Can you imagine Mastodon raising 100 MILLION dollars from a crypto VC fund and failing to disclose it... for a full year?
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@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
@benroyce I wasn't speaking of Mastodon because they barely do any effort into being a spec compliant ActivityPub service...
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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: https://baincapitalcrypto.com/portfolio/
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.
@_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?
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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
@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.
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@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?
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@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.
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@_elena
Thanks for highlighting this.
Bsky smells of narrative capture to me, much like Substack, (who are now teaming up with prediction markets) -
@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.
@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
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@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?
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.
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@_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.
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@_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 @_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
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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
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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: https://baincapitalcrypto.com/portfolio/
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.
@_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)
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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: https://baincapitalcrypto.com/portfolio/
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.
@_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
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@mat sure but it's the language they used that creeped me out - it's like they are using this as a selling point for VCs to say: here, collect all these data
@_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…
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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: https://baincapitalcrypto.com/portfolio/
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.
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.
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Can you imagine Mastodon raising 100 MILLION dollars from a crypto VC fund and failing to disclose it... for a full year? No I can't either.
And from their actual press release: "The Atmosphere currently contains about 20 billion public records—the posts, likes, comments and other interactions that bring the ecosystem to life. It's an astonishing collection of what open social infrastructure makes possible."
Bluesky's 2025 $100M Series B Lays Foundation for Open Social Web - Bluesky
In April 2025, Bluesky raised $100 million in Series B funding led by Bain Capital Crypto. Since our Series A, we've grown from 13 million to over 43 million global users.
Bluesky (bsky.social)
How I read it: data harvesting at its finest
️ @_elena we could ask our founder and CEO John Mastodon about it, for sure.
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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 @_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
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@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
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)
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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.
@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
