@_elena Came across yesterday with my first thread on Mastodon, in which a techbro was proudly mocking others for not liking his LLM app making a summary of Mastodon posts without users consent of course. 🤬
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@_elena They had previously announced other crypto investment, so I would not think it was that aspect.
@_elena "Oops, we were just too busy. Tee hee!"
They had a freaking YEAR...
@_elena @Jerry Curious if there’s a plan to monetize #Bluesky you are aware of? Two points to accent your post:
- criticism on #Mastodon initially feels like smearing a rival platform first, investigative reporting second. (Feel free to push back on that, it’s just the vibe I get when I read these articles)
- bureaucracy is an issue with brand communication. This MAY be what Bluesky is encountering because the United States needs to have a serious conversation about the illusion of brand
@_elena all the startups I've worked for have blasted out press releases the moment their funding rounds closed. Part of being a startup means constantly vying for attention. This explanation does not hold up.
@tedmielczarek@mastodon.social @_elena@mastodon.social I have had the same experience. I co-founded a startup in 2016 that managed to secure a funding round, and the VCs themselves were giddy about announcing it as widely as possible. I've consulted for startups both before and after that, and as far as I'm aware every one of them that secured funding rapidly announced it. This explanation from Bluesky does not pass a basic smell test.
@_elena Bain Capital Crypto is involved in the European project supposed to create an alternative to GitHub. Super red flag, I think.
https://goodtech.info/tangled-levee-fonds-alternative-open-source-github/
@_elena
Thanks for highlighting this.
Bsky smells of narrative capture to me, much like Substack, (who are now teaming up with prediction markets)
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@_elena
I’m glad to see the work you’re doing, your article was excellent. I shared it far and wide. Verification is another huge issue that Mastodon solves. I also did an interview with some grad students from Denmark, who are working on the Fediverse, and I sent them your article too.
@_elena it's insane to think people would believe this "explanation"...
@_elena And this is how I find out that he's on their board. 😅
Even if Bsky themselves and some of their staff actions didn't raise alarms from the get go for me. The fact that they are located in the US under current administration and the lack of autonomy does.
I'm happy I finally took the plunge and made them my back up social media and Mastodon my primary. I like some of the utility over there, but it's already doing the spiral I watched Twitter doing before leaving there.
@_elena Yea. I’m hopefully that projects like Blacksky can completely break free of Bluesky, but being ignorant of how the tech works I worry there’s some kind of rug pull to come
@_elena Very sketchy behaviour, for certain.
Whenever I read something about "crytpo", I substitute the word "criminal" and it makes it much easier to understand.
I sure great things could be done for the Fediverse with that level of funding though.
Where the money comes from is as important as the amount though.
@_elena @lisamelton guess how many millions threads.net has quietly raised from FAANG companies—mostly F tho.
@_elena
"Can you imagine Mastodon raising 100 MILLION dollars from a crypto VC fund..."
Well *I* can imagine it!
@_elena Someone suggested that the vague "and other interactions" very likely means people's DMs and honestly I think they're probably right because "posts, likes, and comments" kind of covers everything else...
And that would be everything since like a year ago — at least.
@_elena I'm pretty sure the WHOLE of the Fedi does not meet 100M costs in 10 years
Combined
@_elena@mastodon.social I mean, I won't use BSKY EVER. I'm happy it exists for those that choose to. But we're going to keep seeing this over and over and over again. But I'm also happy because more folks that choose to use other platforms takes power away from Big Tech.
I think things like this show folks that BSKY is NOT the same as Mastodon or the fediverse in general. But I think most won't care and for those that DO care, do they care enough to move AGAIN?
And if they do, we know they won't be going to Twitter. Maybe a few will run their own whatever in the Fediverse or some will be empowered to build something themselves and make it better and AP is the only way to go really imo.
No matter what, thank you ALL for joining us on the #Fediverse because the ABOVE is the ONLY alternative that Capitalism sees and I'm happy to have REAL choice.
@_elena Next Space Karen buys Bluesky for $44 billion
@benjamimsilva@social.vivaldi.net @_elena@mastodon.social He's foolish, he's not THAT foolish. He'd pay no more than $40 billion this time.
@_elena I mean, I run a mastodon, I'd surely not forget to disclose that!
@_elena are you aware that any record is public on atproto and checkable on pds.ls? there's nothing new .....
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@_elena @mat reminder, the Bluesky team explicitly mentioned commercial use of their data in their 2024 arXiv preprint:
“…as Bluesky grows, there are likely to be multiple professionally-run indexers for various purposes. For example, a company that performs sentiment analysis on social media activity about brands could easily create a whole-network index that provides insights to their clients. Web search engines can incorporate Bluesky activity into their indexes,…” pg. 5
it’s been part of the model from the start…
@UlrikeHahn
> as Bluesky grows ... a company that performs sentiment analysis on social media activity about brands could easily create a whole-network index
DataFarming much? E tu, BS?
This is one of many unsavoury reasons why the ATProto network absolutely depends on a central 'firehose', designed to give any intermediary that operates a Relay a global view of the network.
The ATmosphere is a panopticon, *by design*.
(1/2)
@_elena permissive data/spaces is coming this year, and you can use E2EE messaging germ using your pds. if you want to delete any data, you can just connect to pds.ls and delete any record you want (e.g. all your likes, comments, etc)
if you post a public message, someone can ingest that message. there's no protection in what you're citing
(for the record, no such protection on public mastodon messages either)
you're claiming a protection that does not exist
bluesky is a capitalist endeavour funded by cryptobros, while mastodon is not. they have the incentive to do quiet seedy things beingd the scenes with your data mastodon does not. any secrecy like elena cites is a warning you should heed
