Yeah, I do think Doctorow has missed the mark here. @tante put it better than I could:

It’s trying to raise money (at least 4 Mio and up to 30 Mio USD) for ATProto (the protocol at the core of Bluesky) so “the community” can standardize the thing and “build stuff”. Plus the project wants to run a second “Relay” (which is the chokepoint that centralizes Bluesky at the moment). Edit/Addition: The fact that just running another Relay leads to costs in the millions should make people wonder if this is the right approach for a better social media infrastructure that does not rely on big organizations.

Okay, but isn’t that what the Bluesky Public Benefit Corporation (the corporation that owns Bluesky and employs the people working on the ATproto protocol) wanted to enable/do? They already got millions in funding (some from sketchy Blockchain companies). Now some diffuse external entity collects more from random people, from “the community”. And not a bit but a lot more. What do the people donating money get for their investment? Stake in the Bluesky corporation? [Checks notes] Nope. Nothing.

The 9 custodians consist of a whole bunch of AI people, some Mozilla folks (same thing) and the director of the Social Web foundation. […]

It’s just presented in a weird way with a whole lot of “give us a lot of money and we’ll make amazing stuff happen” and in the end a bunch of AI grifters get some startups “that build upon AT proto” funded.

Also if you mess the colour filters, you still only get porn but different porn??? And on some if you select one colour, select another and go back there’ll be more results, still only porn???

My question is why doesn’t the PeetTube logo show up at all? If you turn safe search on, or change any of the letters to capitals (“peertube logO”) it’s nothing but the logo.

You couldn’t waterboard a confession out of me about getting surgery to improve my sexual performance and this guy goes straight to social media about it.

It’s just porn for whatever reason.

PeerTube (don’t duckduckgo “peertube logo” with safe search off)

Seaford, I’d recommend just blocking badger and moving on. Hexbearers don’t really respect the concept of civility and have much more patience for this inane nattering than you ever will.

Non-Roman Romania

In the ActivityPub JSON for this post, there is no indication that this field contains MarkDown. If anything, it says the opposite, it says it contains HTML. It’s therefore not unreasonable for other platforms to render it as such.

Actually, the name property is explicitly plain text, it shouldn’t contain any type of markup, whether that be markdown or HTML.

I actually remember thinking once or twice that I hadn’t seen you in a while, glad to have you back <3

Welcome back, my guy.

Hey, those councils won’t be skint when we, *checks notes*, hand over several billion £ to American big tech.

The PM didn’t under-sell AI’s potential

I love how the it isn’t even considered that he over-sold AI’s potential. Can’t wait for roads to be closed for weeks because the AI mistook a puddle for a pothole.

I’m sorry, but I fail to see the relevance of this not-for-profit vs for-profit diatribe. If you mean that things like culture and structures matter more than the a project’s legal status, then I agree, but unless you’re going to point to particular issues you have with Mastodon’s then, again, I fail to see the relevance. The things Mastodon (the company) is seeking to improve are highly technical and specialised, where people working on them need good cross-disciplinary knowledge and experience, and understandably demand a high wage.

Did you mean to link to this BBC article?

Science and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle told the BBC there was no reason why the UK could not create tech companies on the same scale as Google, Amazon, and Apple.

‘It’s a shame that the torment nexus isn’t British.’ We should be talking about breaking these companies up, not putting a Rule Britannia spin on cyberpunk.

Surprised to see you of all people question why a project needs money to pay for things.

What for?

They said what for in the previous section, improving Mastodon’s “usability, discoverability, and trust & safety”. They tried to fundraise for a head of trust and safety last month, but failed. My impression is this is them trying to raise general donations to the project to pay for things like this, instead of individual campaigns for individual things.

Is the infrastructure being provided by the companies counted as part of this budget?

I thinks so, given the previous paragraph links to their sponsor page and says as such.

I haven’t seen anyone else mention this, but it’s basically become impossible to trust YouTube music compilations anymore. Like YT recommended me this and I don’t understand how music can make me feel less, but it does.

You’d think a gammon would appreciate people that don’t eat meat.

Not OP, but the leadership has just shown themselves to be unable to run the platform how users want. They’re refusing to ban serial harasser Jesse Singal. Its head of trust and safety banned a bot and its creator because the bot pointed out that they liked a porn post on their work account for ‘harassment’. Bear in mind the entire point of Bluesky is for all this info to be public and easily accessible.