Can you imagine Mastodon raising 100 MILLION dollars from a crypto VC fund and failing to disclose it... for a full year?

[benjamineskola@hachyderm.io]

@_elena Yeah, I don't believe this for one minute.

Considering what a big deal it is for most companies to successfully raise VC money, they want us to believe that it wasn't important enough to make time to announce it? Any other company would drop everything to shout it from the rooftops.

And a funding round is a significant amount of work already, so are we supposed to believe that after all that work they had to put into it, they didn't schedule time to even do the tiniest announcement about it?

And like, I would have guessed that the VC firm itself also has PR people whose job it would be to help out with that, and they were still too busy? No.

[javascript@app.wafrn.net]

yeah actually the concept of DID as decentralized identifiers can have its equivalent in the Portable Objects Proposal described here: https://codeberg.org/fediverse/fep/src/branch/main/fep/ef61/fep-ef61.md

This is just more complex to do in an ecosystem like the fediverse where implementations are (and have been for a long time) less standarized

[otfrom@functional.cafe]

@ainmosni @_elena @patpro @Codeberg we do need something like 50 to 500 codebergs

[mariusor@metalhead.club]

@benroyce I wasn't speaking of Mastodon because they barely do any effort into being a spec compliant ActivityPub service...

@stefan @_elena @mat

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@mariusor @stefan @_elena @mat

not in an effort to start a fight but just divulging my honest views on the topic:

so fucking what

just build shit

the spec can follow behind later

waiting for perfect spec structuring before doing anything is an exercise in inertia

[amoshias@esq.social]

@_elena oh, Mike. oh, oh, oh, Mike.

I like the guy and appreciate what he does but just...

this isn't a thing.

does he think all the other companies are just sitting around eating bonbons, and this one specific company is busy?

[mariusor@metalhead.club]

@javascript I thought I was pretty clear in my initial statement: if DIDs are used as primary identifiers for objects, the resulting specification is no longer ActivityPub.

Unless the SocialCG comes up with ActivityPub 2.0 that has DID as identifiers, I wouldn't call the implementations that use that FEP as ActivityPub compliant.

@_elena @benroyce @stefan @mat

[jaypeach53@mastodon.social]

@mat @_elena @benroyce B$ky is BullShit.

[mariusor@metalhead.club]

@benroyce maybe you want to look through my post history before giving me advice to build shit. I'm not speaking from a point of ignorance.

The reason why some of us are trying to stick to the specification is to maximize compatibility between implementations. Each project adding their little flavour of functionality before even bothering to have a solid common foundation is detrimental to the health of the ecosystem as a whole.

@stefan @_elena @mat

[bazkie@beige.party]

@markmetz @_elena what's narrative capture?

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@mariusor @stefan @_elena @mat

i don't give a shit about your post history. i have no doubt you're quite knowledgeable and i don't think you're ignorant at all

but i think "stick to the spec" is purposeful impotence

just build shit and fuck the spec. the spec can follow along later, and if a feature is useful and popular, other projects can copy it

nevermind that demanding spec authority in a decentralized system is a fool's errand

just do whatever the fuck you want, fuck specs

[wjmaggos@liberal.city]

@_elena @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.

[abucci@buc.ci]

@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.

[hipsterelectron@circumstances.run]

@tedmielczarek @_elena series B is one of the stages that represents a categorical step up in financing and control structures. series G like sure at that point people tend to stop counting but B is still a champagne event

[nickapos@mastodon.oncrete.uk]

@benroyce @_elena Yeah i completely agree

[cairobraga@gts.cairobraga.com]

@_elena (can you link the post, please? I'd love to see how people are reacting to this "dog ate my homework"-ass excuse, lol)

[craig_patrick@mastodon.social]

@_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

[ulrikehahn@fediscience.org]

@_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…

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2402.03239

[katzenberger@tldr.nettime.org]

@_elena

Does not add up.

Did they secure a $100 million funding en passant, while being otherwise "crazy busy and overwhelmed" by their development work?

And if they were instead crazy busy and overwhelmed precisely because of trying to secure that funding, what kept them from taking the final step of a press release?

That's not even fishy. It's an insult.

[greenwhale@dice.camp]

@_elena we could ask our founder and CEO John Mastodon about it, for sure.