Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by isodev 304 days ago
> Bluesky doesn't need to generate billions of dollars

Are you sure their investors share this vision?

2 comments

1. I believe they actually could generate (low) billions of dollars without compromising at all, if they manage to reach true mainstream scale (>1 billion MAUs)

2. I really don't care if the investors/shareholders are disappointed as long as the PBC's mission is fulfilled. Also their control is relatively limited.

Maybe I should have written added this:

Disclaimer: I am a shareholder in Bluesky Social, PBC (former employee)

Aren't they at ~10M MAU and falling? At least that's the impression given by https://bsky.jazco.dev/stats
Yeah, I'd love to see growth improve but Bluesky is already in an exclusive club of social apps that have "broken through" in some significant way. It's not going anywhere.

And it's the only open network built on an open protocol to ever do so.

the open network aspect is extremely cool, but it's hard to take seriously considering how difficult it seems to be to set up an alternate host. I do love the idea that you can just build an entirely new UX and bring the social graph for free!
Not open, just ideologically optimized.
Open only to the ideologically favored.
Here are more detailed stats:

https://bluefacts.app/bluesky-user-growth

Investors might get soaked, such is the risk of capital investment. Everything built on AT Protocol would survive.
> Everything built on AT Protocol would survive.

Will it? How much of that doesn't run on investor backed servers today? People often say stuff like this but I haven't seen that work in practice.

Yeah, that’s more of a hope about the future. It’s up to other people to build it.

I’ve seen posts about some poorly-publicized, proof-of-concept alternative implementations that would probably fall over if they got real attention, but I think that shows that it’s not a problem with the protocol itself.

Good enough, as far as I’m concerned. It’s just about posting comments on the Internet, not bank accounts. If something went fatally wrong, we would move again, just like we moved off previous social networks.

> such is the risk of capital investment

Everyone says that right up until they read the news where the US Government bails those investors out.

It is highly unlikely the US gov bails Bluesky investors out, and I wouldn’t care if they did. $36M raised to date is couch cushion money.