Mike Masnick, who sits on the board of #Bluesky, claims the team was too busy to announce the series B funding (see screenshot).

But something is fishy.

Even the VC firm - Bain Capital Crypto - isn't listing Bluesky anywhere on their website: baincapitalcrypto.com/portfoli…

Why the mystery? Was Bluesky afraid of a public backlash & asked to keep the information under wraps?

Sorry if I keep repeating myself but I will forever be skeptical of Bluesky and think of the tale of the scorpion and the frog.

@benroyce @mat tangentially related but I'm beginning to think that maybe the whole point of the ATmosphere being open is to find a way to capture billions of data points for profiling / monetization purposes? I know everything is public here too, but the language of their press release gave me the creeps.

I may start referring to them as Blue$ky and the ATmo$phere.

I mean what's the draw otherwise for VCs and crypto bros?

@mat
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

@mat

if a message is public, it's public. people need to understand anyone can scrape you, on any protocol

but there is a difference between the fediverse which has no financial motivations, and bluesky, which does have creepy financial motivations. they can, and will, eventually, simply as a matter of the inevitable financial imperative of seedy cryptobro creeps, to do things with your data *on the inside*

(private messages, linking it with data in other plutocrat silos, etc)

I've been feeling this way myself. A lot of what ATProto does well can be implemented in the fediverse, from what I've been reading, there's just not enough funding to get it done fast enough.

@benroyce @mat

@benroyce @mat

imo we should think of social media (the social news feed ala bluesky and mastodon etc) as totally public like blogs you can boost. that's different than messaging and groups that need privacy, what I call social networking.

I think bluesky's goal is to be the Google/Gmail of all of social media. "it's open so you could use other services but we make it easy and provide a better experience." the way the app view works makes that possible unlike how AP works. enshittify.

Yes, the language, and making it sound like it's all terrific without really bad consequences 🙄

@mat

@pascaline also, think about it: what were they so busy at that they didn't have the time during that whole year to talk about the money.

Bain Capital are notorious for using investments to hollow out companies and turn them into puppets they eventually discard. their business practices are a mix of cannibalism and parasitism.

Bain most likely dangled the money contingent upon meeting a set of demands. a bespoke API/backdoor of private BS info must be it.

I'm pretty sure the WHOLE of the Fedi does not meet 100M costs in 10 years

Combined

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.

"Can you imagine Mastodon raising 100 MILLION dollars from a crypto VC fund..."

Well *I* can imagine it!

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.

@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…

arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03239

@sab @mat

Yup

"I want to post some shit on social media with an anime profile picture" is perfectly cromulent and so who gives a fuck about DID

The same with the "your messages are portable!" bit the bluesky cringe crew keep enthusing about

Oh yeah, the meme I posted about the Oppenheimer movie 2 years ago is an extremely important record I must preserve for all posterity

2 weeks later, no one gives a shit about your posts

Social media is ephemeral nonsense, not a doctoral thesis

Isn't there also something about the idea of the ATProto ID that it should follow you across the web, making tracking across services easier? On the fediverse we have accounts that are separate, and tracking the same user across the internet remains a significant challenge.

This seems to me to be the real problem BS sought to solve.
@benroyce @_elena @mat