@glyph @jwz

Mastodon was being sold as twitter-like. It didn't have important features that were mostly used by black users (like quote tweets). It also had a lot of "well, actually" folks who were trying to police culture.

I am not seeing as much culture policing as I was seeing when I first joined, probably because there are not large influxes of users, yes?

@glyph Well, she's funded by Jack Dorsey, who's deeply in bed with Saudi Prince Bonesaw, for a start.

If you support Blue Sky, you support Dorsey, Musk, Trump and the rest of the fascists, TESCREAL lunatics and cryptogrifters. They are all the same fuckin' octopus. https://jwz.org/b/ykgp

@jwz I'm not drawing an equivalence; none of these are straight lines. But if we wanted to say material support for fascism disqualifies a protocol from being worth learning from, Bluesky is _taking_ money from fascists to do (maybe good?) stuff, but Mastodon _gave_ a big in-kind software labor donation to help get Truth Social and Gab off the ground. Arguably the Bluesky approach is savvier.

Everybody needs resources and the fascists are somehow the ones who have all the resources right now.

I kinda think you could make a similar argument about pretty much every single significant FOSS project, though.

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members
https://www.apache.org/foundation/sponsors
https://www.debian.org/partners/

Etc

@jwz @glyph

@JessTheUnstill @glyph If the "you" in that sentence implies that I, jwz, could make the argument that "Debian is equivalently complicit in the rise of fascism as Blue Sky"... No. No I fucking could not.

"And yet you use an iPhone, interesting."

@jwz @JessTheUnstill Just for the sake of argument, let's assume that Bluesky is an overt con job, grifting fascist dummies out of millions to divert funding to a project of building a robust public social media substrate. (Forget about the tech for the moment, whether the specific choices they've made have worked toward this end or not.)

Have they yet generated any *returns* for fascists that would disprove this, at least at the level of intent? Is there any indication they will do so?

@jwz @JessTheUnstill I think that funding sources can easily corrupt. I think we should be circumspect. There's a reason I'm having this conversation here rather than there, and a reason why I spent my entire Sunday getting yelled at by Mike Masnick, like a dumbass. But also, if we want to condemn the entire effort as irredeemably 100% no-nuance evil, I'd want to see that it's meaningfully capitulated on its stated goals. That seems quite murky to me; there's a lot of countervailing evidence.

@jwz @JessTheUnstill And sure, the fascists have invested on their own sincere belief that it *will* generate outsize returns for them, but also, the fascists are not particularly good at believing true things or making good decisions. they're fascists, bad beliefs and bad decisions are their whole deal

It doesn't have to make money to provide value.

See: Twitter

@glyph @jwz

@JessTheUnstill @jwz sure, I'd also accept some non-monetary return as evidence of this. Maybe I could even accept that the creation of Bluesky as a honeypot for left/liberal discourse, so that it may be more easily eventually monitored, enclosed, and destroyed, is a huge risk. But it's still a hypothetical *future* risk, not a *current* return. One that they earnestly seem to be trying to hedge against, and I think it's interesting to explore if that might work.

@JessTheUnstill @jwz Keep in mind that the claim in question is not "should we switch to bluesky", but whether I should even consider writing about how it works, because "anything I write would give it oxygen".

(I am flattered by the idea that I could even remotely affect Bluesky's billion-dollar trajectory, I can barely convince one person to give me a dollar every few months.)

@JessTheUnstill @jwz That is also part of my calculus here, I don't have the ear of Joe Rogan's audience to convince millions how to spend their time online, the most likely influence I could have would be an ActivityPub developer reading my analysis and integrating a feature or two from ATproto. Even if I were King of ActivityPub somehow, ActivityPub is the insurgent here and has much less room to be picky about its tactics. Generously all of fedi is still like 1/5 the size of bsky.

@glyph @JessTheUnstill As for "but I'm not Joe Rogan, nobody cares about what I have to say" -- my primary effort on fighting fascism is shitposting and making up funny drink special names. We all do what we can.

@jwz @JessTheUnstill Everyone keeps talking about needing a Joe Rogan of the Left but have we even considered that we already *have* a Joe Rogan of a radius of a few blocks around Folsom and Harrison? Makes you think.

Anyway I don't think we can completely align on this particular question but I definitely respect your view here. I hope we can end up in a better place in a few years… somehow.