Olives @olives@qoto.org

For better or worse, anything that goes up onto social media should probably be assumed to be public. Don't rely on it to provide any privacy to you.

I don't think they will close the API (or not yet) but I could see more restrictions on it's use coming down.

"Someone trained an AI on Bluesky posts."
I remember that that was the rough excuse for Twitter / Reddit closing their APIs, in large part because they weren't getting a cut from it.

I've seen how this story plays out countless times, and I don't think I want to play along with it again. It didn't even take particularly long.

I mean, if Bluesky was working well enough, it'd be tempting to ignore whatever they're doing, but the signs are already there.

Before a company goes down the drain, they become weirdly puritanical and in a "boiling the frogs" type (slowly turning up the heat) manner. There is also a lack of transparency.

This Silicon Valley centric savior syndrome has only become more pronounced over the past five years.

The fundamental problem with Bluesky is that yet again, it's a Silicon Valley techbro parachuting himself in to "save you".

If it was 2015, it really might look like an interesting addition to the market.

In 2022, 2023, or 2024, it looks a lot like another out of touch incompetently run tech firm from Silicon Valley with, what might as well be secret policies, written by a middle manager somewhere and you have no clue how they came up with them.

I don't think Bluesky chose a good time to launch either. To play with the ideas they do, they really should have launched in, say, 2015, 2016, or even, 2017. 2018 is already too late.

Considering that Bluesky was founded by a co-founder of Twitter, it's worth looking at the past history of Twitter to get a glimpse as to how they might behave.

Bluesky probably could turn to crap, as some are putting it.

For an idea of how that might pan out, someone only has to look at how Twitter framed themselves as more infrastructure earlier on before moving up the value chain.

Likewise, discourse around Bluesky at this time is dominated by how the infrastructure might work.

Same with particular fetishes tbh.

I wouldn't expect every such person to be a lefty, or to talk about the free market, or other such things. Or to be a member of a particular online community.

Same with particular fetishes tbh.

I wouldn't expect every such person to be a lefty, or to talk about the free market, or other such things. Or to be a member of a particular online community.

I don't think it would be accurate to characterize people who watch porn, or anime fans, or whatever, as belonging to any particular political affiliation.

I'm sure you could find such people in many (these are very popular activities).

Since a fair bit of what I cover relates to civil liberties, this isn't really a source that tells me anything that I wouldn't already know.

Not only is there a video in the corner, it appears on *every page*, even if it has been closed already.

Let's try ANN for a moment.

First, there's a random captcha to even access the site. So, let's engage with that for a bit... Then, there's a video hovering in the corner, but to close that, you first have to scroll through the cookie consent prompt, otherwise it will attempt to set hundreds of cookies.

The video appears to be about online trolls harassing someone. So, Internet drama. Closed that.

Then, I find that there is no article that I'm that interested in. Scroll all the way down. Nope. Digging into the archives. Okay, one article potentially relevant.

Coverage of financial censorship seems poor, including the meeting with the regulator to express concerns about that.

I don't have much of an opinion on Niche Gamer (the site appears to have improved lately). They write stories I find relevant and I cover them here.

If you have other potential sites I could check, I don't mind checking them though.

For a company which collects so much data, Facebook is not terribly transparent.

The bigger issue is that Facebook runs obscure "data sharing" programs and no one really understands what they're doing. Then, they come out with language that is about as clear as mud.