Rivaling the likes of Meta and Twitter, Bluesky brings its own edge to the competition by announcing a critical seed funding injection of $8 million and the roll-out of its maiden paid service. In a blog post published on Wednesday, the firm divulged about racking up the seed funding over the summer as they made the transition from a public benefit LLC to public benefit C Corp. Accompanied with this, Bluesky is pressing forward to deploy its paid service, offering custom-built domains for users who aspire to possess a distinctive domain to serve as their handle.
Neo, a firm driven by community, spearheaded the seed funding round, which saw the participation of multiple partner entities, including Code.org's co-founder Ali Partovi and Suzanne Xie, previously a Project Manager at Twitter. The list of investors in the round featured illustrious names like Joe Beda, co-inventor of Kubernetes, Bob Young from Red Hat, and several others.
This seed funding will be channelized towards boosting Bluesky's workforce, controlling operations and infrastructure expenses, and nurturing the AT Protocol, which is the linchpin of the Bluesky application.
The decentralized social network protocol conceptualized and developed by Bluesky presents an alternative to ActivityPub and thus challenges another rival in the decentralized Twitter pool, Mastodon, and Meta's soon-to-be-launched app, Threads.
Along with securing the funding, Bluesky is also vowing to identify lucrative strategies for revenue generation and confirmed initiating trials with different techniques and services to discern what furnishes immense value to their users while fostering a sturdy social network.
Typically, social media companies resort to advertisement to ensure users can avail of their services free of cost, but this leads to users turning into products. Unconventionally, Bluesky aspires to discover a fresh method to uphold its network, commencing with paid services.
The first in line for Bluesky's suite of paid services are custom domains. Presented in collaboration with widely known domain registrar, Namecheap, Bluesky had prior made provisions to permit users to establish a tailor-made domain as their handle. To date, over 13,000 of its 100,000+ users have leveraged this service. However, the existing solution necessitates users to acquaint themselves with domain registrars and DNS settings. The new premium service intends to ease this process by allowing users to set up a tailor-made domain within minutes.
A separate but related announcement by the firm details the operational blueprint of the Namecheap paid service, illuminating how users can select a domain name of their preference and subsequently link it to their Bluesky account. While the agreement terms with Namecheap remain undisclosed, it’s plausible that they entail a kind of revenue share plan on the domain name purchases.
In its blog post and a related spate of posts to Bluesky itself, the firm states that it will delve into exploring other potential services it can incorporate for its users in the time to come. Meanwhile, the company is persistently fortifying its feature set and policy provisions, prompting customized feeds and newer moderation guidelines while seeking expansive public feedback on its thoughts regarding moderation and safety.
Following the recent criticisms directed at the company by several community members for its approach to decentralization and moderation, Bluesky stands strong in its proactive stance to addressing these concerns. By offering tailored solutions designed to meet the diverse needs of users, Bluesky is rapidly positioning itself as a strong competitor in the space of social networking, nudging users towards their unique platform. Leveraging powerful no-code tools similar to AppMaster, the platform offers robust features and flexibility that could potentially edge out competitors.
