Mastodawn

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

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Elena Rossini ⁂2d ago

Mike Masnick, who sits on the board of #Bluesky, claims the team was too busy to announce the series B funding (see screenshot).

But something is fishy.

Even the VC firm - Bain Capital Crypto - isn't listing Bluesky anywhere on their website: https://baincapitalcrypto.com/portfolio/

Why the mystery? Was Bluesky afraid of a public backlash & asked to keep the information under wraps?

Sorry if I keep repeating myself but I will forever be skeptical of Bluesky and think of the tale of the scorpion and the frog.

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Michael Santaly 2d ago

@_elena Yea. I’m hopefully that projects like Blacksky can completely break free of Bluesky, but being ignorant of how the tech works I worry there’s some kind of rug pull to come

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ikuturso 🇪🇺2d ago

@wonkothesane well when the userbase is mostly on Bluesky and likely to stay there I don't really see the ability to completely break free as very realistic. It's also true their retained control absolutely allows them to rug pull no matter how many times they say "credible exit".

@_elena

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Kent Navalesi ☕️

@ikuturso
@wonkothesane @_elena

My guess is that, now that some alternative PDS's are coming online, they're going to rush to stipulate some enshittifying terms for them to connect to the main Bsky server. Allow ads (or data harvesting, or whatever) or lose access to 99% of users.