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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@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
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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.
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.
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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)
@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 @
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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.
@mastodonmigration it’s the first time in the entire history of capitalism that a company wouldn’t publicly boast about raising 100 million dollars
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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 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.
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Great. So maybe someday in the future the bluesky ecosystem will eventually have what mastodon already has
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@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 @
@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
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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)
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 -
@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
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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 @matYup
"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
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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 He makes it sound like it's me trying to file my taxes on time or something. Anxiety disorder creating artificial roadblocks and "forgetting". I'm also the "CEO" of a software company but mine isn't going anywhere at all, like EVER.
I wonder if he's on SSI. I've been considering it...
And the whole team has it!!?? I'm sorry. That must be a real mess to manage. Does everyone panic at the same time or y'all take turns?
We take turns.
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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
@benroyce atproto is way more than a protocol for microblogging. messages aren't the only data our pds stores. it can log all the movies/tvshows we watched, all of our blogs, music history, rss feeds, encrypted messages, games, etc can be stored out there
I think you're criticizing atproto without being aware of how powerful it is. bluesky is just a brick of atproto, just like mastodon is just a brick of activitypub
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@benroyce atproto is way more than a protocol for microblogging. messages aren't the only data our pds stores. it can log all the movies/tvshows we watched, all of our blogs, music history, rss feeds, encrypted messages, games, etc can be stored out there
I think you're criticizing atproto without being aware of how powerful it is. bluesky is just a brick of atproto, just like mastodon is just a brick of activitypub
You sound like a cryptobro with your endless enthusiasm for an exciting future while utterly ignoring the pathetic present. Correct: mastodon is just one brick... in an entire house. While bluesky is one brick... oh wait it's the only brick, there's no house, there's no decentralized reality. Just endless cryptobro style salesmanship
