They have venture capital backing as a direct competitor to Twitter. I'm sure there are other sources as well, but that's the big one, I think.

BlueSky is a top-down approach to do the same thing that the Lemmy/Mastodon fediverse is trying to do bottom-up. They are approximately as untrustworthy as the devs and admins of your local fediverse server.

You absolutely should not trust any third party with private data that would destroy your life if revealed. Lemmy and BlueSky are both way better than Meta or Google, but they'll all comply with government subpoenas and by design most of the data entered on these apps is public anyway.

As to funding, BlueSky says that they're a "public benefit company" with some VC and cryoto-bro funding, a small registrar business, and some aspirational ideas about selling add-ons to support BSky as an ongoing concern.

I recall hearing about a merchandise sale they had for a bit that dwarfed their registrar revenue, but I think that was time-limited.

https://bsky.social/about

The largest "alt-sky", blacksky, asks for donations if you use their services and (Iirc) aren't a person of color.

It's a typical commercial social media play:

Give away free platform use, in order to build up user base so it's big and sticky enough to either:

1. Enshittify - Place obnoxious ads, sell users' data to advertisers and sell content to AI.

or

2. Get bought out, by a bigger social media company, e.g. Meta/Google/Whatever, or get bought by a billionaire with an agenda, e.g. Musk/Xitter.

Its as trustworthy as any other capitalistic-driven platform that intends to monetize their users at some point.

It's nearly a year and a half old, but this bsky blog post answers some of the future revenue questions:

https://bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2024-series-a

In addition, we will begin developing a subscription model for features like higher quality video uploads or profile customizations like colors and avatar frames. Bluesky will always be free to use — we believe that information and conversation should be easily accessible, not locked down. We won’t uprank accounts simply because they’re subscribing to a paid tier.

Venture capitalists (idiot husks with more money than brains, but tremendous ego and unjustified confidence) give world-changing amounts of money to a lot of stupid shit and hope at least one of them somehow turns into a big payday. Sometimes they break laws (eg: uber, airbnb). It's a horrible way of running a society.

We could be solving homelessness, hunger, diseases, the climate crisis. Instead, these fucking idiots are pouring millions of dollars into shit like "an AI to listen to music for you".

I don't understand how people have time for multiple social media. How do you read/reply to everything on Lemmy and do something else?