yea it's augustus, but Zuck's "Zuck or Nothing" playing off of "Aut Caesar aut nihil" isn't even referring to a particular Caesar, but it's use as the title Emperor, and attributable to Cesare Borgia.
I think Zuck's shirt is a good joke on everyone trying to displace Facebook from the market. BlueSky wants to be the next Facebook/Twitter, so IMO by not getting the joke the Bluesky shirt is a self-own.
> BlueSky wants to be the next Facebook/Twitter, so IMO by not getting the joke the Bluesky shirt is a self-own.
The point of the shirt seems to be that they don't want to be the next facebook. The article clarifies that. Whether they'll live up to that promise if they grow is another issue.
Oh they'll live up to the promise, because of the protocol's technical architecture. Also mentioned in the article, if they decide to go on a direction the public doesn't like, it's an easy fork.
It's an easy fork maybe, but where's the incentive to stand up a peer or replacement? They're made a paradox for themselves, in attempting to create adfree social media that moderates itself the userbase now expects the service to be free and ad free and heavily moderated by volunteer labor. This will work for a while spending millions in VC cash but I don't see the sustainability.
I've considered standing up a PDS a few times, and I think if I was going to design a financial incentive I'd wrap up a static blog host and personal cloud storage so I could charge a market rate fee (5 bucks a month for 100GB storage, whatever Dropbox is charging) and bluesky publishing and following just tacked on as a value add.
the real money would be in extending the protocol to support distributed marketplaces, so hosts could each have their own rules - disrupt Etsy, eBay, Facebook marketplace, but at some point you're getting into Silk Road 3.0 territory
On the contrary, the phrase is a direct threat, "we are here to disrupt and take you down", maybe Jay Graber does not want to be the Mark Zuckerburg, but bluesky wants to be the next Facebook. its just evolving to diffuse the legal and ethical responsibilities of moderating. It's laudable and I agree with them on principle, but I'm not in love with the David Goliath framing. They're equally as silicon valleyish and VC funded as anyone else.
Sure. It's ironic, because someone saying "Emperor or Bust" is trying to become the emperor. Zuck is already zuck, so "Zuck or nothing" is throwing shade at everyone trying to be him.
The article you posted doesn't hint at any strategy toward monetization, and only links to a blog post from 2 years. Have they done anything besides sell domain names and tshirts ?
Also accepting investment from Bain Capital is a terrible omen.
Their first significant monetized product will be a Discord Nitro-type subscription for accounts that will enable HQ media, more allowed media posts, visual gimcracks, etc.
The article, the store page and the tweet - none of them mention how many t-shirts were for sale. Was it 500,000? Was it 8?
Apart from being barely significant in the first place, the article lacks the context to even make its point. Journalists are meant to do research. This is just a big, sloppy retweet.
That can allude to all the all-too-powerful overlords, in tech and politics. They should make more of those shirts and take mail orders. Maybe even an NSFW version with a middle finger.
More or less, I am being incredulous that they "didn't make enough oops", it's ink printed on a commodity, there is essentially an endless supply available, so it's a choice to sell out.
Have you ever ordered commercial merchandise? You tend to order a number far below infinite, and if your goods sell faster than you’re able to get a new order, it is “sold out.”
And yeah, presumably they didn’t do a giant run for this, nor should they have?
They don't make the shirts themselves. They ordered a finite number from a supplier. They're not claiming that the world is out of potential to make new shirts.
selling out is a marketing piece. If they wanted to raise money for development of AT Proto they could raise more by taking backorders and shipping when available. Selling a limited edition in order to sell out is because it's cheaper to get people to write about you than it is to buy ad placement.
It can be both, and there's nothing wrong with that. Could they have gathered a few bucks more if they had taken orders as long as they come in? Sure. But at some point they'd inevitably go "we could make even more with larger batches" only to end up with considerably loss on that one last batch.
Taking the publicity instead of squeezing the lemon past the easy part is a perfectly rational decision.
No, the iterative improvement is to go back to letting communities develop the services and interactions they need rather than it being dictated to us by a monoplatform. It was like that with Twitter and now happening again with Bluesky.
If you don't see how this ends you're not paying attention. If you support this you're the problem.
The whole point of ATProto is personal ownership of content. The current degree of centralization is an undesirable but (arguably) necessary feature of bootstrapping a new platform.
Social media should never have entered the mainstream. Serious people like politicians should not be on Twitter. You should not be posting about your work drama on Facebook. Bluesky is not fundamentally better than either of those.
You're thinking of a wire service. Associated Press for example is what you want. TechCrunch is a blog and it's completely normal for blogs to be editorialized.
Tabloid is a form factor for a newspaper - roughly defined as 'half of a broadsheet' - and not directly related to the content of the publication. It got a bad reputation because lots of trashy publications are published in this form factor but this is not its defining characteristic.
Aside from that Wikipedia is not a good source to decide whether a publication is to be trusted due to its heavy political bias. The New York Post has a conservative bias while (English-language) Wikipedia has a heavy 'progressive´ bias as is reflected by its list of what they consider to be 'reliable/perennial sources' [1] which closely resembles a political litmus test.
When you say 'good reputation' I assume you mean 'serious general news' papers?
UK: The Independent, The Times, The Scotsman, The Guardian
NL: Het Parool, Trouw, NRC Handelsblad, de Volkskrant, de Telegraaf, Reformatorisch Dagblad and many others (most of them owned by DPG)
DK: Berlingske Tidende
SE: Dagens Industri, Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet, Expressen, Aftonbladet and many others
There are many others, take your pick. As said these are newspapers published in tabloid format, not 'tabloid newspapers' publishing celebrity gossip and other trash although some of them do also venture in that direction on occasion.
dictator, in modern political systems, a single person who possesses absolute political power within a country or territory or a member of a small group that exercises such power. The term comes from the Latin title dictator, which in the Roman Republic designated a temporary magistrate who was granted extraordinary powers in order to deal with state crises. Modern dictators, however, resemble ancient tyrants rather than ancient dictators. (from Britannica [1])
In some ways this fits the election of Donald Trump - he was designated as a temporary magistrate who was granted extraordinary powers in order to deal with state crises - but in most ways it does not. Trump does not possess absolute power nor is a member of a small group which possesses such power as the plethora of court cases blocking his decisions make clear. The real important bit here is this:
> apparently 77M Americans
That is the majority of the voting public which you're lambasting for making the wrong decision. Here's a bit more on that subject, read it well:
Don't agree with the majority and think they should listen to you or your group instead? There are names for such forms of government as well, names which are generally portrayed as being opposites of the two I pointed at earlier.
What bothers me about this is not injecting an opinion (it's TechCrunch) but the superficial and ignorant take.
Julius Caesar was not just some "violent dictator" like a Hitler, Stalin, or Putin. He wasn't sending people off to gas chambers, gulags, or out of windows. He was famous for his clemency toward his enemies in the civil war which made him dictator.
Even the title of "dictator" was a legal office in ancient Rome and meant something very different from the modern usage.
Zuck admiring Julius Caesar (which doesn't mean endorsing all his actions) puts him in the company of many of the most successful, ethical, and well informed people in history
Well... About a million dead and a million enslaved might disagree: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gallic_Wars . He murdered/enslaved for political gain back home, then killed the people who opposed to him back in Rome to stop democracy.
I don't want to compare to these other guys because obviously it was a different time/culture and you can't really make such broad sweeping comparisons. I won't judge people for admiring him because I also appreciate a lot of his political and strategic savvy. But he was a very violent dictator.
"About a million dead and a million enslaved might disagree"
You might be very surprised at how differently ancient people viewed the world compared to yourself.
Sure, no one wants to be killed or enslaved but the societies of these very people behaved in precisely the same way as the Romans and most ancient societies did. These were not peace loving hippies being invaded by alien monsters.
Anyway, Caesar was not dictator when he fought in Gaul. He was a Roman proconsul/general fighting in his provinces the way all ancient Roman armies did, and was more inclined toward mercy than most, although he also fought a much bigger war than most.
In the civil war Caesar was fighting Pompey, the guy who used his military power to control the Roman government for the previous decade. And who would have continued controlling the government had he won. The narrative that Pompey was defending the republic against a tyrant is more ancient propaganda than reality.
A reasonable and accurate summary is that Julius Caesar led a violent army against violent enemies, fought a civil war with unprecedented clemency, and was a benevolent dictator until his assassination by the envious people he had granted clemency.
> Caesar was not dictator when he fought in Gaul. He was a Roman proconsul/general fighting in his provinces the way all ancient Roman armies did, and was objectively merciful than most, although fought a much bigger war than most.
He fought it against the wishes of the senate. Notice I didn't say he was a dictator "while fighting it".
> The Gauls and Germans his armies fought against were not some kind of peace loving hippies. Their armies waged war just as violently and invaded and slaughtered (including Romans) in the same way.
Sure. Notice the size of their armies in the link I provided vs. the count of dead people and enslaved people. These were civilians.
Also notice I specifically said I didn't judge him because he's a product of his time. I just criticized the parent post for misrepresenting him and comparing him to more contemporary figures.
> The narrative that Pompey was defending the republic against a tyrant is more ancient propaganda than reality.
Agreed. Both sides were terrible in that conflict. That doesn't make him a non-dictator because he won over another dictator wannabe.
> A reasonable and accurate summary is that Julius Caesar led a violent army against enemies, fought a civil war with unrivaled clemency, and was a benevolent dictator until his assassination by the envious people he had granted clemency.
I think that's revisionism. I don't know all of these things and they are very much a matter of perspective. Frankly, I don't care since none of that is grounded in fact. It's interpretation of facts.
The two facts I provided were: he was a dictator and he was violent.
Those are indisputable objective historic facts. Were others dictators and even more violent?
Sure. That doesn't dispute these facts. Notice I very specifically avoided passing judgement on him and on the OP article.
This is factually incorrect. He was a proconsul in command, fully authorized by the Senate.
You're probably referring to the fact that some of his political opponents in the Senate tried to score political points criticizing his war in Gaul. There was no real question of the legality then or now. False legal claims like this were standard practice and everyone took them for the partisan maneuvering they obviously were.
> Sure. Notice the size of their armies in the link I provided vs. the count of dead people and enslaved people. These were civilians.
These claims are all incredibly speculative. We actually have no real idea how many people (civilians or otherwise) died in these wars. Caesar himself is the primary source and we know for a fact that he tended to wildly exaggerate his numbers.
> Agreed. Both sides were terrible in that conflict. That doesn't make him a non-dictator because he won over another dictator wannabe.
> The two facts I provided were: he was a dictator and he was violent. Those are indisputable objective historic facts.
Another indisputable fact: he wasn't violent as dictator.
But it's important to understand that all of Gaul was tribal. The was no unified country. These tribes were invading each other's land constantly to loot, rape, kill, take hostages, enslave, and extract tribute.
Gallic tribes had famously sacked Rome, and if Rome hadn't become so powerful they would have happily done it again. German tribes had successfully invaded Roman territory as recently as around the time Caesar was born. They were a legitimate threat, especially to the Roman province, although it's also true Caesar's had other motivations.
Again, it's just much more complicated than when for example Hitler and Stalin jointly invaded the entirely peaceful country of Poland. Or when Putin invaded the entirely peaceful country of Ukraine.
Because no one goes into journalism to report the news, they go into to influence public opinion. This is done largely by deciding which stories to amplify and to kill, and which information is presented in which order. That is a subtle art, this person seems to lack subtlety.
I forgot about BlueSky since, around ~2 months ago, every last person I followed on there moved back (reopened) to Twitter due to the user number falloff... I am so out of the loop now
I guess the people I follow either don't care about the numbers or didn't have that issue, but I'm finding more and more of the people I wanted to read from there everyday, and am enjoying it so much more after a year of engagement bait (or worse) on X. Bluesky to me is what Twitter was a few years ago, which (IMHO) is great.
I think it really depends on the communities you are in. I use Bluesky mostly for ML stuff and Mastodon for more Unixy stuff and my Bluesky feed is quite lively with a good signal/noise ratio. I completely nuked my X account over a month ago, it was just drowning in ragebait and Elon posts (even though I don't follow Elon).
Active monthly is probably a tenth of that. I've made an account 2 or 3 times over the years but never find much to make me stay, I think I delete my accounts tho so I don't know if I'm in that stat.
why'd your parent comment get downvoted? 33mm users, <2mm daily likers, <1mm daily posters. as stated, less than a tenth of total user count.
bluesky is a pretty niche bubble-y platform. so are mastodon et al. they're fine if you want to follow a specific group but they aren't even close to the reach of X/Twitter.
For twitter being supposedly a right wing social media platform, the only tweets I see break 100k likes are extremely left wing political takes (and Elon's tweets cause he's almost surely gotten him to be artificially pushed in the algorithm).
I've seen theories that there's like botting happening on those posts, and it kinda seems likely given how little real interaction they get.
i notice the same thing. there are a handful of big rw accounts i've muted and no longer see but big lwers there always seem to be more.
i also muted musk but periodically find my account has magically re-followed him, so i concur that there's almost certainly a special case in the code that artificially boosts/follows him.
Thought it was Caesar Augustus? IIRC Zuckerberg has even claimed that his hairstyle is inspired by him.