I wonder if this is an effort to combat pages which post a short clickbait description and require you to click "read more" to see the full description, and often post the link in the comments. There are lots of sites (Polygon immediately comes to mind) which are notorious for doing this as a way to get fake engagement which boosts their posts which gets more clickbait engagement.
I know it's all speculation, and this does come across as more monetization creep, but I can't help to wonder if there's an underlying reason beyond "line go up".
I have a friend who is a best-selling author, and her threads account was being heavily throttled (hundreds of likes a few months ago, fewer than ten now) -- it was suggested that it's because she is posting links away from Meta properties, and the way around it was this "link in the comments" tactic.
So it's not necessarily clickbait -- seems to be also an evolved workaround to fight throttling. :-/
The entire point of atproto (which Bluesky is a demo for) is that when they betray us, we can keep our identity and followers and move on. Power in user hands not only makes the worst-case better, but it also changes the calculus for a service that's considering making anti-user moves and makes them far less appealing.
Bluesky the company/app certainly isn't perfect, but the model they pioneer is very much designed to help fix this exact problem.
The problem with XMPP is that few people use it these days. One day Bluesky will go the way of the dodo as well, but right now it is flourishing. I have actually met over 20 people in person through Bluesky. It's a pretty great place if you want to have a positive social media experience.
Sure, just self-host the entire thing away from Bluesky for only ~$150/month; it'll only take a few terabytes of space to do so [0]. The best part is the link at the top of that thread is broken, indicating that even the people that really care, still don't care enough to keep up with costs and maintenance.
I'm asking about every part of the full Bluesky stack because in the scenario that "Bluesky starts monetizing users" means if you self-host just part of the stack, and continue to rely on any portion of Bluesky's stack for your server... well, it's pretty obvious where the pressure and forced monetization will go to.
The above is why I'm intentionally ignoring all other threads about hosting just one portion of Bluesky. It being easy to self-host, say, a Personal Data Server, means that won't be the portion Bluesky builds monetization in to. The part of the stack that an extremely small number of people are willing and able (technically and financially) to host long-term, and are seen as good stewards worthy of users' trust, will be the part that starts abusing users.
Is there a cheaper method of self-hosting the entire stack I should look at, or is this seriously being pitched as something average home-labbers can do?
EDIT: Oh cool, it gets better. This [1] guide from ~2024 suggests an OVH server, also ringing in (at the time) at ~$150/month. Looking at the suggested configuration now, it's $367.98CAD / month. But please, tell me more about how if Bluesky needs to show an ROI, everyone'll start self-hosting PDS' and Relays
That's one way in which ActivityPub wins over ATProto.
It's about as easy and cheap to self-host Mastodon, Pleroma, Misskey, etc... as it is most blog or forum software. It's only resource-intensive if you follow accounts or aggregators that post a ton of media, and even then unlikely to need more than single-digit terabytes of storage.
> It's only resource-intensive if you follow accounts or aggregators that post a ton of media, and even then unlikely to need more than single-digit terabytes of storage.
The exact same thing can be said about running an ATProto AppView vs a PDS.
I wonder if people will ever go back to Diaspora and host their own pods. For about $40/month you can host up to about 1,500 users. I did it for a little while on a basic package for like $15/month and the directions to install are fairly straight forward and the community is really helpful.
The issue I ran into wasn't cost of hosting, it was getting people to move off whatever platform they were already on - regardless of how much better it was for controlling their own data and privacy.
Great! And this provider will just... eat the server, bandwidth, and storage costs, indefinitely, with no expectation of financial renumeration? Or will they charge a minimal fee that few social media users will be willing to pay?
My point stands: Hosting a full Bluesky stack is big money, every month. And that ignores how the admin must be seen in a positive light; having deep pockets isn't enough, the admin team running (and paying for) the servers must be trusted not to manipulate what gets seen, who gets banned, and what links are deemed malicious.
$150/month is a lot of money, but split just 100 ways, that's $1.50/month. If the user base is too expensive, emotionally, to do free server administration for, well, why would you want to do that job then at all? Which speaks volumes.
It's the payment onboarding that's usually the sticking point (which is fortunate for my side of the discussion, because you've missed a zero), but that also misses that hosting costs will almost certainly scale with user-count.
And I'm not discussing emotionally-heavy, but public standing within the community you've convinced to trust you with their social media algorithm
In your view, contrary to the lobster.rs post, running the server should instead cost $1,500/month and goes up exponentially to support a handful of users. Have I got you right?
How is having a good public standing to a very vocal minority about modern day sensitive topics not a high emotional cost to bear?
Is it so wrong for those who create content to want people to visit their website to consume that content? The alternative being that Facebook and Google summarize everyone's content and keep all the engagement and profit for themselves.
On the other hand, if we assume that Facebook and Google need to make some money, and people aren't willing to pay to use them, and people don't want ads to overshadow the algorithm, and people don't want to pay with their data, and...
What's the actual solution? What would an ethically run Google look like? I'm not even going to ask for Facebook, because I'm not convinced it's possible.
I think some part of this is anti-bot. They don't have a good solution to this yet, I and someone else I know got a lifetime ban from Meta just from opening an account.
No actions / no posts. I guess they determined the way we opened the account was too bot like. Sucks because we're real people that were trying to buy Meta ads.
But maybe doing something like this allows them to ease those restrictions, and then by charging for posts they have an ability to determine bots from non-bots in a more robust way. I'm doubtful it will actually work - because bots are exactly the type of thing that can and will try to open dozens of accounts to get around the 2 posts per month limit.
Yeah I mean it's a problem I'm in groups that just get tons of spam to things off-site that are mainly scams or just fake to get you to view a an ad-ridden page.
People put the link in the comments because Facebook won't let you link to news sites in posts because they can't be posted in certain countries. So, putting the link in the comments was a workaround for that issue.
In today's AI world, it should be trivial for platforms to identify posts using suck tricks. They can simply ask an LLM "Does the following post contain some scummy engagement trick: $POST".
I know it's all speculation, and this does come across as more monetization creep, but I can't help to wonder if there's an underlying reason beyond "line go up".