Shamar @Shamar@qoto.org

Bluesky received $35 Million in a year.

"The Fediverse" as a whole, may have managed to acquire a grand total of $500k in investment from individuals and nonprofits over the past eight years.

Mastodon itself has like 3 paid devs. None of them are getting rich.

Things just are not going to move at the same speed or at the same scale--and they literally can't, because the money isn't there.

It's the difference between VC-funded and volunteer-funded and any discussion or comparison to platforms needs to fully internalize that this difference does matter.

It's like wondering why the local bakery can't compete with, I dunno, BreadMax, the franchised international bread consortium with a store on every corner.

This isn't to say there aren't cultural differences, but ultimately it just feels like a much different conversation.

New person joins Bluesky and no one really talks about the infrastructure because you can't just "host your own," not really. Hosting your data isn't the same as hosting the "means of posting and discoverability itself." Moderation isn't outsourced in the same way as it is to every individual server admin here.

Also, a person joining Bluesky can be like, "WTF devs?" and devs who are literally working fulltime, every single day, with no side projects or silly distractions like "needing to support themselves with a job to live" to take away their focus from building the thing, will build the thing.

And "the thing" will materialize, as if by magic. Wow, when you fund a development team and dedicate them to a task and when the millions fall from the fucking skies, it's amazing what you can do!

Isn't it, though? If you put money behind a dev or design team, suddenly stuff starts happening.

The problem comes in trying to look over here at Johnny's little Snac activity pub server and mocking it and going, "Damn, Snac, get it together. Bluesky has quote posts already. And where's your reply control?"

And the Snac dev/devs (I am just picking one project at random) look up and go, "Uhhhh, I don't actually WORK for you. Evidenced by the fact that you aren't paying me a goddamned thing to work on this, so I'll get to your concerns eventually, but watch your fucking tone or make your own or just fuck off, I don't care."

And people will go, "Damn, this place is rude."

Well.... YOU are kinda rude too, you know? I even do this to some degree and it's not okay.

Like when I complain about Mastodon, I'm basically demoralizing a (largely unpaid) team who is drastically underfunded for the scale of projects against which they are competing.

We just don't have millions of dollars to fuel development. Lots of times, it's people building the shit for free. So I get that you're mad that we're not farther along, and that stuff moves slowly, and whatever, but it's hardly a surprise that a team with access to millions of dollars is moving more quickly than a space with development funded largely--although not entirely--by people working for free.

And, I dunno, when you come into the house of people working for free to build a thing and you yell at them about the thing, it hits a lot differently than when you're yelling at a company with millions of dollars in the bank and the resources to do the stuff you want at the speed of the market.