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

[torstentorsten@social.tchncs.de]

@_elena "Open social infrastructure" - Haha, nice bullshit term.

[archivescribe@mastodon.social]

@_elena This is disappointing. I hope the best for BlueSky, but I have a bad feeling this is going to come back to haunt them.

[_elena@mastodon.social]

@torstentorsten open social web for crypto vcs = billions of open data points up for grabs / surveillance / monetization opportunities

[samiamsam@mastodon.social]

@_elena

sure that amount of VC cash slipped their minds

sure

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@mat @_elena

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. bluesky has a financial incentive to do quiet seedy things behind the scenes with your data mastodon does not. any secrecy like elena cites is a warning you should heed

[_elena@mastodon.social]

@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?

[_elena@mastodon.social]

@stonedonkey totally

[_elena@mastodon.social]

@Pouakai OMG I'm so sorry yeah I should have phrased things differently, I was just so riled up

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@_elena @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)

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@_elena

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

[mariusor@metalhead.club]

@stefan frankly I don't think that migrating from URLs to DIDs as identifiers would still qualify as the same protocol in the case of ActivityPub.

So, if ActivityPub is the main component of the Fediverse - which it is for me - I don't think we'll be able to reproduce _all_ the functionality ATProto has.

@_elena @benroyce @mat

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@nickapos @_elena

yeah but there's a difference between someone screenscraping your posts somewhere

and a financially motivated effort by seedy cryptobros *on the inside* linking all sorts of private data

- using your email and birthdate to link to other plutocrat data silos

- ingesting your private messages

- profiling your posting behavior

- feeding it all to AI

etc

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@_elena

And I really believe that Bluesky got ahead because it's been essentially a centralized Twitter 2.0, only now slowly starting to open up, and that's already creating UX problems people have been complaining about with Mastodon/fediverse.

Here's a random post: https://witchsky.app/profile/did:plc:rtf3bjc3w2yn4syxtm4r7jt2/post/3mfrp6tovy22g

Try replying from https://bsky.app. The old "put the URL in the search box" trick doesn't work here.

And developers are disagreeing over "log in with Bluesky" vs "with ATProto" vs "Atmosphere", because the first one erases the diversity of the network, while the more accurate labels are "too confusing for normies".

Plus, "pick a PDS and an AppView and an app" sounds a lot more daunting than "pick a server".

@benroyce @mat

[stefan@stefanbohacek.online]

@mariusor

Right, I didn't say all of it, so I don't disagree. But we can definitely fix all the major issues people have with the fediverse in some way.

@_elena @benroyce @mat

[wjmaggos@liberal.city]

@tedmielczarek @_elena

Is there any requirement to make it public within 1 year? otherwise I wonder why they're announcing it at all.

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@mariusor @stefan @_elena @mat

mastodon was playing around with DIDs at some point

you can find references to it in the documentation (deprecated now for a long time)

example:

IdentityProof - Mastodon documentation

Represents a proof from an external identity provider.

(docs.joinmastodon.org)

not sure why they abandoned it

maybe because DID just isn't there yet

[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