I hate to be the one to break this to you, but servers cost money. Developers cost money. Bandwidth costs money. If you want to run a reasonably successful social media company, you need money.

Bundling domain registration (already a thing) with custom usernames (already a thing) and taking a profit from that transaction is not enshittification. Enshittification would be if they took away the ability to link your own domain and required everyone to buy domains through Bluesky. This would just be giving less savvy users the ability to link a domain to their username without having to learn DNS.

From what I can gather, they aren’t selling the ability to link custom domains as your user handle. They are acting as a domain registrar to allow users to buy domains and link them to their handle in one step, then likely skimming some profits off the top. Imagine they sell a “custom username with domain” for $20 per year, they pay the wholesale fee (around $9 for a .com) and pocket the rest. That seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Is Bluesky prone to enshittification? I don’t know much about the AT protocol, but it seems like it works relatively similar to ActivityPub. Is it open source?