#BlueSky Capital Funding

[mortalityplays]

Forgive me if I'm mistaking you for another person, but I remember you speaking at multiple points on the unsustainability of free social media services (I think especially in response to the cohost collapse?), and I'm curious on what your thoughts on bluesky are so far. I'm not an expert on the subject, but from what I've read previously it seemed like they were on track to be financially sustainable, but I don't know if the recent floods of users has thrown those projections off. Sorry if I'm mixing you up with someone else on my timeline, in that case just ignore me.

bluesky will almost certainly follow the same trajectory of monetisation => bloat => enshittification => decline as every other major platform built on venture capital and user hoarding. it's a terrible model that only works in the short term as a mirage for attracting funding and making founders look good for a year or two before they sell.

you can see the same effect in the decline of all the subscription box services that came into vogue just before covid: they feel great to use for as long as the initial injection of venture funding lasts, because the purpose of that funding at that stage is to attract users and impress the next round of funders with how pleasant/intuitive/efficient/ethical/good value the service is. that's the stage where they're handing out freebies and bowling over influencers, and every ingredient in the box is fresh and high quality and locally sourced. wow what a good deal, what a great system!!! why hasn't anyone done this before? the answer is because it's unsustainable by design. they rack up good reviews, sign on a billion new users, attract new funding from a bunch of much more credulous investors, and then gut all of the expensive parts. portions get smaller, ingredients get worse, packaging gets flimsier, prices go up, freebies turn into "5% off your first 9 boxes when you invite 3 friends", and customer service vanishes.

with social media (and platforms like discord) the logic is the same, it's just a little less glaringly obvious to the end user because they're not coming home to leaking packages of rancid chicken on the doorstep. bluesky has an advantage over tiny operations like cohost because it was founded by a billionaire making a point for the sake of his own image. it got a really significant chunk of startup funding, and the owner had existing connections and rep in the space to attract more. That's why it has survived the goldrush period, why it still feels good to use, and why users who have been burned so many times before are finally accepting it as a stable, reliable option. It's still in its venture capital honeymoon phase where the only thing worth spending money on is making the service attractive to users.

What I expect we will see next, with another mass influx of users from twitter and new funding from a rogue's gallery of tech venture sickos led by Blockchain Capital is a strong ramp up into monetising that userbase. They've already been pretty forthright about how they plan to do this, and I think it's a solid roadmap of how Bluesky will bloat and decay over the next few years:

this is a huge lol. don't worry, we're not going to hyperfinancialize the social experience through NFTs. the thing even crypto freaks started feigning amnesia about a year ago. real "our health conscious sodas are 100% arsenic free" messaging here. They know perfectly well that rubes users are suspicious of their typical 5 dimensional tech finance chess games and are patting our hands about last week's bogeymen so nobody worries too hard about whatever 'decentralised developer ecosystem' just happens to be helmed by a bunch of crypto guys. this definitely means something good and based and not a google-like single sign on user data harvesting operation.

This is the same shit that's currently rotting the floorboards of discord. Bluntly, there is no way to run a platform on this scale without gating functionality behind paid services. Discord has been squeezing free-tier file uploads and call quality etc. down steadily and cranking up subscription costs over the last year or two, throwing in chaff like animated avatar frames to try and justify the user cost. They're also doing the same misdirection thing again here, pointing to Thing We All Hate to deflect from thing we might not like very much when they do it. Booo elon booo we all hate elon!!! wait how do we feel about subscription models again,

watch out for this to kill porn on bsky like it has killed porn on every other social platform 👍 boooo we hate elon boooo stupid idiot and his 'everything app' booooo wait why do you need my tax information, what's that about mastercard,

Look, we are all aware social media is a money pit. Let's not forget dorsey was looking to sell twitter in the first place, long before elon's very public plunge into total online derangement. Subscription services are not going to plug the hole, so we are gradually going to see more and more spaghetti thrown at the wall while early funders shuffle cards and do their pyramid scheme bit bringing in stupider and stupider investments. this is the window in which bluesky will be temporarily worth using for us, for the idiot public, the poorly rendered crowd jpegs in the background of their venture capital MOBA. it's in their interests to slow and pad the decline as much as possible, because that is how they get maximally paid.

Given the scale of the money involved, and dorsey's weird ego investment, I think bluesky will probably manage a controlled drift for a good few years before it gets really bloated and painful. and by then we will all be so used to the *checks notes* decentralised developer ecosystem that we'll just be posting through it, watching another generation of columnists call another collapsing platform 'their beloved hellsite' and passing around that meme about not getting out of our chairs no sir until idk we all get on a fediverse neurolink alternative to stick it to the elongated muskrat and our brains pop peacefully in our sleep. which I guess is the closest thing to viability any social media platform can achieve.

anyway diogenes the cynic is also on bluesky

[decepti-thots]

i can see people discussing cohost as a possible tumblr alternative in the event the current shitshow continues to escalate, and as someone who lurks on cohost (lotta good game writer/crit folks went over there instead of bluesky after twitter tanked!) and has kept a keen eye on it since it began, i just want to offer some brief thoughts. not as a value judgement, just so people have a decent idea of what cohost actually like... is, and what pros and cons it has.

cohost is a tumblr-like experience which uses a very similar microblogging-and-reblog/share set-up, though it's a lot more 'static' than current tumblr is without e.g endless scroll on everything and scripts everywhere. (reminds me a lot of how tumblr was in 2010, tbh.) it has some things tumblr lacks (notably, its comment feature is much better) and lacks some things tumblr has.

it is run by a very small number of people. this is currently fine in terms of things like moderation, because cohost has a small userbase and has not attracted a general audience, but rather, mostly chill people in certain niches. however, in the event it has any kind of scaling-up of its userbase, they would need to drastically increase their moderation footprint, because right now it is skeleton.

related to that, being an ad-free site that is not funded by venture capital, their financials are... not amazingly stable tbqh! they have been very transparent about this quarter to quarter. they were bleeding money profusely until very recently. now, it has juuust about stabilized, though it is not "profitable" per se. cohost is a site that runs on a similar idea to dreamwidth; it strives to be a decently-sized site where a good chunk of its adult userbase voluntarily pay for monthly subscriptions to keep the site going, more out of a desire to support an independent platform than due to large feature bonuses that come from doing so (though there are additional features. small ones.). it is not, in short, a site designed to be used for free by 99% of its userbase like most social media; if any large migration took place to cohost by fandom, this would realistically only work for cohost if a decent chunk of us decided we would like to send them money each month to keep it going. (this can work; dreamwidth does it, and its skewing-older userbase does so. generally not at huge scale though.)

cohost is anti-metrics to a point that it is simply not a good choice for some people who are looking to use it as a way to grow a professional platform, because you functionally have no 'platform'. (great for folks like me; bad for folks using it as a freelance portfolio kinda gig, really.) it's much more a personal blogging site than a 'here is my Profile i use to get work!' deal tbh. (this is, to be fair, also kind of a reason tumblr has never been that great for this, but it's just sort of something artists etc have been observing.)

cohost is an interesting ongoing experiment, but one reason i have not moved there is it's currently in a very tenuous position. as a platform for specific fandoms forming up there, i think it's really promising, which is why i've kept my eye on it, but i think it's important to know it's not just a 1:1 tumblr replacement. no non-shitty platform is. as i said on my other blog talking about cohost yesterday, if you want an ad-free, algorithm free, no data-selling, no venture capital platform... you want a platform that requires people pay in at least decent quantities, which means you likely have a platform that will never match the scale of big centralized socmedia platforms which do exist as ad platforms backed by millions of dollars of investment.

[duckprintspress]

Meet Aether Beyond the Binary Contributors Flore Picard and Alec J. Marsh

We are 57% of the way to our funding goal for AETHER BEYOND THE BINARY, with 19 days to go!! This awesome anthology featuring non-binary and genderqueer characters in aetherpunk settings has been in the works for a year, and we’re optimistic that we’ll reach our funding target so that we can publish the book as an e-book, trade paperback, and hardcover. Slow and steady, race winning, you know the deal. 😀 Things have definitely slowed down, as is normal for this stage of the campaign, so just a note that we’d always appreciate your help with spread the word about this project so that more people will know it exists! You can find our “main” posts about the campaign on different platforms using these links:

Bluesky

Dreamwidth

Facebook

Instagram

LinkedIn

Mastodon

Patreon (public post)

Pillowfort

Tiktok

Tumblr

WordPress

Thanks in advance!!

You can learn all about the campaign, the book, the merch, and the authors, by visiting our Kickstarter campaign page!

And, today we’re introducing two more contributing authors: Flore Picard and Alec J. Marsh!

The Light Organ by Flore Picard

About Flore Picard: I’m a linguist and translator who lives in France and I have been itching to write since I learned how to. I started writing (fan)fiction more regularly when I was procrastinating on my PhD dissertation, and I haven’t looked back since. I’m also an artist who loves drawing both fanart and original art, and I have a passion for patterns and systems, for the beauty at the edge of chaos and the complexity of being human. I tend to write about queer and disabled characters finding themselves and each other and learning to take up space in the world.

Links: Instagram | Twitter

This is Flore’s first publication with Duck Prints Press.

Title: The Light Organ

Tags: angst with a happy ending, capitalism is the real villain, coming out, disabled character, emotional hurt/comfort, family, fraught family dynamics, illusion, in the closet, magic use, mechanic, musician, non-binary, parenthood, present tense, science fiction with magic, teenager, third person limited point of view, transphobia (mentions of) (past)

Excerpt:

“No, no, no—the organ, the light ring—it’s all about the imagination, not the mechanics,” Kas exclaims, gesturing widely to encompass the aether pool behind the glass.

“I’m just here for the tubes,” the tech—Gilbert—says flatly.

His face betrays no emotions, not even annoyance. Kas almost wishes he would yell or be rude, if only for the sake of feeling like they’re having an actual conversation, but Gilbert has always been polite. He just never seems to care.

“Fine,” Kas gives up. “We’ve got glitches. They started about a week ago. It could be a leaking tube, I’m not sure.”

“What kind of glitches?”

“It’s as if… as if the story stops responding to me. I know how that sounds, but I swear that’s what happens. It doesn’t last more than a few seconds, but it’s getting worse. Earlier, I powered everything up to tune it and it kept flickering.”

“Flickering,” Gilbert repeats, mumbling into his neatly trimmed beard.

Kas grabs a cane in each hand and makes their way to the organ’s seat. “I can show you.”

You’re Gonna Get Older by Alec J. Marsh

About Alec J. Marsh: Alec lives in the Pacific Northwest, where they write romantic adult fantasy and self-indulgent fanfiction. They make candles inspired by their favorite characters.

Links: Etsy | Instagram | Twitter

Alec is one of the editors for Aether Beyond the Binary and has also published multiple titles with Duck Prints Press. His novella To Drive the Hundred Miles (modern, f/m, trans male lead) was recently successfully crowdfunded and orders fulfilled. His two erotica stories Heart’s Scaffold (sci-fi, m/m) and Study Hall (modern academia, m/m) are part of the Contributor Short Story Bundle add-on.

Title: You’re Gonna Get Older

Tags: arranged marriage, christian, coming of age, coming out, cults, fraught family dynamics, friends, in the closet, lesbian, midwest, misgendering, non-binary, north dakota, past tense, post-apocalyptic, relationship of convenience, religion, song fic, teenager, third person limited pov, trans man, trans woman, transphobia

Excerpt:

There was a radio in the room, an old two-way they had found on their last visit and hidden in an empty supply closet. It was still there. They slid open the battery pack and snapped in a fresh battery from their aether lantern. Chips of the meteor had been encased in metal tubing to mimic the lithium batteries of the Before, but they were precious and had to be used sparingly. Stardancer knew better than to use precious energy on something this frivolous.

They popped the battery cover in place and pressed the power button. It crackled to life. They cradled it like it was made from glass. The dials made a tak-tak-tak noise as Stardancer scrolled through channels. Music came through softly. It faded in and out, cut through with static, but it was music, and not the kind made on an acoustic guitar. They adjusted the antenna and turned up the volume.

It was like nothing they had heard before, fast paced with a heavy beat. Even over the fuzzy AM connection, it was invigorating. They wanted to dance. They wanted to sing along with words they had never heard before. The singer screamed their triumph, and Stardancer felt invincible.

There's no time like right now to become a backer and help us reach 100% funded! Check it out!

[strikeslip]

Anyone fleeing Tumblr over AI and going to Bluesky is only thinking in the short term. If a tech company has taken funding (and Bluesky has), they're in the venture capital economy and will need to make money from their users. They might not be selling your data now, but unless you're taking advantage of the federation for self-hosting, they'll likely do it in the future.

Dreamwidth has actual policies and ethics, not to mention plans for how to stick around without making your data the product. That's where to run if AI is your motivation.

[fakeoldmanfucker]

since i saw you have so many zuck post and i'm a little bit invest in it like you so i want to ask some question about threads since i don't want to have another social media because i have so much now

1. does moskovitz actually interact with zuck there? i saw them following each other

2. does saverin made an account and followed zuck?? since i don't know if that is his real account, tbh if he actually followed zuck, became one of the new users on threads i'd be surprised because i thought he already didn't care much about either fb or meta in general

also I saw zuck posting tsn reference there for threads and commenting gif of tsn too

sorry for my sloppy english, hope you reply

Hi anon! Thank you for your ask!

What I need everyone on Tumblr to know is that Mark is basically trying to reinvent himself. He's been the butt of a lot of jokes for about a decade now, and this bout with Elon, and Elon's fumbling of Twitter, has presented a prime opportunity for Mark to reboot his public image. This means he's responding to people's posts on Threads, making jokes, and yes, referencing The Social Network.

Now to your questions:

Yes! Dustin and Mark are actually still really close. Dustin's mentioned going on vacation with Mark fairly regularly (for whatever that means for them). Dustin had access to the pre-release launch of Threads and was user # 3037 (as indicated on his Instagram account), and he generally talks about Mark a lot, mostly to defend him/hype him up. He's been talking about Mark a lot lately, because of the drama with Musk and with the launch of Threads, but Mark has been pretty consistently mentioned in his Twitter posts, going back for years. Dustin seems to be particularly excited about Threads, probably because he feels let down by Twitter and the promise of Bluesky, and also because Dustin still owns a 0.6% stake in Meta, which is worth something like $5 billion. Dustin as well as other early Facebook employees have expressed a feeling of nostalgia and excitement akin to the early days of the company, both from the product development side as well as from the consumer side. Anyway, it seems that Dustin's penchant for micro-blogging and Mark's role to promote Meta's new app have combined and allowed them to publicly communicate for the first time in at least a decade. It has been, honestly, delightful to watch. See the bottom of the post for screenshots of their interactions.

Judging by the Instagram account linked to the Threads account, Saverin really is following Mark. (I judged whether or not the Insta account was real by scrolling through who he follows: some weather accounts, someone with the last name that's the same as his wife, someone who's either a sister or cousin, Fox News. These interests correspond with the types of accounts he follows on Twitter; it's most likely really him.) I agree, it is kinda of insane that Saverin joined so early; it's possible he sold the rest of his shares because B Capital got a big infusion of money at the end of 2022, which corresponds with the fund they raised earlier this year. It's also possible he converted his shares from Class A to Class B, but this move still loses him power. He doesn't really have any incentive to be interested in Meta, not anymore. And yet, Saverin was just under the 2 millionth member to join Threads (1,920,187). Taking into account that 30 million people(/brands) joined Threads in the first day, Saverin was an early adopter. At the same time however, in addition to likely not having any financial interest in the company, Saverin doesn't post very often on Twitter (most of which are reposts of articles) and has only ever posted to Instagram twice, and not since 2014 at that. It's interesting to me that he apparently cares so much to be on Threads so early since he doesn't seem to be that fond of micro-blogging or Instagram anyway. At the least, he is a private person, more private than even Mark has ever been, and he is likely on Threads to lurk rather than to post. Which brings me to the point that Saverin is following Mark. He's also following a number of influential Meta people, including important early employees (none of them follow him back). Combined with the fact that Saverin consistently puts "Facebook co-founder" at the top of all of his bios, regardless of his current projects and investments, this paints an image of a petty man who wants to be relevant. It may be interesting that Saverin follows Mark, but don't expect anything to come of it. Saverin lost his chance to make any amends with Mark and anyone else a long time ago.

Bonus: Mark posting a TSN gif? For some reason?? Even though the post he was replying to didn't even mention TSN? (it's a screenshot of the gif of the moment when Eduardo gives Mark the money to go to Palo Alto for the summer while they're hiring interns)

[ericvanderburg]

Bluesky capitalizes on X woes with funding and user growth

http://securitytc.com/TFqR90

[0x88974]

Bluesky has raised $15 million

Bluesky has raised $15 million in Series A funding round led by Blockchain Capital with participation from Alumni Ventures, True Ventures, SevenX, Amir Shevat of Darkmode, co-creator of Kubernetes Joe Beda, and others.

[bitcoincables]

Snapshot: SEC Sets Deadline for Spot Bitcoin ETF Changes

Officials from the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) have reportedly met with several firms seeking to launch spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Two unidentified executives have claimed that they were instructed to submit final changes by 29 December. The SEC must make a decision on a joint proposal from ARK Invest and 21 Shares by 10 January. It is believed that the regulator may approve multiple applications before the deadline.

The Central Bank of Nigeria has lifted a ban on Nigerian banks conducting cryptocurrency business, which had been in effect since February 2021. The ban was imposed due to concerns about potential money laundering and terrorism financing. The central bank has now relaxed the ban, noting the global trend towards cryptocurrency and opting for a regulated approach instead.

Crypto exchange Coinbase has obtained a licence to operate as a virtual asset service provider in France. This development allows Coinbase to expand its operations into the key European market. The company's Vice President and Regional Managing Director for EMEA, Daniel Seifert, stated that this achievement enables the onboarding of more people into the world of cryptocurrencies while prioritizing the security of customers' assets and compliance.

Arkon Energy, a data centre infrastructure company, has concluded a $110 million funding round to expand its capacity for Bitcoin miners. The funding round was led by Bluesky Capital Management and included investments from Kestrel 0x1 and Nural Capital. Arkon Energy CEO Josh Payne stated that the company's portfolio primarily consists of institutional-grade Bitcoin mining firms.

Read the original article

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[inventivaindia]

Health Tech Startup Medimetry Raises Funding from Bluesky Capital

Health Tech Startup Medimetry Raises Funding from Bluesky Capital

Faridabad-based health technology startup Medimetry has raised an undisclosed amount in seed funding led by US-headquartered hedge fund BlueSky Capital Management.

Launched in 2014, by IIT alumnus Krishan Tyagi and his wife Dr Bhawana Tyagi, Medimettry offers an online platform for telemedicine, electronic medical records and disease management.

The company started out as an online doctor…

[bitcoincables]

Arkon Energy Raises $110M Funding to Expand Data Center Infrastructure.

Arkon Energy, a data center infrastructure company, has closed a $110 million private funding round to expand its operations. The funding was led by Bluesky Capital Management and included participation from Kestrel 0x1 and Nural Capital.

The company, which launched in 2021, has already grown to over 130 megawatts and expanded into multiple countries and regions. It caters to bitcoin miners and clients in the AI and machine learning space with high power computing requirements.

About $80 million of the funding will be used to acquire an additional 200-megawatt capacity across new data centers in Ohio, North Carolina, and Texas. This move aims to increase their total megawatts by 130% by mid-2024. The remaining $30 million will be invested in developing an AI cloud service project at Arkon's data center in Norway to meet the growing demand for generative AI and large language model training markets.

To read the original article, click here.

Tags: ArkonEnergy, datacenter, bitcoin, AI

[skybusinessloan]

Welcome To Sky Capital Funding, Where Business Limitations End. Why Sky? We offer industry best rates & loan terms- NATIONWIDE.

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