Bluesky offering relay and moderation services

This points to Bluesky building the paid infrastructure layer on top of an open protocol, not just a consumer app. A self hosted PDS lets an organization keep its own accounts and posts, but it still needs network plumbing to stay usable at scale. Relays help a server stay synced with the wider network, indexing and AppView services turn raw posts into searchable feeds and profiles, and moderation services distribute labels and enforcement tools across servers.

• The relay piece is especially important because it removes a hard operational job. AT Protocol relays let services avoid tracking every active PDS themselves, and Bluesky notes that relays are essential operational infrastructure as the network grows and shards.
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• Moderation is also separable infrastructure. Bluesky’s production guide says moderation can happen at both the PDS and AppView level, and its Ozone service can supply labeling and review workflows to AppViews. That creates a clean path to sell moderation tooling without forcing every server operator to build trust and safety software from scratch.
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• The Automattic comparison is about business model shape. WordPress is open source and can run anywhere, but WordPress.com monetizes by handling backups, security, scaling, updates, domains, and support for people who do not want to operate all of that themselves. Bluesky can do the same for decentralized social infrastructure.
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If more publishers, communities, and niche apps launch their own servers, the center of value shifts from owning every user account to operating the most reliable shared services around the protocol. That would give Bluesky recurring B2B style revenue, while making AT Protocol harder to displace because the easiest way to go independent would still run through Bluesky’s infrastructure stack.