Bluesky should take on Substack

The mass migrations are over. When X/Twitter’s Mecha-Hitler doesn’t move people in droves it’s safe to assume that Bluesky has seen its last big wave of signups resulting from Elon’s continued violations.

As a member of Bluesky I personally don’t mind the slowed growth at all; 30-40 million people is more than enough for a lively discussion across borders and cultures, and the AT protocol network is bound to greatly expand long-term as its pluriverse of interoperable platforms matures.

The ones who do probably mind are the investors who wanna see the line go up asap, if not in revenue yet then at least in user numbers. Several months ago there was talk of Bluesky PBC soon-to-be-announcing another funding round, which hasn't yet materialized.

Conjecture aside, I think Bluesky has an obvious opportunity in front of it: Instead of competing with X/Twitter, compete with Substack:

Unlike generic social media, newsletter subscriptions are actually a functional business model.

Bluesky as a network (~40m) is bigger than Substack's (est. 20-35m).

Substack ventured into microblogging with Notes; short- and long-form blogging work well together.

A fully functional MVP exists in Leaflet (more on that below).

Bluesky is already building their own payments platform, but there's no way they would be profitable on transaction fees alone: They need a flagship product.

Substack has to be disrupted. Why? Because they don't mind funding Nazis and they'll exercise vendor lock-in whenever given the opportunity. The partial openness of their proprietary platform is merely an accidental side effect of how email newsletters inherently work.

Ghost and a handful other top-notch newsletter alternatives do already exist, but none have the network power of Bluesky.

Acquire Leaflet for fun and profit

Bluesky could make a pivot with minimal friction by amicably absorbing the excellent Leaflet.

Note: I've talked to the Leaflet developers on multiple occasions and I'm a fan of their work, but I did not discuss this post nor the hypothetical acquisition herein with them prior to publishing.

We should always be wary of platform consolidation, but this case presents a very natural coupling. Both projects are open source, based on atproto and use the React framework, so they're technologically aligned.

They're also mutually complementary business ventures:

a bespoke payments network is essential to compete with incumbents on platform fees; Leaflet can't do that (easily) on their own.

a competitive publishing suite is a big lift only doable by a dedicated team; Bluesky can't do that (easily) on their own.

Every smidge of information shared about Bluesky's business plan has been consistently vague, presumably because they don't have anything concrete yet. That's no surprise since mainstream social networks have never been profitable with any model other than ad-supported surveillance capitalism, which Bluesky is admirably trying to avoid.

So far they've also shied away from "eating up" any of the smaller fish in their still nascent ecosystem. While they're right to be very cautious to do so, I posit that they've been too restrained for their own good. The openness of Bluesky's platform has lead to a multitude of ventures rapidly exploring nearly every vertical imaginable, leaving very little left to play with for Bluesky PBC. But if the benevolent blue butterfly perishes, so do the rest of us.

(Sure the network is decentralized, but it's not yet sustainably distributed enough to absorb a blow of that magnitude.)

A highly resourced Substack alternative could be just the substantial revenue generator they need, putting them on a clear path to profitability and re-framing their pitch to prospective investors: When Bluesky is compared to Substack instead of X or Threads, Bluesky is already ahead in user acquisition!