Mastodon: @73ms@infosec.exchange
They captured some hype but nowadays you often see people complain that the userbase isn’t diverse and that all they talk about is US politics, there’s lots of dormant accounts and the active user statistics have been looking pretty bleak since early 2025.
Assuming they don’t actually have 100M in funding already secured (which i doubt) I think there’s some doubt over how long they’ll actually be able to continue operating this way.
Blacksky does not fundamentally change the situation. They’ve got a yearly budget in excess of $100,000 and roughly 0.01% of the users. Bluesky can make all those users completely disappear from the other 99.99% with the press of a button and in the case of Link they did exactly that.
As for the “let’s trust the Bluesky team” idea, that’s of course exactly what got everyone into this mess with Twitter. The leadership can change. The investors can push them to do what they want no matter how great people the public facing team may seem to be (and honestly some of the things they’ve done has not inspired trust).
This is yet another version of the ridiculous “we’re decentralized in theory so it doesn’t matter that we aren’t in practice” argument which the article does address. In practice it is chained because they are in complete control of the real-world use of it.
People are even worried about Google’s control over Android recently and Google has much less power over AOSP than Bluesky Corp. has over ATproto.
What is swivel-eyed is believing that Venture Capitalists won’t do the thing they’ve historically always done in the past when they’re in control.
It obviously matters whether the data and control is mostly in one company’s hands, not just whether it is in “many repositories”.
Not much substance to your comment… do you agree with it?
You’re right that the issue isn’t just trusting a third party in general, that’s how it is for most users on Lemmy or Mastodon too.
The difference isn’t whether you personally run a server. It’s whether the network depends on a single company.
Bluesky operating basically all of the infrastructure on that network means:
Here on Lemmy there is no single company that has all that power. If your admin goes bad there are real options to move to and the network will still exist even if they shut their service down. You also have much more leverage over here because you have those options and no operator is drawing in tens or hundreds of millions from investors who get to make the decisions.
yeah I’m not sure Upscrolled is going to be an improvement over Tik Tok in the long run in any way. Not open source or federated, probably will be even easier for Trump-supporting billionaires to buy it than TT for example. Supporting Loops makes much more sense.
You could also implement features that reduce the addictivity as the EU might be demanding of Tik Tok in the future. When it’s a federated open source platform with no profit motive that’s going to be something much more easy to get in.
He publicly distanced himself but Bluesky’s ownership is very opaque and they do dishonest PR very well so I would not be at all surprised if Dorsey still owns a part of it.
lol, how is it not a massive echo chamber when that has been the constant complaint in countless articles that keep getting made fun of instead of being taken seriously on Bluesky.
I’ve run into people like that on Bluesky much more than on the fediverse. They do of course exist on both.
dansup is Canadian. I guess it makes sense to get the iPhone app up on the store first if you’re trying to get users from the US market where people are moving away from TT currently.
You can say that but it’s entirely different from bringing up deliberately pointing the camera of a device at the jury. And again, there was nothing about them looking at something in particular or anything suggesting the intent to film. As I said it is also very easy to know if the camera is activated.
and do the released facts say here someone was pointing a camera at the jury and the scolding happened as a result of that or are you just inventing a hypothetical with nothing to do with what is being discussed?
I don’t know if it was intentional marketing but it does have that effect and was kinda pointless. I assume people have camera phones in the courtroom with them too but possessing a device that can record doesn’t mean you intend to do it and I doubt Meta has tampered with their glasses so if they were to do that it would be noticeable thanks to the recording LED…
Sounds like the worst thing you could do, better to limit these kinds of defederation wars instead of escalating them even further.
This seems like your standard open core/dual licensing, CLA controlled BS where open source is indeed treated like an inconvenience… Perhaps with more obfuscation than on average. Probably not really adding requirements on top of AGPL as such but they seem to be offering multiple releases under a more restrictive license either because they have the rights so they can do dual licensing or they keep certain components proprietary and don’t offer those with the team/community editions.
So yeah, probably within their legal rights and I assume there is still a codebase/release that you can use under the terms of the AGPL but they do seem to be looking for ways to make it be used as little as possible.
I could be wrong if the AGPL and other open source parts aren’t enough for actually compiling a functional version of this but this is what it mostly looks like to me.
which conditions on top of AGPL are they adding?
I don’t think you’re even talking about the points the article makes… You probably wouldn’t want them selling your data either but this is more about avoiding the kind of fate Twitter had.