modified to deliver your eyeballs to the advertisers and your data to data brokers, and before long, it’ll be an Instagram-style slot machine, where you mostly see ads and AI pink-slime, but keep pulling the lever in case there’s another update you care about in there somewhere.
Certainly, this aligns closely with the stance I express in a blog post scheduled for publication on Medium today in opposition to BlueSky. Users will likely be disheartened when BlueSky essentially replicates the characteristics of 2019-2020 Twitter. Ads suck. Centralization sucks. Millionaires and billionaires running these platforms for profit suck.
