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

[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.

[mat@zelk.space]

@UlrikeHahn @_elena how is it different from the fediverse? as long as there's a firehose, anyone can crawl mastodon.social or any other instance and do the same

[ulrikehahn@fediscience.org]

@mat @_elena

it seems both legally different to me and different in design:

Bridging to Bluesky: The open social web, consent, and GDPR

There’s been intense discussion across the fediverse, GitHub, blogs, and articles about a bridge that would let you use a Mastodon accou...

UlrikeHahn (write.as)

[mat@zelk.space]

@wjmaggos I agree with you, even if permissive data is coming this year. for the appview part, anyone can build his own and pick the data they want from the pds. there's also dozens of different alternatives already, which limits enchittification

@_elena @benroyce

[mastodonmigration@mastodon.online]

@_elena

This is an absurd and transparent lie, that reflects very badly on Mike Masnick.

We are talking about a $100M investment, and he is asking people to believe they were just "too busy." Hogwash.

[mat@zelk.space]

@UlrikeHahn it surely is, but nothing technically prevents anyone to crawl data from https://[any_instance]/public/local automatically. It's even worse on AP because you never really delete a post as it's duplicated on a thousands different instances. Someone already did a firehose of activitypub but I can't remember his @

@_elena

[_elena@mastodon.social]

@mastodonmigration it’s the first time in the entire history of capitalism that a company wouldn’t publicly boast about raising 100 million dollars

[mike@thecanadian.social]

@_elena I'm not going to mince words here, that's either total bullshit from Mike or incompetence from the team, or both. You've just received 100 mil in the bank and you can't get a staffer to spend an hour writing a press release. The real hold up was figuring out how they were going to explain it which they still haven't done.

[benroyce@mastodon.social]

@mat @wjmaggos @_elena

Great. So maybe someday in the future the bluesky ecosystem will eventually have what mastodon already has

[ulrikehahn@fediscience.org]

@mat @_elena I think the legal aspect matters. And once someone downloads an ATproto post it’s not going to vanish by the author deleting it either. There is a freely available archive tool that lets you download your entire Bluesky post history with two clicks. And given how ATproto works, that means you can use the same tool to download, archive and search another users entire history of posts as well

[wjmaggos@liberal.city]

@mat @_elena @benroyce

my understanding is that running your own app view with both a decent experience and reasonable cost is not doable. people are not doing that, while many run fedi servers for a few people.

[sab@hostux.social]

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