They will be offering paid services in the future (see my link above) but only one has shipped yet: a partnership with namecheap to make it easy to get your handle as a domain name without technical knowledge.
I'm curious what the partnership fees with Namecheap look like, if there's even transparency to make that public?
I am working on a similar centralized-aggregation system and integrating-partnering with registrars is one future aspect of the system I've been planning; it's of course always a matter of prioritizing resources, and I'll be at a major disadvantage compared to Bluesky with Jack's early involvement/launching it getting BLuesky plenty of press and at least some momentum.
As around a decade ago I wrote a comment and made a blog post of it, all else being equal, the final layer of competition will be governance - which will ultimately be different nodes that govern well enough - including providing enough value at a fair cost - to gain enough mass to begin snowballing and ideally as many as possible find a stable state; then hopefully they all copy the best features and policies of the most successful; the problem here though is virtue signalling is a survival mechanism, and pretending to offer something that may even appear quite similar on the surface may actually integrate an inherent flaw in the system - say allowing for an ideological mob to more easily form and become indoctrinated, say based on very nuanced decisions on how informatio is presented to end users (can it be more easily gamed by greedy or bad-authoritarian actors, etc).
They don’t mention what the business structure of the partnership is, yeah.
BlueSky has a slightly different take than yours, that you might find interesting. Things are split up into “speech” layers vs “reach” layers on top of them. So “governance” gets a bit weird: at the base level, you can say whatever you want, but how accessible that is depends on the popularity of various things in the reach layer. Nobody can stop you from running a PDS and putting your posts out into the network, but if say, the most popular moderation service decides to not show your posts, users wouldn’t see them unless they use a different tool in the reach layer, say one feed that uses it and another that doesn’t.
