Escapees to BlueSky:
Who Owns It, How It Makes Money, and Does it Deserve Our Contributions?
Positioned as a non-billionaire alternative to the centralized chaos of X.com and Meta, Bluesky has gained attention as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC). It promises better community monitoring, a more welcoming digital environment, and a protocol-based escape from traditional platforms. Yet beneath the surface lies a tangle of open-source ideals and crypto-capitalist investors that may shape its governance and trajectory.
In response, a bold newcomer enters the scene: #FreeOurFeeds, a foundation just launched and asking for money to be on equal footing with Bluesky, aiming to build on the same AT Protocol. Its mission? To ensure this technology remains "fully resistant to billionaire capture.”1
So, what’s going on here—and should you spend your time, energy, care, attention, or dollars pursuing more sane social media conversations? Let’s ask: Who owns it? How do they benefit? What’s the promise, and should we contribute as users, developers, community fact-checkers, moderators, paying customers, donors, or investors?
Bluesky’s Origins: Protocol vs. Platform
Bluesky was conceived within Twitter in 2019 to address entrenched problems in centralized platforms such as algorithmic manipulation, user lock-in, and extractive data practices. Unlike platforms designed to profit from user data, Bluesky was envisioned as a protocol-based system inspired by Mike Masnick’s paper, “Protocols, Not Platforms.” The paper proposed a decentralized approach to tackling free speech and moderation challenges, advocating for open, interoperable systems where users retain control of their data, developers can build tools free from gatekeepers, and communities can establish their own rules.2
Unlike platforms controlled by a single company, protocols are shared sets of rules that allow different people and systems to work together. No one owns them, so anyone can use them to create new tools or ideas. This structure lets users customize algorithms, move their data freely, and even “fork” the system, creating new versions if they disagree with moderation policies—without being stuck navigating complaints about toxicity or restricted free speech.
The paper’s ideas caught the attention of then-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who convened Masnick and other decentralization advocates to explore how Twitter could incubate such a protocol. Bluesky emerged from this internal initiative, with Jay Graber, a decentralization advocate, playing a key role before being appointed CEO before project spun out of Twitter in 2022 as a company ahead of Elon Musk’s acquisition. Bluesky’s architecture revolves around the AT Protocol, which allows for features like account portability, customizable algorithms, and interoperability.34
Despite this promising foundation, Bluesky’s decision to raise venture capital sparked criticism. Jack Dorsey, the project’s original champion, resigned from the board soon after, arguing that VC funding risks repeating the same mistakes that constrained Twitter: prioritizing rapid growth and investor expectations over fundamental change. Dorsey specifically called out the early team for embracing the embedded growth expectations that had plagued Twitter, calling it a missed opportunity to chart a different course.5
The question now is whether Bluesky can deliver on its promise to those seeking refuge from X and Mark Zuckerberg’s META apps (Instagram, Facebook, Whatsapp, Threads), which recently announced plans to change moderation policies and end fact-checking, raising further concerns about the future of accountability and trust in digital spaces.
1. What’s the Promise?
Unlike traditional social media platforms prioritizing shareholder value maximization above all else, Bluesky is structured as a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC). This structure allows Bluesky to prioritize its mission even if it means forgoing some short-term profits.While Bluesky operates as a for-profit entity, it's legally obligated to balance financial success with its stated social mission:
Our mission is to develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation.
Bluesky’s dual promise—of joyful user experiences and tech decentralization—creates an inherent tension. As the first app built on the AT Protocol, Bluesky claims to offer features like “Freedom to Exit,” allowing users to leave the platform while taking their data with them. Chief Operating Officer Rose Wang has emphasized this decentralized foundation, explaining:
“No single entity has control over the platform. All the code is open-sourced; anyone can copy and paste it. We can’t own your data—you can take it wherever you want. We have to win your usership through our performance, or else you will leave.”
Bluesky, the company, is first introduced to users as Bluesky, the app—a new social media platform built on the AT Protocol rather than a platform. The app promises to make the internet fun again, with features like customizable algorithms and account portability designed to give users more control and create enjoyable online communities.
However, this promise of fun and creativity is in tension with Bluesky, the company’s larger mission: creating a system for open and decentralized public conversations. For example, while the app might appeal to users by allowing them to curate highly personalized spaces—essentially their own "filter bubbles"—the broader goal of decentralization requires balancing individual control with openness and diversity across the entire network.
What we need to see: Bluesky must clarify how its user-focused goals (fun and personalization) align with its mission (decentralization and public good).
2. How Will It Make Money?
To fulfill its promise and mission, Bluesky must generate sustainable revenue without replicating the extractive practices that have defined traditional platforms. CEO Jay Graber has outlined several potential revenue streams:
Subscriptions: Offering paid tiers with enhanced features for users.
Marketplace of Algorithms: Enabling users to select curated feeds, with fees for premium algorithms.
Domain Names: Selling personalized domains linked to user profiles, potentially expanding to authentication systems.
“Non-Intrusive” Advertising: While initially hesitant about advertising, Graber is now open to ads that prioritize user privacy and avoid data scraping
Graber has drawn boundaries around what Bluesky’s business model won’t include: overly financialized crypto finance models, NFTs, and extractive data-mining practices. However, nothing inherent in the company’s mission or structure guarantees these practices won’t emerge in the future. Bluesky's safeguard is the promise that you can leave your data with them if the app fails to meet their expectations.
The history of other platforms demonstrates how noble intentions can fail under financial pressure. Both Google and Facebook have tried to pivot away from their all-consuming advertising models. Alphabet/Google’s eventual success in diversifying its revenue through Google Cloud contrasts with Meta/Facebook’s ongoing struggles to escape its ad-dependent business model. Meta’s ventures into cryptocurrency (Libra) and virtual reality hardware have yet to bear fruit, leaving the company entrenched in advertising even as it bets heavily on AI-driven social feeds and ever more ads. These examples highlight the risks of starting with a "free-for-now, figure-it-out-later" approach that results in increased monetization once the audience has grown and users are locked in, cycle Cory Doctorow has aptly named "ensh*ttification."
However, with all of these variables at play, Bluesky's multiple, loosely defined revenue streams suggest a strategic diffuseness that could lead to similar pitfalls. Without a clear and cohesive strategy, its attempts to stay true to its decentralized mission may falter under financial pressure.
We need to see: A straightforward business model story that we can all understand, and transparency about how these revenue models will function in practice and whether they align with Bluesky’s Public Benefit Corporation mandate to prioritize public good over profit. Without this clarity, Bluesky risks repeating the same extractive patterns it aims to disrupt, potentially undermining its vision of decentralization and user empowerment.
3. Who Owns the Stakes?
Bluesky’s governance and ownership will play a pivotal role in its ability to balance its mission with financial pressures. As a Public Benefit Corporation Bluesky must legally prioritize its mission—decentralized, open public conversations—in its decision-making processes. The company’s recent choice of investor fund points to the future of how this mission might be made manifest.
Bluesky’s early funding featured a $13 million seed round from Twitter, helping to incubate the protocol during its formative stages. Its early investors included a noteworthy group of open-source software advocates and angel investors, such as:
Joe Beda (co-creator of Kubernetes),
Heather Meeker (specialist in commercializing open-source software),
Katyn Donnelly (Avalanche VC, future of work)
Automattic (parent company of WordPress and Tumblr)
Protocol Labs (a network focused on Web3 and decentralized technology)
Kris Nóva (author and principal engineer at GitHub, deceased in 2023)
Amir Shevat (former head of Twitter’s Development Platform)
These investors embody values rooted in the open-source movement: transparency, community-driven development, and user collective self efficacy. However, as Bluesky transitioned to securing Series A funding, Blockchain Capital emerged as a lead backer, signaling a shift toward a related, but different management philosophy and influence. BlueSky’s board already reflects this culture, with Masnick, the author of the Protocols, Not Platforms paper, recently joining Graber, along with Jeremie Miller, the creator of the instant messaging (IM) protocol, and Kinjal Shah, partner at Blockchain Capital.
The Overlapping Spaces of Open Source and Crypto Capitalism
One of Bluesky’s key Series A backers, Blockchain Capital, represents a libertarian ethos rooted in crypto culture. Bart Stephens, a managing partner at Blockchain Capital, has described blockchain capitalism as a "protest culture" aimed at disrupting entrenched systems, including traditional financial and regulatory frameworks. In his words:
"Crypto culture reflects the defining characteristics of transparency, open-source principles, and a rejection of traditional models like Microsoft’s software licensing. It is built on free speech, privacy, and reimagining how labor and capital are coordinated—touching on the essence of capitalism itself… We see in crypto capitalism is a new way to draw on human capital from around the world.”6
While crypto culture shares specific values with the open-source movement: transparency, decentralization, and a disdain for walled gardens; it diverges in its emphasis on financialized solutions. Crypto culture often prioritizes individual freedom, market dominance, and the commodification of digital assets, which could introduce tension within Bluesky’s app experience management. Both cultures depend not just on customers giving money to create value but also on developers and users contributing time, code, attention, and care to build and engage with these systems.
Governance and Ownership: The Risk of Influence Over Strategy
Historically, Series A funding marks a transition in a startup's lifecycle when founders may still hold a majority stake, but investor influence begins to grow in pursuit of the next round of funding. However, because Bluesky evolved from a protocol incubated within Twitter, its capitalization table may differ from traditional startup models. How much influence crypto culture and VC-backed interests will wield over Bluesky’s governance remains unclear.
Jack Dorsey warned that BlueSky would repeat Twitter’s mistakes and forced to prioritize aggressive growth and profit-driven decision-making over fufilling its decentralized intent. Bluesky’s challenge lies in ensuring that its governance structure does not replicate these pitfalls, primarily as it seeks to balance the ideals of decentralization with its backers' financial and philosophical expectations.
Free Our Feeds offers an alternative to the risks of centralized control that still overshadows Bluesky despite its promises of decentralization. With Bluesky funded in part by blockchain capitalists and operating in the same ecosystem shaped by figures like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, Free Our Feeds seeks to ensure the AT Protocol avoids falling into the same pattern of ensh*ttification described by Cory Doctorow. It’s a who's who of public interest technologists, cultural figures, academics, and open government proponents aiming to raise $4 million to establish an independent foundation, build infrastructure for open access to content and data, and protect against centralized influence:
Nabiha Syed and Mark Surman of the Mozilla Foundation
Eli Pariser, the Filter Bubble author
Mallory Knodel Social Web Foundation
Mark Ruffalo, actor and activist
Cory Doctorow, Sci-Fi writer, journalist, and liberating copyright advocate
Shoshana Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism author and retired academic
Over the next three years, it plans to raise an additional $30 million to expand the protocol and fund developers, creating a healthier, user-first ecosystem for social media.
What We Need to See from BlueSky
To address these tensions, Bluesky requires governance mechanisms that ensure accountability to users, developers, and communities, not just investors. Open-source principles must remain central, and alternative governance models like cooperative ownership or perpetual purpose trusts should be explored to safeguard its mission. Bluesky risks undermining its vision of creating a decentralized, user-first platform without meaningful checks and balances and could fall into the same patterns it aims to disrupt.
What We Need from Free Our Feeds
Creating an independent foundation is a promising step, but expectations are high. How will this structure lead to better governance? OpenAI started as a not-for-profit, but has struggled with constant management churn and governance crises.7 What mechanisms will ensure that the foundation remains accountable while advancing the mission of a decentralized, user-centered social media ecosystem?
4. Should You Contribute?
Whether Bluesky, the AT Protocol, or Free Our Feeds deserves your time, creativity, or financial support, or deeper involvement as a developer on the AT Protocol, depends on their net contribution to users, developers, and civic society globally. While Bluesky presents an ambitious vision of decentralized, people-first social media, its ability to align its mission, funding, and governance will ultimately determine its success.
What we need to see:
Mission Alignment: How will Bluesky balance user-friendly goals with systemic decentralization? How will Free Our Feeds demonstrate its efficacy, not just its ethos, to end users, creators, and developers?
Governance Systems: Can Bluesky avoid compromising with intrusive ads and data scraping? How will Free Our Feeds not consolidate a different kind of power?
Accountability: What structures will ensure that Bluesky and Free Our Feeds remain accountable to their users and to the rest of us?
Why Bluesky Invites Our Curiosity—But Also Scrutiny
Bluesky represents a set of composable tools to reconsider how we create social networks. The protocol-based foundation, decentralization ethos, and PBC status provide new ways to combine the features and exchanges that lead to social network-mediated discourse. However, its reliance on venture capital and evolving governance and revenue models leave critical questions unanswered.
Free Our Feeds offers a compelling alternative by proposing an independent foundation to safeguard Bluesky's underlying technology. Its emphasis on decentralized infrastructure and open governance holds promise, but critical questions remain: Will its funding structure support true independence? Can it ensure governance that prioritizes public interest over private capital?·
As we migrate to new ways of composing the social web, let’s demand more from our protocols and platforms and from ourselves as contributors, advocates, and funders. Building a better internet isn’t just about finding alternatives to X.com or Meta. It’s about creating systems that give back more than they take and contribute to a functioning global conversation.
Financing the Ecosystem Systemic Change
Social impact investing must embrace a more holistic and ecosystem-driven approach to drive systemic change . This means moving beyond the narrow focus of individual investments and considering the broader interconnected systems that shape our social, economic, and technological landscapes. Philanthropists, donors of time and capital, and impact investors can play a pivotal role in creating sustainable, equitable models for the digital age by addressing the following key areas:
Ecosystem Funding: Instead of funding isolated ventures, funders can aim to build support ecosystems that enable long-term systemic change. This approach includes strengthening the infrastructure, governance models, and community organizations that underpin effective and sustainable systems. For example, the many nonprofit fact-checking organizations in the Global South left in the lurch by Meta’s shift away from supporting content moderation and fact-checking represent a critical component of a functioning digital ecosystem, and functioning political systems. These organizations require sustained funding to combat misinformation and uphold accountability. Free Our Feeds will also need support.
New Forms of Legal and Governance Models: Investing in new legal structures, such as perpetual purpose trusts or multi-stakeholder cooperatives, can help safeguard public-benefit missions from being overshadowed by profit-driven motives. Decentralized technologies like Bluesky, for instance, would benefit from governance models that ensure accountability to users and communities while limiting undue influence from speculative exploitation. However, the PBC organizational structure is not a panacea on its own. The same is true of the foundation structure proposed by Free Our Feeds.
Transparency and Financial Model Clarity: Advocates for decentralized technologies should push beyond speculative business models to a clearly communicated financial model that generates tangible value for paying customers and explicit value defined for those contributing time, care, and attention – a contribution model. The same is true in a foundation structure. What are the financial costs and benefits, and how can BlueSky sustain itself should it continue to attract substantial capital? This requires clear commitments to transparency in how costs are incurred and revenue is generated and reinvested into maintaining the ecosystem at large.
Philanthropic and Donor Funding to Reduce VC Reliance: Philanthropic organizations and private donors can provide funding models that reduce reliance on venture capital at this early stage and demand more rigor in a foundation model. By funding infrastructure for decentralized and public-good technologies, philanthropists can help create sustainable systems that align with broader goals.
What We Need to Contribute
For decentralized technologies to succeed in creating a more equitable digital future, they require collective support from advocates, funders, and users. This includes:
Advocate for governance models that center on public benefit and prioritize accountability.
Support ecosystem funding that strengthens the interconnected systems of public goods, like open-source developers and maintainers, nonprofit fact-checkers, and transparency initiatives.
Develop legal innovations to protect mission-driven organizations from the pressures of traditional growth models.
Promote shared learning and collaboration across actors and nodes in the ecosystem.
Build clarity and transparency in financial models or contribution models, ensuring that we understand the cost and the benefit and we know who owns the stakes of change.
Donors, philanthropists, and social impact investors can help create the foundation for a digital landscape that serves the public good by funding systems that foster transparency, accountability, and collaboration. This isn’t just about fixing the gaps left by platforms like Meta and X/Twitter—it’s about rethinking how we build and sustain digital systems for the future.
And, of course, follow me on BlueSky: @jenvandermeer.bsky.social
Masnick, M. (2019). Protocols, not platforms: A technological approach to free speech. Knight First Amendment Institute. The Knight Institute, 21. https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech
Solana, M. (2024, May 9). Interview with Jack Dorsey. Pirate Wires. Retrieved January 14, 2025, from https://www.piratewires.com/p/interview-with-jack-dorsey-mike-solana
Brigner, P. (Host). (2023, July 23). PGP (Pretty Good Policy) for Crypto: Paul Brigner welcomes Bart Stephens. YouTube. From
Metz, C., & Griffith, E. (2023, December 9). Inside the crisis at OpenAI. The New York Times. Retrieved January 14, 2025, from https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/technology/openai-altman-inside-crisis.html