bluesky is nazi Jack, elons bff, new scam. Ditch that trash. delete bluesky & fb.

@FediTips @jwz

Just another corporation. Been saying that all along but some people block and "report" me for the truth.

Truth haters are welcome to block me but reporting me to the admin is useless because I AM an admin on Beamship 😂

People think NFTs are for money laundering.

When in fact the more pernicious use is #surveillance

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dusting_…

LOL. Where does the corporate apology industry come up with these fake descriptions? A social networking company needs a "natural partnership" with a cryptocurrency company, like a fish needs a bicycle.

The absurdity and betrayal of customers is typical of private equity, not a responsible social networking company that claims to honor its customers' privacy.

While true, the team in that article also state that they "will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.)"

I do hope that this remains true, as the more alternatives to the bird site, the better. A lot of people still see Mastodon as too isolated, which is fair.

@angiebaby

Blockchain is nothing to do with AI/LLM?

From what I gather in the comments, it seems the users are okay with it as long as there are no actual crypto stuff and no ads. Not a high bar to clear, but when your other experience is with Twitter, you'd take what you can get.

The Fediverse is still the more optimal choice, but overall I'm more cautiously optimistic about Bluesky rn. It's interesting to see how it will sustain itself in the future without succumbing to ads, and maybe there's lessons to learn from it too.

Just this once I would like to have been wrong.

But no.

@alebaffa

None of this is speculation, the text is all directly from their own press release.

"They say the won't make any use of crypto-shit"

That's not what they said. The only thing they ruled out was "hyperfinancializing the social experience", but that phrase doesn't mean anything.

Here's what it comes down to: why would they partially sell themselves to a blockchain company and put a blockchain expert on the board if they don't intend to use blockchain?

" they'll pay that back in a year."

This isn't a loan. The blockchain VCs now have partial ownership of Bluesky and a seat on the board. They will want profits, and then bigger profits after that, forever. It's not sustainable.

Also, even before this deal, the CEO of BlueSky is also from a blockchain/cryptocurrency background.

As far as I can tell, most of the BlueSky board is now blockchain/cryptocurrency people.

yes, that was to be expected.

I’m glad that Mastodon is licensed under AGPL, because that makes it much less likely to be proprietarized (as long as a diverse enough group of people contributes).
@jwz

@alebaffa

VCs aren't interested in building serious use cases, they're interested in making as much money as possible and then selling to someone else.

That's why so much of the internet is "enshittified", because the owners of sites and services care more about getting rich than what actually happens to the users or services they build.

Blockchain seems to encourage this behaviour to go to extremes, as seen in the documentary "Line Goes Up":

youtube.com/watch?v=YQ_xWvX1n9…

Yeah, Bluesky is not worth it. Just more tech bros in power. Plus, their attempts to filter content are laughable and are often self defeating.

But I need to know, WTF is an "NFT Analyst"?!? Seems like a pretty simple gig, tbh. I think Keanu Reeves showed that he nailed the job requirements here:

youtu.be/h0-fYXR3M2o?si=oaZENy…

#nfts #keanureeves #bluesky

BlueSky writes in the announcement:
"Our lead, Blockchain Capital, shares our philosophy that technology should serve the user, not the reverse — the technology being used should never come at the expense of the user experience".

Ah, the user experience! Meta (or any other big-tech company in the surveillance capitalism league) would probably come up with a simular statement if asked ...!

@FediThing At some point I think it's what will happen: Bluesky will introduce paid plans for advanced features, but the protocol is anyway open and your data are yours.
Want to build something new with AT Proto? Go on, nobody will stop you.

VCs are happy, people are happy too.

It's not black or white.

They absolutely will stop me, because AT protocol is deliberately structured to depend on expensive relay servers which I cannot afford to run myself.

This is in contrast to ActivityPub where running your own server costs a tiny fraction of the price and is truly independent.

AT seems to have been designed to make companies money rather than give control to the grassroots community.

p.s. A number of people have pointed out that the current CEO of BlueSky is also from a blockchain/cryptocurrency background:

2015 - Engineer at blockchain company SkuChain

2015 - Worked assembling bitcoin mining equipment

2016 - Developer on Zcash cryptocurrency

2019 - Happening Inc founder (cannot find any trace of this, no idea if it involves blockchain)

2021 - CEO of BlueSky

Also, the current BlueSky board seems to be three people: two blockchain experts and one non-blockchain person.

No surprises here. Bsky scored very high on my enshittification bingo card since day one, but there's no need to go through the whole list. The most important parts:
- Is it closed source? Yes (partially).
- Is it for-profit? Yes.
- Is it centralized? Yes.

Such projects turn into garbage very fast these days. Historically, the process was much slower (although the end result was the same).

fyi I wrote up a semi-technical bit on BS’s so-called decentralization here

beige.party/@possibledog/11336…

And it hit hackernews here

news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4…

which actually has some good back-and-forth with some actual #BlueSky devs and others. I think the BlueSky devs and ATProtocol hobbyists have some good ideas and good intentions, but they’re also being used by a company that’s owned by assholes and driven by greed.

Possibly a Dog

2024-10-25 12:07:37

So, you know how Facebook is a corporation with a lot of spread-out servers that talk to a centralized database and algorithm that controls and manages all your posts, opaquely, for profit.

And so is Xwitter. And so is LinkedIn. And so is TikTok.

And so is BlueSky. 😲

BlueSky's big claim is that they're "decentralized" with "no algorithm". And yeah, technically, ironically, everything's an algorithm, but I'm not well-actuallying that word. Their current default feed algorithm is not The Algorithm; it lets you see all the posts from all your friends and that's great. It also lets you block at will, and won't shove spam on your feed, or shadow-ban your friends' political posts. It's not evil (yet). It's fine.

But. It's not decentralized. #BlueSky is a centralized corporate app, running a theoretically-decentralized network protocol that currently has only one (1) active node on the network: BlueSky. The other minor members of the ATP network are just piggybacking on BlueSky's 13 million captive users for auth and reach.

It (allegedly?) uses #ATProtocol to pass messages between its edge nodes. But all its central features are still centralized, and the protocol allows "reach" to be centrally managed separately from "speech" (to enable centralized blocking, and goosing and filtering in various feeds), and the protocol isn't even fully implemented as designed.

For example, ATP allows for "DID"s for identity portability, so if you later want to switch to a hypothetical GreenSky competitor, you won't lose your followers and blocklist and post history.

But the actual BlueSky app does not implement DIDs. It's called "did-placeholder" on their github. It's a stub. It's TBD. It's not a feature, it's a feature request.

And guess who just bought a seat on BlueSky's board with a $15M Series A round? That's right, a crypto vulture named Blockchain Capital.

Their general partner Kinjal Shah -- whose cryptocurrency-fueled career has careened from Bitcoin to NFTs to DAOs to VC -- is now on the BlueSky board, and methinks the press release doth protest too much when it defensively claims, with just a pinky promise, "the Bluesky app and the AT Protocol do not use blockchains or cryptocurrency, and we will not hyperfinancialize the social experience (through tokens, crypto trading, NFTs, etc.)."

Go ahead and enjoy BlueSky. It's better than Facebook. It's easier than Mastodon. It's sassier than TikTok. It's not motherfucking Xitter. But it's not decentralized.

links:

jwz.org/blog/2024/10/bluesky-n…

bsky.social/about/blog/10-24-2…

github.com/did-method-plc/did-…

Bluesky Announces Series A to Grow Network of 13M+ Users - Bluesky

Bluesky now exceeds 13 million users, the AT Protocol developer ecosystem continues to grow, and we’ve shipped highly requested features like direct messages and video.

^Bluesky

I didn't think that they were privacy respecting in the first place lol

They've always looked sketchy to me

It's not someone giving someone else money. This isn't a loan or a donation.

Bluesky are (partially) selling themselves to Blockchain Capital, that's why there is someone from Blockchain Capital on Bluesky's board now.

Selling your company to VCs tends to lead to enshittification because VCs usually want lots of profits and growth, even if it's unsustainable in the long term. There's an example of something similar happening here: waxy.org/2024/01/the-quiet-dea…

The Quiet Death of Ello's Big Dreams - Waxy.org

Ello launched in 2014 with big dreams, but the artsy social network suddenly shut down last year, deleting nine years of posts without warning. What happened?

^{Andy Baio (Waxy.org)}