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Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
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:
or
Its as trustworthy as any other capitalistic-driven platform that intends to monetize their users at some point.
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.
The largest "alt-sky", blacksky, asks for donations if you use their services and (Iirc) aren't a person of color.
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?
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.
And another link:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/04/14/blueskys-quest-to-build-nontoxic-social-media
For an appearance at South by Southwest in March, she wore a custom T-shirt that parodied one of Zuckerberg’s own design. Where his is emblazoned with the phrase “aut Zuck aut nihil,” a riff on the Latin “either a Caesar or nothing,” hers read “mundus sine caesaribus”—“a world without Caesars.” (The company started selling the shirts for forty dollars apiece and made more money in a day than it had in two years of selling domains.) In Bluesky’s founding documents, taking a lesson from Twitter’s history, Graber introduced a slogan: “The company is a future adversary.” In other words, they must design their platform today in such a way that, even if new leadership eventually jettisons their guiding principles, the thing they’ve created will remain impossible to abuse.
I'm sure they can't sell t-shirts forever, but the idea behind the ATProto is that your data is portable, so even if some asshole billionaire buys it up, you can just move to another compatible service with minimal disruptions.
Compatible services are limited, but there are options. https://help.eurosky.tech/article/9-migrating-to-eurosky
I don't have an answer to your question but would like to mention that I had a bluesky account for a bit over 2 years. Its fine. A bit whacky at times but as with everything else, once you get your follow list done, its fine. I recently deleted my account because I made a piefed and mastodon accounts for different reasons and found myself not going to bluesky at all anymore. Not sure why.
If you want to join, go ahead. It can be fun and theres a lot of cool people there to follow. Mark Hamill, James O'brian, Eric Idle takes the time to reply to people when he happens to be online.