>judging by the team's background -- André Staltz with Secure Scuttlebutt, Paul Frazee with dat/Beaker/Hypercore Protocol -- I think it's pretty clear the driving motivation for much of the team behind Bluesky is not profit.
Not to be overly cynical, but I just don't care. Things change. When mega-corps and investors come knocking with 10-figure checks... 99.9% of humans will cash out. It's human nature. I've invested my time and energy in many things that have been taken over and destroyed by bad/incompetent actors, virtually all of which had promising starts, or I wouldn't have gotten involved.
The organization is a future adversary. You build the technology knowing you won’t be staying at the company forever, and you signpost the things that protect users / your-future-self. This includes open sourcing everything, moving specs to standards bodies when they stabilize, and building the network around low switching costs.
I can’t predict the future. We may screw it up. I’m trying to protect the community from us if we do.
That's not a cynical take for anyone who's observed the past 20 years of the web.
Page and Brin explicitly spelled out how advertising could change the incentives of a search engine. That didn't stop them from selling out immediately and letting the VCs install a CEO to 'businessify' the company.
And besides the current people themselves changing, there are also many other ways in which incentives can change: new people get into the mix (investors, board members, c-level), people leave etc. I recently formulated it like this:
As long as an experience of something that I want to have in my life can be influenced by a single entity I have to hope the incentives of that entity do not change drastically.
Not to be overly cynical, but I just don't care. Things change. When mega-corps and investors come knocking with 10-figure checks... 99.9% of humans will cash out. It's human nature. I've invested my time and energy in many things that have been taken over and destroyed by bad/incompetent actors, virtually all of which had promising starts, or I wouldn't have gotten involved.