Discovered on GitHub: Bluesky is preparing paid premium functions
Bluesky grew massively recently, which is likely to have significantly increased costs. It has now been discovered on GitHub how Bluesky intends to pay for this.
(Image: Diego Thomazini/Shutterstock.com)
The short messaging service Bluesky is considering offering premium functions for a monthly price of 8 US dollars. The money could be used to introduce a special account label, more options for customizing profile pages and a higher resolution for uploaded and viewed videos. This can be seen from screenshots of an overview page that is being prepared internally and has now been discovered on GitHub. Direct translations of posts, analyses of posts and folders for bookmarks could be added at a later date. A developer has confirmed the authenticity of the files, but pointed out that the points mentioned would probably not correspond to the final functions.
Empfohlener redaktioneller Inhalt
Mit Ihrer Zustimmung wird hier ein externer Inhalt geladen.
Ich bin damit einverstanden, dass mir externe Inhalte angezeigt werden. Damit können personenbezogene Daten an Drittplattformen übermittelt werden. Mehr dazu in unserer Datenschutzerklärung.
More and more questions about financing
It was already known that Bluesky was planning to raise money via premium functions. The service announced this back in October, long before the biggest wave of new registrations to date, which saw the service grow significantly after the US presidential election. The service is currently free to use and almost 25 million accounts have now been created. This is one of the reasons why the question of how the service will be financed has recently been raised again, also due to the events at competitor X (formerly Twitter) and the attempt to establish a payment option there. Bluesky has stated that the service should remain free of charge in principle and that paying accounts would not be algorithmically favored.
Videos by heise
The screenshots of the planned overview page have now been distributed by an account on Bluesky itself. There has already been a lively discussion about the content, and requests for other premium functions have also been formulated. Just a few days ago, Bluesky CEO Jay Graber did not rule out the possibility of advertising on the platform in the future in response to a question about this. The company does not want to repeat the mistakes of other social networks. Another short message service, Threads, is reportedly on the verge of introducing advertising to finance its free service.
Alongside Threads from Meta and Mastodon, Bluesky is currently one of the most important Twitter alternatives and has recently benefited particularly strongly from the drop-off of Elon Musk's short messaging service Twitter, which is now called X. Unlike the classic, hermetically separated social networks , however, there are more and more connection options between the three services. For example, accounts on Bluesky and Mastodon have been able to interact with each other for several months; anyone who wants to can add content from the other network to their own timeline. Threads is also opening up to its competitors, but the connection to the so-called Fediverse –, to which Mastodon belongs –, has not yet worked in Europe.
(mho)
