Bluesky has raised a $15m series A

bsky: @daniloc.xyz

This just in time for the weekend, so we’ll be treated to endless tirades about the satanic rites of venture capital

and why the One True Way of building a pure and decent social platform is a grumpy dude paid a terrible wage to ignore user feedback

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 (bsky.social)

bsky: @daniloc.xyz

Bluesky: we have $15m to spend

Mastodon: we have a stuffed animal

reply guys in my mentions: well actually the fediverse is WAY bigger than just mastodon, you utter fuck

Glyph

@danilo I feel like mastodon gets done dirty by these narratives, so I went to do a little perusing to see if I could offer a sunnier counterpoint, but then I found this, and what can I say but "oof" https://graphtreon.com/creator/mastodon

bsky: @daniloc.xyz

@glyph it does not look very sustainable to meeeeee

bsky: @daniloc.xyz

Yeah this is what I’m saying

It’s very much a “you have to do your homework before you get to play video games” kind of situation

Glyph (@[email protected])

@[email protected] I am still overall bullish on the Fediverse and having plushes is fine but yeah I gotta concede that the avalanche of merch posts is perhaps ill-considered given an increasingly dire sustainability situation

Mastodon (mastodon.social)

Jon

There are some six-figure donations via their new US 501c3 that don't show up there, and some grants from NLNet. So it's sustainable in terms of "keep the lights on" but yeah, still shoestring-y. To be honest though I don't know how much it matters, unless there's a leadership change they'd just waste whatever money they raised anyhow. I'm working on an update to "Mastdon: a partial history" and it's really too bad I already had a section called "The patterns continue" because ... the patterns continue to continue. Oh well.

As for Bluesky, tbh I'm somewhat surprised they couldn't find a lead with a less-awkard name for them? But, good idea closing now -- if they continue the momentum and market conditions hold they can raise more whenever they want. Not sure about their business model, but their strategy is working out well, and if they're successful they've got lots of good options.

@[email protected] @[email protected]

bsky: @daniloc.xyz

me: what if Usenet for Twitter for People Who Read Slashdot isn’t a large enough god

masto: you have no idea just how undesirable we can make this thing

bsky: @daniloc.xyz

where by “financed” they mean

“not paying market wages or in any way staffing up to meet the scale of challenge or complexity they face”

https://mastodon.social/@Gargron/113365319263963755

bsky: @daniloc.xyz

The ideological purity of constant near-insolvency is not a strategy, buds

bsky: @daniloc.xyz

Wild stuff.

bsky: @daniloc.xyz

Feel how you need to feel about VC, ~blockchain~, bsky

Mastodon remains:

- on shaky, financially unsustainable ground

- culturally moribund and quite stinky, lacking the multiracial, multicultural vibrancy it needs for relevance

- technically complex in ways that constantly leak up to the user experience

- squandering its early lead

- low velocity in its product execution

- indifferent to the needs of both users and admins

Free as in used mattress.

Tin Tvrtković

@danilo I'm also pretty frustrated with Mastodon - I thought Ruby was supposed to enable rapid development, but Masto progress seems slow as fuck?

That said, there's more nuance here. I see this as a three tiered thing:
* decentralized social networking
* Fedi itself
* Mastodon

I don't really care about Mastodon itself, I'm sure better servers are possible.
I semi-care about Fedi, it's a good idea but to me it seems like somewhat overly-complex.
Decentralized social networking is the big one.

Tin Tvrtković

@danilo So if you're crapping on Mastodon - agreed, and more power to you. But from what I know of the architecture of Bluesky, it's not a real decentralized social network (the ability to run your own PDS notwithstanding). Maybe I'm wrong though?

So to me the comparison isn't completely apples to apples.

bsky: @daniloc.xyz

@tintvrtkovic right but the number of people who care about these details is small enough to fit into a half-booked conference hotel

The technology that wins is the one that lets people have internet friends easily and reliably. Like it or not, Mastodon is pulling that cart for the fediverse and right now it’s pulling it into a ditch

Linux on the desktop for social media

Tin Tvrtković

@danilo Ok, so folks might not care about the details. But I had to leave Twitter and lost half of my friends. Moving to Bluesky doesn't fundamentally solve this issue, just punts it down the line again. Moving to a decentralized social network does.

I think folks do care about not losing a bunch of their friends in the future, or having their platform run by a fascist.

bsky: @daniloc.xyz

@tintvrtkovic I think if that were enough Mastodon would not have lost the lead to bsky so dramatically and quickly

UX and network benefits today will always trump speculative downside tomorrow

Tin Tvrtković

@danilo sure, Bluesky will probably win because money gets results really fast in the world we live in.

Still feels a lot like we're casually walking into a "... but it might work for us" meme.

Arvind Venkataramani

@tintvrtkovic @danilo money isn’t preventing Mastodon from being user-centred.

Ego, arrogance, and attachment to a vision that doesn’t match the needs of most people is.

I’m willing to bet they’ve never done a single usability test, and definitely have not tested core lifecycle journeys.

Orca 🌻 | 🎀 | 🪁 | 🏴🏳️‍⚧️

@[email protected] @[email protected] @[email protected]
Oh. I just saw a person complaining about Gargron recreating her pull request instead of accepting hers yesterday. It's ridiculous. (Mastodon team is, I mean)

https://hachyderm.io/@thisismissem/113465993207356999

Arvind Venkataramani

@Orca @tintvrtkovic @danilo @thisismissem

Yeah, just because something is open source doesn’t mean it has values and practices that serve the people it claims to serve.