They literally owe money to *checks notes... Blockchain Capital. A bunch of fucking cryptobros venture capital firm.

Enshittification is coming, people are stupid for falling for this again. I'm sick of fucking hearing about how all-volunteer created & funded Mastodon isn't as slick as the fucking venture capital funded Bluesky. "It's too hard to use!" Wah, go cry about it into a corporate teat some more, sucker.

Much like lemmy, my mastodon feed and general engagement has started to fizzle out. I’m seeing people I used to follow on mastodon no longer active, but now on Bluesky. 🤷‍♂️

can we "use" mastodon if we already have lemmy accounts?

Yep. They’ve only raised $15M so far which is a modest amount by relative standards. If they paid it back right now then I would give them some breathing room for these naive, grandiose statements. Oh but then how would their staff get rich without an IPO? If they could become profitable NOW they could maybe go employee-owned and avoid selling their ass to the stock market.

Of course none of that will happen. Optimistically they will take on more investment money and then go public or get acquired by some other entity and these hippie-ass remarks from their CEO will look like what they are: pipe dreams brought on by their first blush of success. And that’s charitable. Her comments are so naive it’s plausible she’s straight up lying through her teeth right now.

Everyone in tech wants to get buy-a-house rich and quit. No one is in this for humanity.

Exactly, they're in the "growth" part of the business stage, where they get investors giving them money because of the explosion of user growth. In other words, the explosion of available eyes to put ads in front of. They're literally investing based on the growth of the user base, which is tied to how much ad-buy can be involved.

I expect subscriptions soon. I don't mind subscriptions as much as I mind advertisment honestly. Advertising is negative content for these types of services. It detracts and makes the service way less useful but subscriptions at least will fund upkeep at a greater efficiency of user per dollar than ads.

To lurkers, consider financially supporting the fediverse particukarly the homeservers you use if you aren't running your own.

And at the same time they will offer a premium plan in which there are no ads.

Since the barriers of entry on mastodon are too high for mainstream users, Bluesky is probably a good thing imo.

This is just my opinion.

There were only 50 employees in BlueSky in 2021. She was probably one of the few people that started a company out of those employees. That's what I got from her Wikipedia.

I'm gonna guess is she is liked by her coworkers, she does well in presentations.

Also bluntly, her background of being Chinese and Swiss is a good look if they plan on marketing internationally. Her age probably plays a big role. No one wants to follow a company with a CEO that's too old or too young.

See that's kind of the thing though, Ads is a broad spectrum. We can think of it as small things like the old google one blue line of text off to the side in the old days, the huge popups that force you to view them etc...

Bottom line there's a scale there.

|few and easy to ignore] ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [ Many and forces you to pay attention to them before you can reach what you came for]

and the bottom line is, far left on that spectrum, is negligable profit. If you can tune out the ads easily and just focus on the content you want... that means the advertisers aren't getting new sales/visits etc.. that they want. Which means, they will pay very little for them.

Point is, the hypothetical hope of "well when their investors ask them to make it profitable, they will just put a tiny banner in the far corner", is a no go.

I reject that you lump a commercialized platform with decentralized ones. It kind of makes me think you are full of it to begin with.

What happened to Twitter after Muskrat can't be compared to anything I have ever seen. It is a disservice to reality to try and play like Twitter was already like that. It is now purely a propaganda platform used to subvert democracy.

Reddit was way better before going corporate. You have to be a real bootlicker to think the corporation improved it. You cite some questionable reddits as proof corporate cleaned it up. I just see them commercializing the hard work of millions of people without compensation.

The Fediverse has already fulfilled it promise. While it may not be the final version of the future of decentralization, it is a great start.

I will never give my information or time to another corporate ran social media platform. They proved they are all abusive fucks aand are at war with the very users that allow their platforms to exist.