It makes no sense to build a social network nowadays.
With Mastodon and Bluesky around, users have free options. Plus X and Threads, and you can see how the market is more than saturated.
IMHO they should look into close collaboration/minority stake with Bluesky or Reddit instead. You have a huge pool of users already, without the need to build it up from the ground up from scratch.
Heck, OpenAI probably has enough money to just buy Reddit if they want.
I don't know about Reddit, but Bluesky would never in a million years partner themselves publicly with OpenAI. I can't comment on the opinions of the team themselves because I just don't know, but the users would revolt. Loudly.
Is there anything stopping openai from scraping all the bluesky content without partnering?
Yes, they can. All Bluesky data (and ATProto in general) is publicly available.
It is already happening and nothing can be done against it at a protocol level: https://mashable.com/article/bluesky-ai-dataset-using-one-mi...
Also, what is their USP? "Join our social network so we can train our models on your data!"