cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/27733087
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 early internet also couldn’t provide most of the larger sites and platforms we now use. As it grew, it had to monetize in order to actually operate. If you want something outside the scope of a passion project, you need funding outside the scope of a passion project. The early internet did so well with people who actually cared because they didn’t have to operate platforms that couldn’t just care. They were operating things like personal sites and chatrooms, not social networks, document editors, or newsrooms.
Federated servers with donation-based models can function as of now, but you’d have a hard time covering hosting costs if every normal social media user began using federated platforms. There’s simply too many of them.
I’m not saying ads improve content, I’m not saying they’re the best model, and if you refuse to accept ads anywhere, that’s fine, but sites simply can’t all provide services for free, and if we want sites with the same functionality we have today, they need to monetize somehow.
Donations are definitely an option (I mean, hey, look at Wikipedia) but it isn’t necessarily viable for every online venture. For a lot of platforms, monetization must be compelled in some way, whether it’s by pushing ads, or paywalling with a subscription. The best option a platform can offer if it’s not capable of just running off donations alone is to let users choose the monetization they prefer to deal with.
There is no larger site the internet wouldn’t be better without.
Google, Meta, Twitter, Youtube are all part of the monetization disease.
The internet scaled on the back of subscribers, not big monetization, which frankly suck performance with tracking and ads rather than adding to it.
We are on Lemmy, and lemmy would obviously work even better without competition from big monetized platforms.
Communities doing passion projects serve the project. Without youtube we could have alternatives that worked better, because Youtube wouldn’t be there to attract all the attention.
Back in the day we had indexing sites, fora, and also search before google. All things that helped finding interesting sites. The interesting sites of passion projects have become rare. And almost the entire internet is now driven for profit instead of interest and passion. I tell you, I can really see the difference, there is 100 times more irrelevant noise for the same amount of content.