• Bluesky has launched a new feature where you can purchase custom paid domains on the platform.
• The announcement comes at the same time that Instagram launched its Twitter rival, Threads.
• The new feature is designed to make Bluesky sustainable while ensuring its core tenant of users owning their data remains.

This week has been an interesting one when it comes to social media. It began with Twitter further alienating its community by making poor decisions, while Meta launched a rival platform via Instagram called Threads.

One of the other recent additions to the social media landscape, Bluesky, also announced a new feature for its platform this week. To that end, Bluesky will now allow users to purchase custom paid domains.

The move comes as Bluesky is starting to grapple with the fact that it needs money in order to stay up, but also does not want to infringe or compromise on one of the core tenets of the platform – ensuring that it is ad-free and allowing users to own their data.

“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. So, we’ve been exploring other avenues of monetization,” it explained in a blog post.

“We believe that there must be better strategies to sustain social networks that don’t require selling user data for ads. Our first step in another direction is paid services, and we’re starting with custom domains,” the platform noted.

To deliver this new feature, Bluesky has partnered with Namecheap, which the platform says is, “has one of the best reputations for defending their users against unauthorized domain transfers and protecting their domain names.”

“Domains have so much potential as a personalized way to customize identities and as a decentralized way to verify reputation that builds off the existing web,” the post highlighted.

It has not been mentioned, however, as to how much paid domains on Bluesky would cost, but it looks like it would be a yearly paid service that users would have to renew in order to retain.

While it remains to be seen if paid domains will provide Bluesky enough runway to keep building and developing its platform, it is clear that it is looking for ways to monetise in ways where ads are not a part of the picture.