Can you imagine Mastodon raising 100 MILLION dollars from a crypto VC fund and failing to disclose it... for a full year? No I can't either.

And from their actual press release: "The Atmosphere currently contains about 20 billion public records—the posts, likes, comments and other interactions that bring the ecosystem to life. It's an astonishing collection of what open social infrastructure makes possible."

https://bsky.social/about/blog/03-19-2026-series-b

How I read it: data harvesting at its finest 💁‍♀️

#Bluesky

Bluesky's 2025 $100M Series B Lays Foundation for Open Social Web - Bluesky

In April 2025, Bluesky raised $100 million in Series B funding led by Bain Capital Crypto. Since our Series A, we've grown from 13 million to over 43 million global users.

Bluesky
@_elena are you aware that any record is public on atproto and checkable on pds.ls? there's nothing new .....
@mat sure but it's the language they used that creeped me out - it's like they are using this as a selling point for VCs to say: here, collect all these data
@_elena permissive data/spaces is coming this year, and you can use E2EE messaging germ using your pds. if you want to delete any data, you can just connect to pds.ls and delete any record you want (e.g. all your likes, comments, etc)

@mat @_elena

if you post a public message, someone can ingest that message. there's no protection in what you're citing

(for the record, no such protection on public mastodon messages either)

you're claiming a protection that does not exist

bluesky is a capitalist endeavour funded by cryptobros, while mastodon is not. bluesky has a financial incentive to do quiet seedy things behind the scenes with your data mastodon does not. any secrecy like elena cites is a warning you should heed

@benroyce @mat tangentially related but I'm beginning to think that maybe the whole point of the ATmosphere being open is to find a way to capture billions of data points for profiling / monetization purposes? I know everything is public here too, but the language of their press release gave me the creeps.

I may start referring to them as Blue$ky and the ATmo$phere.

I mean what's the draw otherwise for VCs and crypto bros?

@_elena @mat

if a message is public, it's public. people need to understand anyone can scrape you, on any protocol

but there is a difference between the fediverse which has no financial motivations, and bluesky, which does have creepy financial motivations. they can, and will, eventually, simply as a matter of the inevitable financial imperative of seedy cryptobro creeps, to do things with your data *on the inside*

(private messages, linking it with data in other plutocrat silos, etc)

Isn't there also something about the idea of the ATProto ID that it should follow you across the web, making tracking across services easier? On the fediverse we have accounts that are separate, and tracking the same user across the internet remains a significant challenge.

This seems to me to be the real problem BS sought to solve.
@benroyce @_elena @mat

@sab @_elena @mat

Yup

"I want to post some shit on social media with an anime profile picture" is perfectly cromulent and so who gives a fuck about DID

The same with the "your messages are portable!" bit the bluesky cringe crew keep enthusing about

Oh yeah, the meme I posted about the Oppenheimer movie 2 years ago is an extremely important record I must preserve for all posterity

2 weeks later, no one gives a shit about your posts

Social media is ephemeral nonsense, not a doctoral thesis

@benroyce atproto is way more than a protocol for microblogging. messages aren't the only data our pds stores. it can log all the movies/tvshows we watched, all of our blogs, music history, rss feeds, encrypted messages, games, etc can be stored out there

I think you're criticizing atproto without being aware of how powerful it is. bluesky is just a brick of atproto, just like mastodon is just a brick of activitypub

@sab @_elena

@mat @sab @_elena

You sound like a cryptobro with your endless enthusiasm for an exciting future while utterly ignoring the pathetic present. Correct: mastodon is just one brick... in an entire house. While bluesky is one brick... oh wait it's the only brick, there's no house, there's no decentralized reality. Just endless cryptobro style salesmanship

@benroyce I'm only talking about the protocol since the beginning, nothing of what I'm saying is about crypto

@sab @_elena

@mat @sab @_elena

The way crypto works is people fall for this exciting salesmanship of an exciting future and then... nothing

Bluesky was started by, is run by, is funded by, and owned by, cryptobros

So they deploy the same bullshit con job

"It's decentralized!"

Except it isn't

Lies and a seedy sales job, and unfortunately lots of dum dums fall for it

Who trusts this endless hype shit? Where does it lead?

To a rugpull

@benroyce @mat @sab @_elena
I wonder if anyone checked proton wallet. What’s it for, really?
I think this is crucial for understanding what they're trying to do with Bluesky. It's not necessarily about monetizing microblogging per se, but about getting DIDs on every platform all over the web. Whether they'll succeed is beyond the point - I pray they won't. But if they do it's very easy to see the monetizing potential.
@mat @benroyce @_elena

@sab very interesting, I haven't thought about that. it's pretty invisible for any user

@benroyce @_elena