Well that didn’t take long. Looks like they’re going the discord route and locking uploads + basic customization behind a subscription. You know, because we don’t already have enough of those.
Bluesky is working on a premium subscription that will add features like higher-quality video uploads and some profile customization options.
Mastodon supports over 10 million accounts because ActivityPub is actually decentralized instead of BlueSky/ATP’s “I have the concept of plan.”
Mastodon itself gets about $21,000 per month through Patreon alone, and Mastodon.world gets about $900 per month. They’re not running the services for free. Also, there are currently just under 1 million active users - a far cry from the 10 million you quoted.
If they were a true decentralized platform they wouldn’t need to worry as much about monetization, but that never really was what they cared about. It’s another centralized corpo dom daddy that you suckers will fall for time and time again.
One would think that, if they wanted to be a “centralized corp dom daddy,” they wouldn’t have added federation to the software. It’s not like there’s a massive market for federated social media in particular that rivals that of Big Tech platforms. Most people have no idea what federation even means, and they don’t care.
We have yet to see any decentralization of Bluesky, and I doubt we will.
They get quite a bit of money from donations. At least, .world and .social used to when I checked last year. I don’t see bluesky getting the benefit of charity.