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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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."
https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-19-2026-series-b
How I read it: data harvesting at its finest
️ @_elena
How many cats can get for this? -
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."
https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-19-2026-series-b
How I read it: data harvesting at its finest
️ @_elena "Open social infrastructure" - Haha, nice bullshit term.
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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."
https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-19-2026-series-b
How I read it: data harvesting at its finest
️ @_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.
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@_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
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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. 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
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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
@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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@_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.
@stonedonkey totally
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@_elena
You'd scared me.
I really thought Mastodon did something sinister at the first glance XD@Pouakai OMG I'm so sorry
yeah I should have phrased things differently, I was just so riled up -
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.
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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?
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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@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?
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.
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@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.
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@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.
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.
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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.
Is there any requirement to make it public within 1 year? otherwise I wonder why they're announcing it at all.
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@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.
@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:
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/entities/IdentityProof/
not sure why they abandoned it
maybe because DID just isn't there yet
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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 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.
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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
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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:
https://docs.joinmastodon.org/entities/IdentityProof/
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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