The Week in Social Media: I'm Still Convinced Mastodon's Going to Outlive Everything
How Bluesky reached 25 million users in record time - and keeps growing!
OpenAI acquires Statsig for $1.1 billion, brings on CEO as applications executive
OpenAI has acquired Statsig, an analytics platform that allows companies to do things like A/B test, feature flag, and do user session replay. When I did web work at the end of the last decade, we used a bunch of different products and approaches to do these things, so I get the appeal of having it all in a single place. But now OpenAI has acquired Statsig, giving them access to all the human-generated data that company has built up.
OpenAI claims that Statsig will continue to operate independently. Uh huh. While I don't doubt Statsig were acquired for their suite of applications and expertise around such, I also very strongly suspect that access to their data was the key thing. Bluesky uses Statsig and all user interactions (what you click on, etc) get sent to the platform.
The search for novel data means that I suspect there are going to be more and more of these types of acquisitions. And until I hear otherwise, knowing that everything I did and do on the site is going into OpenAI's data vacuum...gives me pause. I think I'll be more active on Mastodon, and I was already more active there already.
Speaking of which,
Mississippiās age assurance law puts decentralized social networks to the test
Mastodon says it doesnāt āhave the meansā to comply with age verification laws
Thread between Eugen Rochko and Mike Masnick
Mastodon GmbH, a German non-profit that is responsible for the Mastodon software used by decentralized instances all over the world, has said that it doesn't have the means to comply with the law, so it just won't. This led to a discussion between the parties on Mastodon/Bluesky (bridged, naturally). Bluesky, who in essence don't want to comply while this is being challenged in the courts, has decided to block users in Mississippi while this plays out. And Mastodon GmbH are doing nothing.
Masnick thinks that's a bad idea. But a lot of people are chiming in with what I think is ultimately the correct position: Mastodon GmbH is a German company, subject to German and European laws. Why should they have to care about the laws of one US state?
Rochko brings up an interesting hypothetical that looks less and less hypothetical by the day in our current times:
The law is bad, nobody said otherwise. But decentralized systems are supposed to be resilient. If the US makes a law banning all mentions of LGBT from social media, which sounds less unlikely by the minute, what will Bluesky do? All of your infrastructure is controlled by one US company...
Masnick points out that isn't true, that there are ATproto infrastructure instances not controlled by Bluesky. And he's not wrong. But the people using those are a tiny, tiny fraction (like, less than ten thousand users) out of Bluesky's entire userbase. mastodon.social isn't Mastodon. But bluesky.social is basically Bluesky, and it's weaselly to pretend otherwise.
I got on Bluesky back at the tail-end of when it was invite-only, invited by a poet I admire who I knew from my Twitter days. She tried to make a go of it on Mastodon, like a lot of people, and never found her place there. And while I hoped that Mastodon could be a place for artists and poets (in the same way it was for, say, cybersecurity types), that was clearly a misplaced hope. My people weren't there. They were a little more there on Bluesky. (They're even more there on Facebook, which breaks my heart.) So I sucked it up and created an account.
But I expected it would just be the thing, for now, and for however long. Having been around since the pre-internet BBS days, I've seen a lot of tech, people, ideas, just come and go. Online spaces seem to last longer now than they did. But they've only ever been transitory.
I have a feeling that Mastodon could last longer. Than Facebook, Bluesky, Twitter, or whatever else. Don't ever count out cranky nerds and their preferred tech. Discord is the hot thing with younger people, but there are a lot of IRC servers and networks, still humming along in the background, the way they did in 1996 when I was connecting using mIRC on my rickety Windows 3.1 machine.
I still post on Mastodon, regularly. I don't expect this to change. I expect one day that the lights will go off at Bluesky, the way they did for MySpace, Friendster, Google+, and others. I don't think that'll be a year from now, but 10? Yeah, maybe. For decentralization to be a real thing, you need a constellation of instances. mastodon.social has 268000 users. My own instance has a shade under 300. And there are many of these little instances, twinkling like dim stars.
Will my instance be around forever? I doubt it. I kick in $50-100/year to help with the server costs, and I hope others do as well, but there's always the chance it could shut down. And so what if it does? If I'm lucky, I'm able to migrate everything. And if not? Well, I do what I've done so many times before. I find a new place. I create an account. And I begin the processing of starting over, again. The instance gone, but the protocol still humming. tilde.club is my second home in geminispace. Online, nothing lasts forever.