- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Social networking startup and X competitor Bluesky is working on subscriptions. The company first announced plans to develop a new revenue stream based on the subscription model when detailing its $15 million Series A back in October. Now, mockups teasing the upcoming Bluesky subscription, along with a list of possible features, have been published to Bluesky’s GitHub.
The problem is that in the process of monetizing something, the tendency is to handicap the service that made you popular to begin with by either moving some features into the paid tier or degrading the service in order to steer users into a paid tier. If demand existed for a brand new, guaranteed to never enshittify, Twitter clone that costs $10/month, then we would have one.
The fact is that social networks have to give away access to their systems because the real product is community and engagement, and you cannot have that without significant user volume. Once the users have freely given the company the product, then the company can start monetizing their means of transport, and the only way they can do that is by paywalling quality of life features. Thus, enshittification begins.
The current status quo is also not sustainable, so they have to try some solutions. There’s an opportunity to go from actual federation to paid subscriptions and none of those will solve everything.