When imperfect systems are good: Bluesky's lossy timelines

I completely agree with this... but without profit, people can't get paid, and they'll stop building. I do hate this incredibly need for growth, of course, but financial growth is necessary to pay people and give them raises and allow them to have upward mobility at the company.

I hope Bluesky is able to find a model that works for them AND for consumers. (I do know it's an open protocol, so it'll live on without Bluesky itself! However, as this post shows, it's a lot of work to build on the prototype... so if not them, who? And if someone else, how will they become sustainable?)

At the same time I feel like a lot of companies grow much larger than they need to be simply because of bigger is better mentality. How many of Uber's 30,000ish employees are involved with making sure the app and backend database are working properly? Are they really doing 600 times more work than Craigslist at connecting sellers with buyers?

You cannot compare uber to Craigslist.

Uber takes on so much more responsibility of the transaction. Setting price, handling disputes, real time coordination, etc.

I'm an Uber hater, but... yes.

Like, sure, they don't need every single one of those 30,000... but they have to have ground teams in every city in the world. Connections with every airport. Connections with almost every restaurant in the world. Customer support and safety (okay I know they don't nail this, but still). They need to pay out drivers in each country. The app needs to work in hundreds of countries, all with different laws, currencies, languages and more. Some places let you pick up anywhere, others require specific locations. And that's not even including marketing, partnerships, HR, finance, etc.

I don't think the employees are the problem with Uber, it's the shareholders. They need to make X back, so that delta is where drivers get squeezed.

It's semantics but I like to separate money from profits. You need money to pay people and to survive but you don't need to be raking in endlessly growing piles of it. This is something that was really demoralizing about working for a big company, they could be making like 50000000000 a year in just profits but still be ruthless in getting more. Like I just want to make a product I'm proud of and I'm happy living a simple life, I am happier now making less money but not feeling like I'm endlessly milking customers.

Aren't you actually arguing in favor of profit-driven behavior? You're not disagreeing with profit as a motivator, you're questioning if the 30,000 employees is the maximal way to achieve profit.

On the other hand, running something like BlueSky is not terribly expensive. A foundation with a reasonable endowment can do that indefinitely.

Initially, it can be funded by selling tools that do analytics or by donations (like Wikipedia).

Yes, but there is a path, and it's simplicity.

Lichess, is it bad? It basically solves the whole problem. If well-designed distributed social media site could be something like that. Donations are enough to support one guy at least.

I totally get/relate to your perspective, but to be the annoying leftie in your ear:

A) Sustainable revenue is a requirement for any company, yes, but the unlimited (above-inflation) growth demanded by most large corporations is absolutely not. Lots and lots of companies operate for a long time without expecting massive growth, raises n' all. MBAs pejoratively call such companies "lifestyle businesses"--as in "just pays for people to live"--but I'd call them "normal, healthy companies".

B) More fundamentally: the idea that a social media network can only be built by a single corporation owned by investors is an omnipresent, yet extremely toxic, assumption. Mastodon represents another extreme end of the capital<->labor spectrum where anyone can contribute to the network at any time with their own instance, but I think Bluesky is a hint of a less-pure--and therefor more feasible--future.

To use the language of my favorite dream, Chomskian Anarcho-Syndicalism: imagine a social media network organized by a democratic non-profit entity akin to the Python or Linux Foundations, that then contracts out work to a hierarchy of smaller, purpose-built teams ("syndicates"), each of which may in turn contract w/ other teams. Each team would have to attract talent and negotiate enough income to pay them sufficiently still, of course, but there would be no team leader to make a surplus profit from the system -- any "surplus" would stay at the non-profit level, and thus necessarily be reinvested back into the product.

In the current system, the reason Bluesky didn't do this off the bat is obvious: no one would loan them startup funds, as ownership investment is the de facto universal way to start up an unproven venture. But we can dream bigger and better, IMHO; both on a smaller scale by building upon already-proven open protocols like AT Proto, and on a larger scale by structuring the state & economy to support this kind of model equally, if not primarily.

Yes! If the venture capitalists that are already involved stick to their stated principles and don't demand eternal growth (which... fingers crossed?), I think bsky has an extremely feasible, promising future.

They've intentionally kept a low footprint to keep expenses down, and while income via donation is out of the picture (unless AT Proto grows into a full ecosystem, I suppose?), cosmetics are a tried-and-true model for supporting something that most users use for free, but that some power users spend all day on and want shiny stuff for. They'll probably end up exploring Discord-esque paywalled features for power users as well, which isn't necessarily ideal but is leagues better than getting on the currently-dying vicious cycle of Display Ads, IMO.

All of the big tech companies today are the result of 100s of smaller, well intentioned tech companies that got acquired into these behemoths.

I always look at how WhatsApp played out as the company. They were the good guys, and didn't want to get acquired. Zuckerberg, almost bankrupt FB at the time giving into all of the ridiculous demands WhatsApp made. No one at WhatsApp thought it was going to happen, until it did and did result in a once-in-a-lifetime transfer of wealth to several hundred employees.

If Bluesky ever gets close to becoming a serious threat to Meta's walled garden, the effort to fight back against them will take a lot of capital. Just the legal battles alone will cost a fortune.

Wikipedia isn't a threat to anyone, they just have to generate enough capital to exist.

> but without profit, people can't get paid, and they'll stop building

I wholeheartledly disagree. People build things all the time for things other than profit. In fact, most of the greatest things ever built were a loss for those who built them.

Dignity is the best motivator. Profit only supercedes dignity when dignity is not on offer.

Profit supercedes dignity when one needs to eat, because one cannot eat dignity.

Being able to spend a significant amount of time and effort on passion projects is a luxury most people can't afford.

Once you take on investors, that’s not an option. VCs expect rapid growth and an exit - statistically through acquisition, but occasionally an IPO.

Once you go public, then you have investor pressure and can be subject to activist investors unless the founder has controlling interests like in the case of Meta and Google.

WhatsApp was acquired for $20 billion in cash and stock. Facebook was worth $170 billion at the time. The stock part of the acquisition wouldn’t have any real financial impact on Facebook.

This is hardly the first instance of "if only venture capitalists light their money on fire, we can have nice things."

Spoiler: Venture capitalists don't light their money on fire, and we can't have nice things.

Basically why I don't like to work for any public company anymore. You are there to be exploited by moneyed interests that most often don't even have any positive effect on the products itself.

That is not semantics. It is fundamental economics.

It doesn’t matter if the company is public or not. If the company has outside investors, you are in the same position.