Bluesky announces its $8M seed round and first paid service, custom domains

Hours before Meta launches its anticipated Instagram competitor, Threads, another Twitter rival — Bluesky — is announcing additional funding and its first paid service. In a blog post on Wednesday, the company shared that it raised seed funds totaling $8 million this summer, when it converted from being a public benefit LLC to a public benefit C Corp. In addition, Bluesky will now offer a paid service that provides custom domains for end users who want to have a unique domain as their handle on the service. [...]

“Bluesky’s business model must be fundamentally different — we are a public social network and our code is all open source, so we have no ‘moat’ when it comes to data,” the announcement states. “We set out to build a protocol where users can own their data and always have the freedom to leave, and this approach means that advertising couldn’t be our dominant business model,” it adds.