So there's a tiny tiny percentage of people in my mentions right now that are accusing me of horrible things because they don't like Bluesky and I've taken money from them.

For these people, I'm not saying you have to like Bluesky's moderation practices or the decision they make for their own app, I would never say such.

These people fundamentally do not get standards, and especially web standards, and how they are made. So here's a small explanation for people.

In the standards community, there's practically a code that is we do not argue about our employers or financial supporters' corporate positions, we leave our companies at the door when we participate in writing open standards.

Sure, some of us my represent our given employers within the standards community (and there's a requirement to disclose affiliations), but there's also a bunch of us that operate entirely independently of any given company.

At the W3C, which is the home of the FedCM standard, they have what are known as Invited Experts, and the W3C enforces that they act independently and that they disclose any affiliation, especially financial.

I am an Invited Expert, that happened before Bluesky decided to fund my work. Bluesky, like them or not, are one of the few organizations that actually has the capital to fund standards work. Doing this work isn't cheap either! It's a tonne of work seeking consensus and reaching agreement to move things forwards.

Like, I'm current budgeting 30-50% of my productive time over the next year will be working on this standard.

When I first chatted with Bluesky, they were initially like "we want to do a three month freelance contract to implement FedCM for AT Protocol", and after some conversation, we settled on "no, this shouldn't be a contract but instead a grant, that allows you to be completely independent of bluesky and explicitly enables you to work across decentralized protocols, making FedCM better for everyone"

The grant is explicitly clear contractually that I am entirely independent from bluesky, like I could make a technical decision others at bluesky do not like (unlikely, but possible), and it would not affect the grant.

It explicitly requires me to work across protocols.