🦋 Bluesky Social

The social network Bluesky has, for some 27 million users, become a viable replacement for Elon Musk’s X. According to a report last week about a new funding round, the public benefit corporation may soon be valued at $700 million.

However, many Bluesky users are nervous about its future, given its venture-capital backing, and seeing how billionaires such as Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have demonstrated their ability to reshape their platforms with impunity.

So an unusual coalition has assembled to billionaire-proof Bluesky’s underlying technology, to ensure that — even if Bluesky itself were to end up under an oligarch’s control — users would be able to easily jump ship and take their connections and data with them to other social networks. Part of the project involves stimulating the creation of those other networks, which could move past Twitter-clone territory to take on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

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The campaign aims to raise $30 million over three years, with an immediate goal of $4 million. The money would be used to establish a public-interest foundation that would govern the evolution of the AT Protocol, fund developers who want to build platforms that can run on the protocol, and gradually build out infrastructure that those platforms could use.

“It is an unusual thing in the sense that infrastructure, and technical infrastructure particularly, is possibly the least glamorous thing you could be talking to people about — and as a consequence famously impossible to raise funds for,” said technologist Robin Berjon, one of the “custodians” of the project. “At the same time, we have these luminaries and famous people who are really excited about it. Bringing the two together is quite novel. I’m very excited to see it pan out.”

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In terms of building out new AT Protocol infrastructure, Free Our Feeds will first focus on a second relay — the mechanism that lets the network know when a user posts something, thus enabling things like feeds and view counts. At the moment, Bluesky controls the only AT Protocol relay. “Because that’s a point of concentrated power, that’s a high priority for us,” said Berjon.

If it raises sufficient funding, the project would then move on to tasks such as operating users’ data repositories, known as “personal data servers” in the AT Protocol.

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Berjon, a former vice-president of data governance at the New York Times, also said there may be scope for “building bridges” between parts of the AT Protocol and the ActivityPub protocol that is used by Mastodon and Meta’s Threads — even if the two rival protocols never quite merge.

Ultimately, the aim is to make it easy for developers to set up alternatives to legacy social networks, and perhaps even new kinds of social networks.

https://bsky.app/profile/freeourfeeds.com/post/3lfmvqip7zk2v

tldr, it's a new foundation launching with an open letter signed by:

Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia

Shoshana Zuboff, Professor Emerita, Harvard Business School and author of ‘The Age of Surveillance Capitalism’

Mark Ruffalo, Actor

Alex Winter, Actor and filmmaker

Audrey Tang, Former Minister of Digital Affairs, Taiwan

Roger McNamee, Businessman and author of ‘Zucked’

Brian Eno, Musician

Carole Cadwalladr, Investigative journalist

Cory Doctorow, Blogger and journalist

Akilah Hughes, Writer and comedian

Sebastian Soriano, Former Chairman, Arcep

Rosie Boycott, Member, UK House of Lords

Alexandra Geese, Member of the European Parliament, Greens/EFA

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Bluesky has expressed a clear interest in public governance of the protocol they have developed. We are establishing a Foundation to help steward this process, to ensure that the AT Protocol remains capture-resistant and is instead governed in line with a thriving public interest and open community.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24191471

Disinformation similar to the pro-Russian "Matryoshka" campaign is emerging on Bluesky, using deepfakes and fake profiles to spread pro-Russian messages, prompting calls for more proactive action from the platform.

Bluesky is in the final stages of raising new funding led by Bain Capital Ventures, which would value the social media company at around $700 million, according to three sources familiar with the deal.

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Bluesky officially launched less than a year ago with 3 million users and grew to 25.9 million users in 2024, the company said. Nearly half of those new users were added during the last month and a half of the year after Donald Trump won the US presidential election and some X users fled the platform owned by Trump supporter Elon Musk.

Bluesky last raised a $15 million Series A round in 2024 and an $8 million seed round in 2023. It's unclear how much capital Bluesky is raising in this new round, which is still being finalized, and terms could change.

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The new funding could put pressure on Bluesky to figure out how to make money. The service still has no ads, and Bluesky said in 2023 that it doesn't want to rely on advertising to sustain its business.

Ever since the election, there has been a large influx of disaffected Twitter users unhappy with Elon Musk's involvement in the Trump administration. I'd be fine with that if not for the fact that they follow back everyone who follows them, including scammers, spammers, and various other bad actors.

The worst example of this is an account called "KamallaDreams," which has over 110k followers and regularly posts racists memes.

This one is ironic considering Kamala Harris' mom is Indian.

Credit to brendelbored.bsky.social for surfacing this.

Now, obvious engagement bait gets enough likes to reach the various trending feeds that don't actively filter them out.

We’ve dug into the nerdy details of how Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky compare, but given this recent momentum it’s important to clear up some questions for new Bluesky users, and what this new approach to the social web really means for how you connect with people online.

Note that Bluesky is still in an early stage, and many big changes are anticipated from the project. Answers here are accurate as of the time of writing, and will indicate the company’s future plans where possible.

• Is Bluesky just another Twitter?
• How is Bluesky for privacy?
• How do I find people to follow?
• Is Bluesky in the fediverse?
• Is the Bluesky network decentralized?
• How does Bluesky make money?
• How does moderation work?

Over the past few months, traffic to the site formerly known as Twitter has taken a nosedive as competitors like Bluesky and Threads continue to bring in more and more users.

According to the traffic-estimating service Similarweb, visits to the Elon Musk-owned social network now known as X have plummeted over the past three months.

Social networking startup and X competitor Bluesky is working on subscriptions. The company first announced plans to develop a new revenue stream based on

Bluesky has blown up this year thanks to a vibrant community of posters, user customization choices, and a decentralized protocol that doesn't lock users

Bluesky has seen massive growth in the weeks following the US election. As of Tuesday, there are 24 million users on the social media platform. With great engagement comes great responsibility, which means Bluesky CEO Jay Graber has to do a lot to keep her promise to not “enshittify” the platform with ads while still funding its explosive growth.

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Enshittification, as its known, generally comes as social media platforms expand and need to squeeze money out of users in order to please investors and keep the lights on. Since Bluesky doesn’t plan to run ads, WIRED senior writer Kate Knibbs asked, how does Bluesky plan to make money? “Subscriptions are the first step,” Graber said, referring to a plan to have users pay a regular fee for the ability to upload higher-quality video, for example, or access certain customization features.

Impersonators, harmful content and AI scraping are up, too