@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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Whenever I read something about "crytpo", I substitute the word "criminal" and it makes it much easier to understand.
I sure great things could be done for the Fediverse with that level of funding though.
Where the money comes from is as important as the amount though.
@simonzerafa VCs are not benefactors... that level of funding demands returns - i.e. finding ways to monetize the platform, with a focus on scale.
I wish public institutions in Europe would begin funding the fediverse as an essential utility. It would be easy to find the money: just stop paying hefty license fees to Microsoft and move to FOSS tools
@_elena @lisamelton guess how many millions threads.net has quietly raised from FAANG companies—mostly F tho.
@_elena
"Can you imagine Mastodon raising 100 MILLION dollars from a crypto VC fund..."
Well *I* can imagine it!
@_elena Someone suggested that the vague "and other interactions" very likely means people's DMs and honestly I think they're probably right because "posts, likes, and comments" kind of covers everything else...
And that would be everything since like a year ago — at least.
@_elena I'm pretty sure the WHOLE of the Fedi does not meet 100M costs in 10 years
Combined
@stux I'm sorry if I keep repeating myself but can you imagine an American company raising 100 million dollars IN THIS ECONOMY and not boasting about it?!? Waiting one full year to mention it?
I feel bad for people in my life because I may keep repeating this all weekend. It's the most nonsensical business story I have ever come across 🤪
@_elena@mastodon.social I mean, I won't use BSKY EVER. I'm happy it exists for those that choose to. But we're going to keep seeing this over and over and over again. But I'm also happy because more folks that choose to use other platforms takes power away from Big Tech.
I think things like this show folks that BSKY is NOT the same as Mastodon or the fediverse in general. But I think most won't care and for those that DO care, do they care enough to move AGAIN?
And if they do, we know they won't be going to Twitter. Maybe a few will run their own whatever in the Fediverse or some will be empowered to build something themselves and make it better and AP is the only way to go really imo.
No matter what, thank you ALL for joining us on the #Fediverse because the ABOVE is the ONLY alternative that Capitalism sees and I'm happy to have REAL choice.
@_elena we could ask our founder and CEO John Mastodon about it, for sure. 😁
@greenWhale@dice.camp @_elena@mastodon.social
ALL HAIL The First of HIS name, Founder of the TOOT TOOT, Creator of the meme of the elephant wetting itself that we all find hillarious, the greatest person to ever live, for realsies, JOHN MASTODON!
@_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 "Open social infrastructure" - Haha, nice bullshit term.
@torstentorsten open social web for crypto vcs = billions of open data points up for grabs / surveillance / monetization opportunities
@_elena
How many cats can get for this?
@_elena they aren't investing this kind of money if there's not a path to more money... People are the only thing of value on the platform... It's the same crap all over again with what people think is a prettier bow.
@_elena
You'd scared me.
I really thought Mastodon did something sinister at the first glance XD
@Pouakai@mastodon.social @_elena@mastodon.social if they ever do we still have the rest of the Fediverse.
I'm on my own private #Bonfire for my business and I LOVE IT.
@ozoned@btfree.social unrelated to the OP but since ur using bonfire, I'm curious can u use mastodon apps with it, or is there another client or web app u use?
@lps@holos.social some apps are Mastodon compatible, such as gotosocial, but I don't think Bonfire is one of them.
@Pouakai OMG I'm so sorry 😅 yeah I should have phrased things differently, I was just so riled up
@_elena if trump supports it, then it must be really bad
@_elena Next Space Karen buys Bluesky for $44 billion
@benjamimsilva@social.vivaldi.net @_elena@mastodon.social He's foolish, he's not THAT foolish. He'd pay no more than $40 billion this time.
@_elena I mean, I run a mastodon, I'd surely not forget to disclose that!
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 They had previously announced other crypto investment, so I would not think it was that aspect.
@_elena "Oops, we were just too busy. Tee hee!"
They had a freaking YEAR...
@_elena The whole 'gosh golly' thing ...
@geonz@mathstodon.xyz @_elena@mastodon.social those silly businesses would forget about the law if they weren't reminded! It happens to us ALL!
@_elena Masnick has certainly revealed a previously hidden side of himself in all the BS BS ...
@colo_lee@mstdn.social @_elena@mastodon.social
I was at Red Hat when they were sold to IBM.
The CEO, Jim Whitehurst, that for some reason people saw as a god and didn't understand he didn't INVENT Linux or anything, was standing up there selling us the idea of the sale to IBM.
CEO's are only there to keep the business running. They're not there for the people, they're not there for the customers, they're there to make sure it just keeps humming along.
Even if they disagreed, they're not going to say it publicly. You know how much money that CEO job is making them? Say whatever, world be damned.
THIS is why they can't have this power.
They will ALWAYS convince themselves and anyone they can that this is BEST FOR ALL.
@_elena well... This is really disappointing. I have never trusted BlueSky but I have trusted Mike Masnick. His response is really not convincing at all.
@_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.
@_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.
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@mastodon.online @_elena@mastodon.social
And you know who can never be used to make that money back?
US!
We're FREE.
Folks like BSKY, idk why. But they'll either stay or they'll leave. If they leave, they're not going back to Twitter. If they stay, maybe they don't know or maybe they don't know how good we are. Or maybe they have something we need.
How can we turn this into a strength to HELP people move over?
Bonfire is AMAZING imo. It's not Mastodon. We have so many options, we just need to convince folks that this way is better and we can suit them however they need.
@mastodonmigration it’s the first time in the entire history of capitalism that a company wouldn’t publicly boast about raising 100 million dollars
@_elena@mastodon.social @mastodonmigration@mastodon.online
They JUST found it between the couch cushions.
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.
@_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
@craig_patrick @_elena
They aren't forthcoming about financing. So, as would be expected, they are not forthcoming about their monetization plans. These are 2 bad signs.
Then add in the gaslighting about why major funding went unmentioned by both Bluesky and the VCs: "Everyone at Bluesky is just so gosh dang busy nobody had time to mention it." This is the gaslighting we see daily in the news. "I'll give you an obvious, nonsensical excuse, but still expect you to believe it because you all are gullible and emotion-driven."
@Jerry @craig_patrick thank you Jerry. “Gaslighting” is a perfect way to describe that nonsensical response.
What’s super creepy is that Bain Capital also kept the info under wraps. For a full year! I never heard of anything like this… the kind of news that is usually shouted from the rooftops (ESPECIALLY in this economy)
Jerry has hit the nail on the head. We have become so used to the constant stream of lies from politicians and the tech industry that we have become desensitized to them.
It used to be that people were more more careful, because being caught in a lie held consequences. Now everyone simply lies with impunity confidant in the knowledge that nothing will come of it.
This degrading of society has real consequences.
@_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?
@_elena Maybe the deal is in cryptocurrency, not actual dollars?
@_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.
Is there any requirement to make it public within 1 year? otherwise I wonder why they're announcing it at all.
@_elena
Thanks for highlighting this.
Bsky smells of narrative capture to me, much like Substack, (who are now teaming up with prediction markets)
@markmetz 🎯 you nailed it (at least, that's my interpretation, too)
@_elena
I’m glad to see the work you’re doing, your article was excellent. I shared it far and wide. Verification is another huge issue that Mastodon solves. I also did an interview with some grad students from Denmark, who are working on the Fediverse, and I sent them your article too.
@_elena it's insane to think people would believe this "explanation"...
@_elena And this is how I find out that he's on their board. 😅
Even if Bsky themselves and some of their staff actions didn't raise alarms from the get go for me. The fact that they are located in the US under current administration and the lack of autonomy does.
I'm happy I finally took the plunge and made them my back up social media and Mastodon my primary. I like some of the utility over there, but it's already doing the spiral I watched Twitter doing before leaving there.
@707Kat this is the way! (Mastodon as primary and Bluesky as backup) 🙌
@_elena Yea. I’m hopefully that projects like Blacksky can completely break free of Bluesky, but being ignorant of how the tech works I worry there’s some kind of rug pull to come
@_elena Very sketchy behaviour, for certain.
@_elena are you aware that any record is public on atproto and checkable on pds.ls? there's nothing new .....
@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
@pascaline FYI @blogdiva brilliantly pointed out that precious information may include direct messages... and I posited that it includes blocks too because they are public info
@_elena @pascaline also, think about it: what were they so busy at that they didn't have the time during that whole year to talk about the money.
Bain Capital are notorious for using investments to hollow out companies and turn them into puppets they eventually discard. their business practices are a mix of cannibalism and parasitism.
Bain most likely dangled the money contingent upon meeting a set of demands. a bespoke API/backdoor of private BS info must be it.
@_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
it seems both legally different to me and different in design:
https://write.as/ulrikehahn/bridging-to-bluesky-the-open-social-web-consent-and-gdpr
@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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@_elena permissive data/spaces is coming this year, and you can use E2EE messaging germ using your pds. if you want to delete any data, you can just connect to pds.ls and delete any record you want (e.g. all your likes, comments, etc)
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. they have the incentive to do quiet seedy things beingd the scenes with your data mastodon does not. any secrecy like elena cites is a warning you should heed
@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.
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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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)
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