here comes the pivot to ads

[viss@mastodon.social]

or maybe not actually ads - maybe it's gonna be AI training. they're gonna announce a partnership with one of the frontier llm orgs to ingest the firehose to train a new conversational model or something.

[joy@mastodon.social]

@Viss

<kermit drinking tea dot gif>

[viss@mastodon.social]

@joy i havent checked on crunchbase in a while for them, but like - there are investors. those people want 10x-20x return on their money. bsky doesnt do that and stay 'free'. now theres a vc as the ceo?

[joy@mastodon.social]

@Viss

It says something that they couldn't find someone from industry to be the next CEO.

[viss@mastodon.social]

@joy id have done it >:D

[davemwilburn@infosec.exchange]

@Viss

No, it's fine. Who could be better suited to lead an open source company like Bluesky than a (checks notes) former executive at WordPress that was intimately involved with one of the open source community's most notorious shakedown scandals?

[grumpydad@infosec.exchange]

@Viss I'll go get the popcorn.

[viss@mastodon.social]

@DaveMWilburn gird your loins for the influx of new users

[davemwilburn@infosec.exchange]

@Viss I'm doubtful. They've had plenty of scandals already, and they mostly didn't result in huge influxes of new Fedi users.

[viss@mastodon.social]

@DaveMWilburn ive seen trivially half a dozen huge waves of people who fall off bsky and come here. some go back again, but there's always a 'wave'

[jackryder@infosec.exchange]

@DaveMWilburn @Viss

[rawrmonstar@social.vivaldi.net]

@Viss they can already do that for free, can't they?

[viss@mastodon.social]

@rawrmonstar im not sure how interacting with any frontier model at that scale could be free - if they are training their own, then its tens of millions in spend on gear to do it in-house. if theyre using the cloud, then its 5x that in cloud costs. if they are training a frontier model, then that company will probably eat the cost, but its still a shitload of engineering heavy lift to make it happen

[ramsey@phpc.social]

@Viss @catsalad I never understood why Jay was CEO. She should have been CTO. Wasn’t the whole software architecture pretty much her design?

[quinn@social.circl.lu]

@Viss hey don't forget PII!

[autisticplushy@lgbtqia.space]

@Viss do do do do

[viss@mastodon.social]

@quinn oh totally. option B is that they just hoover up absolutely everything on the platform and feed it in its entirety to an llm and get paid for it that way

[viss@mastodon.social]

@ramsey @catsalad zero clue. back when i was on bsky, for the short period i used it, none of their staff would ever reply to me or respond to me in any way - which made it all the more delicious every time they fell on their faces from problems twitter solved ten years ago that i could have trivially helped them with.

[ramsey@phpc.social]

@Viss @catsalad I never understood that, either. It was supposedly created as a skunkworks project within Twitter, so why the hell have they acted like they didn't have 15+ years of experience to draw from?

[rawrmonstar@social.vivaldi.net]

@Viss I meant you can access the BlueSky firehouse without a partnership with them can't you? Why would an AI company pay BlueSky when they don't need to?