#Bluesky continues to be entirely non-responsive to the numerous security vulnerabilities I've reported to them, so I spent the evening writing up a nice README and a framework with exploit modules, and just made it all public.
To anyone thinking about joining BlueSky, especially artists: everything you post is sent to a third party for AI labeling.
BlueSky uses AI to label content for moderation, and to do that they use a company called https://thehive.ai. If you look through their privacy policy, you will see that they can use content sent to them to train models for all their services, which include generative AI for both text and images.
If Jack Dorsey & Elon Musk (who are friends) just wanted to run a MAGA site full of fascists, they could have just bought Parler & saved themselves approx 43.999 billion dollars.
What they wanted was to cripple the sad remnants of investigative journalism, and the political left, which successfully used Twitter for political organizing, activism & messaging throughout the Trump regime.
Why would anyone who cares about either of these things go to Jack's #Bluesky project.
I've been on BlueSky for 10 minutes and... (An Essay)
I get it now. I used to be like "Why can't people just stop using Twitter/Instagram/WhateverTheFuck? If they need social media, why can't they just use Mastodon? Why doesn't Pixelfed get more users? It's literally the same UI".
But I get it. I've been on BlueSky for what? 10 minutes? And I can feel my brain chemistry changing. Mastodon is a coffee shop. It doles out caffeine. You still get the little dopamine hit when you get notifications, you get that kind of substitute for human interaction that feels nice. But Twitter and BlueSky and Instagram and these apps from companies with access to inordinate amounts of data to build algorithms designed by psychologists to literally be As Addicting as Possible? These apps are dealing meth. But they've pressed it like ecstasy and made it cute. They've made it socially acceptable. But let me tell you something.
Ever since I logged onto BlueSky, I've been thinking about it. I don't think about Mastodon all day. "Oh my god what should I post next? What will get me followers? Would this be funny? Is this on brand?" I don't think about it. I come here because I have interactions with people without the pretext that they're engaging with me to get engagement in return. Because sometimes in my life I feel isolated and because this substitute for human interaction feels nice.
I thought I'd get BlueSky (despite their horrifying privacy policy - more on that later) because there are some Things Going On that make me need to get a little more serious about making money. But fuck, if this is the only way? I'm taking a vow of poverty, or getting a day job.
Because then there's their privacy policy. Access to websites you visit before and after, identifying information about your device, purchases you make, and it goes on. But even that level of invasive access should give us pause, right? I have a lot of things set up on my computer that mitigate some of that access, but then let's think about how we give the app access to our photos and videos (all of them, not just what we post in the moment), our device's camera and microphone (not just while we're using it) and so on. And then think about how our society grooms us to believe (and maybe in some circumstances this belief is true) that we need these sites for access, for engagement, to make money.
The price of not working in a warehouse is every piece of information we can reasonably gather about you to use and sell however we please, for whatever purpose, indefinitely, and it never expires and we don't pay you for it.
This is exploitation and my ancestry makes me pause, horrified, at what this information will eventually come back and do to us when inevitably the wrong person/group gets ahold of it. And that's pretending like we even know who has our data and what they're doing with it, right? Because we don't know. We really don't. Call me paranoid, say that I shouldn't worry if I have nothing to hide, give me all of the excuses you've been programmed to give about why we should not worry about a surveillance state that we pay for. Then come online and rant about how dangerous governments are and fail to see the irony in it all.
And I'm a hypocrite. I bought in, too. For personal gain. After criticizing others for years for doing the same thing. It's true. But the interesting side effect is that I've gained so much insight into why we're so addicted to sensationalism, why we're so addicted to these sites, why we're so unwell in general. The kinds of things my feed is inundated with, especially since I haven't curated it yet and it's showing me what it wants to? My god. We cannot have a healthy society when this is what we're consuming all day every day. There is no way to be a healthy person, I believe, when consuming this all day every day.
So anyways. As always, perhaps a bit sanctimonious. But I'm a little dumbfounded at the experience of all of this after years off of corporate social.
Bluesky, a decentralized Twitter-like social network, is pausing new signups “temporarily” to try and resolve performance issues it’s been experiencing after Twitter introduced limits on the amount of tweets you can see in a day. Even though you still need an invite code to be able to join Bluesky, it seems that the influx...
so on #Bluesky, rather than going with the well-documented and defined webfinger protocol, behind the .well-known directory, decided to make their own shit for verifying domains via HTTP.
thus, somebody took the S3 bucket name "xrpc" and now is s3.amazonaws.com on the platform
Are there incentives to convert Mastodonians over to #BlueSky? I feel like I walked onto a used car lot this morning. Please stop evangelizing another Jack Dorsey product. We know where to find it. If you love it, good for you. And hey, we’ll see you on your return trip when he sells it to one of his billionaire libertarian friends!
There's a lot of misinformation circulating that obscures or softens Jack Dorsey's relationship to Bluesky, Bluesky to Twitter, &/or Dorsey to Musk/Twitter.
On Dec 11, 2019, Dorsey announced on Twitter that he'd started Bluesky as part of Twitter, to serve Twitter, & funded by Twitter $, "to develop an open & decentralized standard for social media." (One already existed. Clearly the goal was one he controlled.)
"The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this [Bluesky] standard."
Jack Dorsey is furious that #Bluesky has attracted "very very common" people. He also doesn't like the idea of moderation tools facilitating the banning of racists.
All these tech billionaires are like a version of the movie Big, in which a pre-adolescent boy wakes up in the body of an aging Howard Hughes. Or Colonel Kurtz. Or a sardine. #JackDorsey
"I’m not on Mastodon because there’s nobody there, there’s not enough users to make it succeed, my whole community is on Twitter and don’t want to migrate and… hey… I now have a #Bluesky account! Please follow me on Bluesky, it’s very cool, it belongs to a billionaire but is decentralised. Or at least, the billionaire promises us it will be, which is cool."
Bluesky’s having a bit of a moderation crisis, which got me thinking about the ways in which the major Twitter clones approach moderation:
#Bluesky has libertarian “free speech at all costs” moderation. #Threads has puritan neoliberal top-down moderation. #Twitter has Nazis-to-the-front anti-moderation. #Mastodon has a server covenant and vote-with-your-feet, accountable community moderation.
The first three are run by tech-bro billionaires. The latter is not. And it shows.
And there it is, monetization before decentralization. #Bluesky
They're selling domains. I knew it.
3:59 . a Post Bluesky @bsky.app • 1h We raised an $8M seed round led by Neo, with participation from other seasoned allies who want to help us realize our vision of an open commons for public conversation. With this funding, we can expand our team, manage increasing ops & infra costs, and grow the AT Protocol ecosystem & Bluesky app.
Bluesky @bsky.app • 1h We're excited to share our first paid service! We're partnering with Namecheap to provide easy custom domain management. With this, you can easily set a custom domain as your Bluesky handle and much more. Simply navigate to account.bsky.app to get started. ® Domains & Support @aliceshay@aliceshay social $11.98 @aliceshay.com $14.58 @aliceshay.net $16.98 PASt STO @aliceshay.cloud $9.98 Renews at 526 98/vr Purchase and Manage Domains Directly Through Bluesky https://blueskyweb.xyz/blog/7-05-2. We're excited to announce a new feature that allows users to seamles...
Reading about #bluesky, it's impressive to me how little Jack has learned.
As somebody who (briefly) worked at Twitter on anti-abuse, the place is a goldmine of lessons on fucked-up behavior. And the CEO comes out of the cryptocurrency space, which also has a rich history of garbage people run wild.
But instead of something that applies any of that, they have apparently produced the same sort of tired neoliberal marketplace-of-ideas horseshit product that Twitter was to start.
OK this will probably be an unpopular opinion, but regarding the #bluesky#bridge and whether it's ok to be opt-out... For me the discussion doesn't make much sense because this is how fedi works. When you enable federation, your posts are federated to any activitypub-supporting server, unless you opt-out by fediblocking. Do you approve all of these servers? Do you agree with their ToS? Have you read the ToS of all of them, or know where they belong to? No. I know this might make you insecure about your data, but it's better to be honest than create a false impression of control, which then feels attacked when Threads or Bluesky appear. I understand that somebody may not want their content appearing in Zuckerberg's or Dorsey's platform. But they could already be running an AP server that's federated to your server, and you will never know. This is what we signed up for, adopting an open protocol and using software that federates with everyone as the default. And tbh I like it this way - an opt-in federation would be a disaster for smaller servers, it would practically be impossible to federate. By using an AP-enabled server, I'm telling everyone that it's ok to interact with my content - unless I actively block them. It doesn't include an agreement for how or from whom this content will be used. The fact that both servers run AP-compatible software is only a technicality. So if Bluesky implemented AP support it would suddenly be ok that interacting with their users would be opt-out, like with every AP server?
Don't get me wrong, I understand that everyone wants to be in control of their social circle, and I support you if you want to block Threads or Bluesky bridges. But I don't really see how it's unethical to have a bridge that is opt-out, just like any other AP-server. Our only "agreement" is using an open protocol, not any common ToS. ActivityPub is not ethically superior by definition, anyone can adopt it, and we have the right to block them, and this is all by design, it's not a different corner of the internet, everyone in the internet can use the protocol and see/display your public content. The drama every time some server does basically what we allowed them to do and we don't like it, is getting really old quickly. It doesn't "protect" fedi, it only makes it hostile and boring. If you're concerned about who sees your content, please run a followers-only account and control your followers. Running a public account in an openly federated platform and then getting angry when you don't agree with every single server you're federating with is a recipe to make sure you'll be angry for years to come.
#Barcelona, #Meta's Twitter competitor, will be ready by summer.
And lest you believe #ActivityPub integration was just some rumour, think again. In a slide, Meta confirms that Barcelona will indeed be decentralized and will be compatible with Mastodon.
Everyone who thought that AT protocol would easily win over ActivityPub, and that #Bluesky would kill Mastodon just because a few influencers joined doesn't understand the sheer marketing power and pull that Meta has at its disposal.
But believe me, I'm not exactly cheering on Meta here. Generally, where Meta goes, shenanigans happen. I simply don't think Meta is capable of releasing a product without dark patterns.
Nevertheless, I don't think the Fediverse is even close to preparing for what will happen once Barcelona starts federating.
Bluesky temporarily halts sign-ups because so many people are joining from Twitter (www.theverge.com)
Bluesky, a decentralized Twitter-like social network, is pausing new signups “temporarily” to try and resolve performance issues it’s been experiencing after Twitter introduced limits on the amount of tweets you can see in a day. Even though you still need an invite code to be able to join Bluesky, it seems that the influx...