🦋 Bluesky Social

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On the Bluesky social network, you may notice a lot of drive-by responses from accounts that rarely or never post — they just reply to other accounts.

The reply pattern starts with a phrase like “I respectfully disagree” and follows it with a fatuous objection. Another pattern is to start by agreeing, then pivot to trying to start a fight.

These responses are clearly from LLMs. Some Bluesky users have even gotten the bots to post a haiku, spill their prompt, or argue with another bot.

Denise Paolucci (rahaeli on Bluesky) cofounded blog site Dreamwidth and previously worked in trust and safety at LiveJournal. She has a ton of experience with every possible form of social media bad actor and regularly posts on Bluesky about trust and safety. Lately, she’s been writing about our bot friends.

Paolucci thinks this particular wave of “reply guy as a service” bots are test runs by a spambot maker, who hopes to rent the bots out to other bad actors as a service: “It’s common for spamming software to be pitched as social media management.”

...

Bluesky are on the case and blocking the bots. You should report the bots as “unwanted replies” and use the word “bot” when the offender is clearly a bot.

• skylight
• bluescreen
• tik
• NikNak
• Bluesky
• Reelo

Skylight will reuse Bluesky infrastructure.

cross-posted from: https://feddit.uk/post/22749816

Cory Doctorow explaining why he endorses the "Free Our Feeds" initiative (Lemmy discussion)

During the Napster wars, the record labels seriously pissed off millions of internet users when they sued over 19,000 music fans, mostly kids, but also grannies, old people, and dead people.
[…]
One thing everyone agreed on was how disgusted we all were with the labels. What we didn't agree on was what to do about it. A lot of us wanted to reform copyright – say, by creating a blanket license for internet music so that artists could get paid directly. This was the systemic approach.

Another group – call them the "individualists" – wanted a boycott. Just stop buying and listening to music from the major labels. Every dollar you spend with a label is being used to fund a campaign of legal terror. Merely enjoying popular music makes you part of the problem.

Here's what I would say when people told me we should all stop listening to popular music: "If members of your popular movement are not allowed to listen to popular music, your movement won't be very popular."

We weren't going to make political change by creating an impossible purity test ("Ew, you listen to music from a major label? God, what's wrong with you?"). I mean, for one thing, a lot of popular music is legitimately fantastic and makes peoples' lives better. Popular movements should strive to increase their members' joy, not demand their deprivation. Again, not merely because this is a nice thing to do for people, but also because it's good tactics to make participation in the thing you're trying to do as joyous as possible.

[…] When social media is federated, then you can leave a server without leaving your friends. Think of it as being similar to changing cell-phone companies. When you switch from Verizon to T-Mobile, you keep your number, you keep your address book and you keep your friends, who won't even know you switched networks unless you tell them.

There's no reason social media couldn't work this way. You should be able to leave Facebook or Twitter for Mastodon, Bluesky, or any other service and still talk with the people you left behind, provided they still want to talk with you.

That's how the Fediverse – which Mastodon is part of – works already. You can switch from one Mastodon server to another, and all the people you follow and who follow you will just move over to that new server. That means that if the person or company or group running your server goes sour, you aren't stuck making a choice between the people you love who connect to you on that server, and the pain of dealing with whatever bullshit the management is throwing off.

We could make that stronger! Data protection laws like the EU's GDPR and California's CCPA create a legal duty for online services to hand over your data on demand. Arguably, these laws already require your Mastodon server's management to give you the files you need to switch from one server to another, but that could be clarified. Handing these files over to users on demand is really straightforward – even a volunteer running a small server for a few friends will have no trouble living up to this obligation. It's literally just a minute's work for each user.

Another way to make this stronger is through governance. Many of the great services that defined the old, good internet were run by "benevolent dictators for life." This worked well, but failed so badly. Even if the dictator for life stayed benevolent, that didn't make them infallible. The problem of a dictatorship isn't just malice – it's also human frailty. For a service to remain good over long timescales, it needs accountable, responsive governance. That's why all the most successful BDFL services (like Wikipedia) transitioned to community-managed systems.

There, too, Mastodon shines. Mastodon's founder Eugen Rochko has just explicitly abjured his role as "ultimate decision-maker" and handed management over to a nonprofit.

I love using Mastodon and I have a lot of hope for its future. I wish I was as happy with Bluesky, which was founded with the promise of federation, and which uses a clever naming scheme that makes it even harder for server owners to usurp your identity. But while Bluesky has added many, many technically impressive features, they haven't delivered on the long-promised federation.

Bluesky sure seems like a lot of fun! They've pulled tens of millions of users over from other systems, and by all accounts, they've all having a great time. The problem is that without federation, all those users are vulnerable to bad decisions by management (perhaps under pressure from the company's investors) or by a change in management (perhaps instigated by investors if the current management refuses to institute extractive measures that are good for the investors but bad for the users). Federation is to social media what fire-exits are to nightclubs: a way for people to escape if the party turns deadly.

So what's the answer? Well, around Mastodon, you'll hear a refrain that reminds me a lot of the Napster wars: "People who are enjoying themselves on Bluesky are wrong to do so, because it's not federated and the only server you can use is run by a VC-backed for-profit. They should all leave that great party – there's no fire exits!"

This is the social media version of "To be in our movement, you have to stop listening to popular music." Sure, those people shouldn't be crammed into a nightclub that has no fire exits. But thankfully, there is an alternative to being the kind of scold who demands that people leave a great party, and being the kind of callous person who lets tens of millions of people continue to risk their lives by being stuck in a fire-trap.

We can install our own fire-exits in Bluesky.

Yesterday, an initiative called "Free Our Feeds" launched, with a set of goals for "billionaire-proofing" social media. One of those goals is to add the long-delayed federation to Bluesky. I'm one of the inaugural endorsers for this, because installing fire exits for Bluesky isn't just the right thing to do, it's also good tactics.

Here's why: if a body independent of the Bluesky corporation implements its federation services, then we ensure that its fire exits are beyond the control of its VCs. That means that if they are ever tempted in future to brick up the fire-exits, they won't be able to. This isn't a hypothetical risk. When businesses start to enshittify their services, they fully commit themselves to blocking anything that makes it easy to leave those services.
[…]
We can do better than begging people to leave a party they're enjoying; we can install our own fucking fire exits. Sure, maybe that means that a lot of those users will stay on the proprietary platform, but at least we'll have given them a way to leave if things go horribly wrong.

After all, there's no virtue in software freedom. The only thing worth caring about is human freedom. The only reason to value software freedom is if it sets humans free.

If I had my way, all those people enjoying themselves on Bluesky would come and enjoy themselves in the Fediverse. But I'm not a purist. If there's a way to use Bluesky without locking myself to the platform, I will join the party there in a hot second. And if there's a way to join the Bluesky party from the Fediverse, then goddamn I will party my ass off.

in reply to https://whtwnd.com/bnewbold.net/3lbvbtqrg5t2t

which is in reply to https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/

The social network Bluesky has, for some 27 million users, become a viable replacement for Elon Musk’s X. According to a report last week about a new funding round, the public benefit corporation may soon be valued at $700 million.

However, many Bluesky users are nervous about its future, given its venture-capital backing, and seeing how billionaires such as Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg have demonstrated their ability to reshape their platforms with impunity.

So an unusual coalition has assembled to billionaire-proof Bluesky’s underlying technology, to ensure that — even if Bluesky itself were to end up under an oligarch’s control — users would be able to easily jump ship and take their connections and data with them to other social networks. Part of the project involves stimulating the creation of those other networks, which could move past Twitter-clone territory to take on platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

...

The campaign aims to raise $30 million over three years, with an immediate goal of $4 million. The money would be used to establish a public-interest foundation that would govern the evolution of the AT Protocol, fund developers who want to build platforms that can run on the protocol, and gradually build out infrastructure that those platforms could use.

“It is an unusual thing in the sense that infrastructure, and technical infrastructure particularly, is possibly the least glamorous thing you could be talking to people about — and as a consequence famously impossible to raise funds for,” said technologist Robin Berjon, one of the “custodians” of the project. “At the same time, we have these luminaries and famous people who are really excited about it. Bringing the two together is quite novel. I’m very excited to see it pan out.”

...

In terms of building out new AT Protocol infrastructure, Free Our Feeds will first focus on a second relay — the mechanism that lets the network know when a user posts something, thus enabling things like feeds and view counts. At the moment, Bluesky controls the only AT Protocol relay. “Because that’s a point of concentrated power, that’s a high priority for us,” said Berjon.

If it raises sufficient funding, the project would then move on to tasks such as operating users’ data repositories, known as “personal data servers” in the AT Protocol.

...

Berjon, a former vice-president of data governance at the New York Times, also said there may be scope for “building bridges” between parts of the AT Protocol and the ActivityPub protocol that is used by Mastodon and Meta’s Threads — even if the two rival protocols never quite merge.

Ultimately, the aim is to make it easy for developers to set up alternatives to legacy social networks, and perhaps even new kinds of social networks.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/24191471

Disinformation similar to the pro-Russian "Matryoshka" campaign is emerging on Bluesky, using deepfakes and fake profiles to spread pro-Russian messages, prompting calls for more proactive action from the platform.

Bluesky is in the final stages of raising new funding led by Bain Capital Ventures, which would value the social media company at around $700 million, according to three sources familiar with the deal.

...

Bluesky officially launched less than a year ago with 3 million users and grew to 25.9 million users in 2024, the company said. Nearly half of those new users were added during the last month and a half of the year after Donald Trump won the US presidential election and some X users fled the platform owned by Trump supporter Elon Musk.

Bluesky last raised a $15 million Series A round in 2024 and an $8 million seed round in 2023. It's unclear how much capital Bluesky is raising in this new round, which is still being finalized, and terms could change.

...

The new funding could put pressure on Bluesky to figure out how to make money. The service still has no ads, and Bluesky said in 2023 that it doesn't want to rely on advertising to sustain its business.

Ever since the election, there has been a large influx of disaffected Twitter users unhappy with Elon Musk's involvement in the Trump administration. I'd be fine with that if not for the fact that they follow back everyone who follows them, including scammers, spammers, and various other bad actors.

The worst example of this is an account called "KamallaDreams," which has over 110k followers and regularly posts racists memes.

This one is ironic considering Kamala Harris' mom is Indian.

Credit to brendelbored.bsky.social for surfacing this.

Now, obvious engagement bait gets enough likes to reach the various trending feeds that don't actively filter them out.