Netscape had a business model (charge people for browser software.)
Netscape also went bankrupt. It was a colossal failure as a business.
Anyway the answer is ads. This just means it's going to be ads. It's always fucking ads. No one has ever gone into a capitalistic venture sans business plan and ended up doing anything besides selling fucking ads.
If everything goes according to the prediction of economists for 2024, a light crisis should decrease consumer confidence in the US.
One of the solution to re-energize the economy might be to lower interest rates.
Which means that if interest rates go down in 2024, companies are going to be able to borrow at extremely low cost.
In such environment, does the question of business model even matter ?
If your task is to raise debt, what you need is to sell a dream, not have a way to generate money.
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Back to Bluesky:
The bigger danger for the company now is most likely its own users.
"Open ecosystem"/"Freedom"/"Free-speech" users tend to be greedy and consider everything should be free, and at the same time are very active when it's about criticizing.
The "normies" of Twitter / Instagram, are likely higher spender because of the importance that vanity / self-promotion has in their life.
One key could be for Bluesky to focus more on content, than on technology.
Even on Telegram, people join groups and people, they don't really care if the source-code is here or not, or who controls what (because no matter how, this can change in the future).
What is going to make or break the alternative social media networks is the institutions. If/When newspapers (not journalists) start setting up their own instances, if companies put up support accounts on their own domain, if influencers start mirroring their social accounts on their own sites to try to their push their own brand... then I'll start believing that we have a chance.
When people ask you what your business model is, they are asking you how you are going to do this.
