Gregory's ServerWhat's going on over at Bluesky?
Oh they fundraised and got a whole bunch of money from a blockchain investor who has money in basically ever fucked up scam you have heard of.
Great.
 27 comments
 @tante Ah ok I didn't know. I thought this would go via the shares that you put out and you basically can just set the price and then whoever buys, buys.  @DJGummikuh no, it's a private as far as I'm aware. So it can sell its shares to whoever it wants.  So it begins😬 "We’re excited to announce that we’ve raised a $15 million Series A financing led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Alumni Ventures, ...etc. In addition, we will begin developing a subscription model for features..." On the other hand: Mastodon's funding situation ain't great either which is one of the many reasons the platform isn't developing as quickly as many would like it to. 20k/month from Patreon doesn't really pay for a lot of work. Mastodon needs a lot more cash as well to clean up their code base and gain some development momentum. And "a few people pitching in a few bucks" probabtwill not get there  @tante and… I realize that this isn't causal or anything, but it can't be a good sign that @mastodonusercount has been offline for 2 weeks  @tante You can’t have it both ways though: it’s either VC money or continue to bootstrap. Are you maybe suggesting Mastodon should look for other crowdfunding avenues?  @tante a budget would help: do they need $40k a month? There’s a lot of fear that non-profits, like the Mozilla foundation, are basically unaccountable, the fact that Mastodon is not based in San Francisco helps with legitimacy.  we need to decentralize payments. an open protocol to give fiat directly from my bank to other banks. then we build APIs so that it can be automated but always within our control and easy to keep track of in our own banking apps. I think this would drastically improve the number of people that would give to FOSS projects that we regularly use. and make pay per listen, watch and read possible outside of the big middlemen/aggregators. effort on this would ripple out to all these projects.    @tante Bluesky's crypto-connections were there from the start. Their very first blog post was a Bitcoin/NFT giveaway. I think the goal from the start was to create a web3 version of Twitter, which is probably why Dorsey picked a former blockchain dev to be lead the project. That pivot-to-crypto seems inevitable.  Paul Brad Stephens & Blockchain Capital https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/bay-area-billionaire-donations-17323003.php https://www.followthecrypto.org/individuals/bart-stephens?sort=date  @tante I think I might prefer to use the not-VC-funded social network that's actually using a web standard. 😅 #fediverse for life! @tante Honestly, there isn't a social media company that isn't getting looking for funds one way or the other. Let's not forget the whole AI aspect slipping in to many of these social apps as well.  @tante I saw a bluesky dev respond to someone asking about this and they said, basically, "yeah we had some blockchain companies in the last round too, luckily being a public benefit corp will give us protection” I mean, Public Benefit Corporations *do* generally have some actual enforceable stuff (as opposed to B Corps just being a pinky swear) but that's putting a *lot* of faith in it being enough to hold off the money people. |
@tante I honestly don't know so I just plain ask - would they have had the chance to reject his funds? I don't know how this works but I would assume there are anti-discriminatory laws in place everywhere to prevent favorism in investment?