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@davetroy@toad.social1/IMPORTANT thread about Bluesky funding and origins. Many folks know that it was seeded by Jack Dorsey around a libertarian vision of a magical network that wouldn’t need moderation because it would be decentralized and baked into a protocol (somehow).
The people who aided Dorsey in pursuing this vision were other libertarian/post-rationalists connected with effective altruism and other online anarchist movements.
2/One network called TPOT (‘that part of Twitter’) was instrumental. It carried over into Bluesky’s founding DNA.
Someone made this visualization in 2023, showing the TPOT/EA network quite clearly. EA as you know is part of TESCREAL and the belief systems that have driven Sam Bankman Fried and Elon Musk. SBF also put money into Musk’s Twitter buy.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/subcultures/tpot-postrat
3/Now that Dorsey has bailed as a board member and principal funder, Bluesky’s DNA is basically TPOT people. Who is going to win in that scenario? I don’t know, but I’m not putting money on the users. The most recent funding came from Blockchain Capital LLC...
https://www.theverge.com/2024/5/5/24149543/jack-dorsey-gone-bluesky-board
4/
It gets worse. Blockchain Capital LLC was co-founded by Steve Bannon pal Brock Pierce, a major crypto advocate, perennial presidential candidate, and close friend of Eric Adams. Pierce has dozens of other shady MAGA/Russia ties as well.
https://universeodon.com/@cryptadamist/113472115447080382
5/Eric Adams was a frequent guest on Pierce's jet. Steve Bannon helped Pierce raise $60mm from Goldman Sachs 20 years ago for his "World of Warcraft" mining arbitrage play, Internet Gaming Entertainment. So you probably don't want anything to do with Bluesky long term.
https://nypost.com/2021/11/23/eric-adams-flew-to-puerto-rico-on-bitcoin-billionaire-jet-report/
6/Possibly Bluesky can address this by discussing their funding in detail, the expectations of the funders, and whether the TPOT/PostRat community is still a principal driver of the vision for the "company." But this all points to another rug pull in progress, and a lot of credulous people hurt.
While it is reasonable that the company acknowledged that Dorsey's vision of "moderation by protocol" was unfeasible, it sets up a highly centralized model that is now subject to capture.
7/And the next investment they took was from anarchocapitalist cryptobros with ties to Russia? Doesn't add up.
For those interested, here's the original post I shared here back in 2023 re: the TPOT DNA and origins of the network.
https://www.easyzoom.com/imageaccess/884cb1c001cd48e79aca92232bd24a04
8/From Bluesky's press release:
"[Blockchain's] Kinjal Shah will join our board. Kinjal shares our vision for a social media ecosystem that empowers the people who use it, and we are glad to have her support as we invest in driving the adoption of decentralized social."
9/The company should try to address this by publishing a clear and convincing "trust story" that offers assurances about its funders and their motives, similar to an S-1 prior to an IPO. Creators deserve to have a clear picture so they can decide whether and how to invest. Basic transparency.
@davetroy Who cares? All palaces are temporary palaces.
@davetroy This is all good for people to know, but *please* don’t call these jerks “anarchists” or call it an “online anarchist movement”. They don’t want to be regulated *themselves*, but they are actively trying to subjugate and exploit others, which is anathema to anarchism.
@RandomDamage @Moss @davetroy they are very literally not anarchists though, and it makes it hard to recommend this thread despite having a lot of important information because in the first post, op says something where they have no idea what they're talking about
@julieofthespirits @RandomDamage @Moss @davetroy
Came here to say exactly the same.
It's not necessary to call ultraneoliberal dudes "anarchists" just because they had the money to occupy the label in media.
Or shall we call rightwingers now "patriots" or "common sense-driven people"?
And we could call anti-vaxxers "fully informed"?
Otherwise, thank you for the information! 
(and sorry for jumping in your mentions)
@julieofthespirits@kolektiva.social @RandomDamage@infosec.exchange @Moss@beige.party @davetroy@toad.social Just to help add more context, "Effective Altruism" uses anarchist-style labels and ideas to sell eugenics and cement the role of capital. It is most definitely not anarchy.
@julieofthespirits @RandomDamage @Moss @davetroy Anarcho-capitalism is a thing, but the "anarcho" part doesn't align well with what, say, the anarcho-syndicalists uphold. The former believe in the pursuit of unfettered self-interest in the competitive arena of an unregulated market, the latter in organizing around shared wants and needs - collective bargaining, unions, co-ops, mutual aid etc.
In the popular imagination, "anarchism" is synonymous with lawlessness, civil disorder, even terrorism.
@simon_lucy @julieofthespirits@kolektiva.social @RandomDamage @Moss @davetroy Yeah, that was kinda my point, only I'm currently labouring under the Tyranny of the Austere Character Limit!
I wonder how many disagreements a person has that hinge entirely on the participants using variant definitions of a single word? An example would be one party defines "gender" as natal sex, the other as a social identity. Dictionaries support both senses, so they're stuck in a linguistic dispute, talking at cross-purposes.
@ApostateEnglishman @julieofthespirits @RandomDamage @Moss @davetroy
Exactly so. It is a bête noir of mine. It operates in all areas of discourse but it destroys social media because terms are never agreed.
It's almost like footnotes are needed (not community notes). But who is qualified to make such Solomonic Judging, apart from you and I and the Good Folk that agree?
@julieofthespirits @ApostateEnglishman @RandomDamage @Moss @davetroy
In this case, I agree with you about anarchy as a category being misused though I'd probably admit to being a cooperativist.
@simon_lucy @ApostateEnglishman @RandomDamage @Moss @davetroy the gender example is yet another example too of "I have no brains and yet I must speak"
@julieofthespirits @simon_lucy Have you had extensive professional training on navigating gender identity in social and healthcare contexts? Until recently I worked for the British NHS, and for many years before was senior support lead for adults with complex needs.
Have you read any books or studied any of the recent literature on the evolving science of sex and gender? What would you say is sufficient to determine biological sex? Chromosomes, gametes, hormones, neuroanatomy?
Something else?
@ApostateEnglishman @simon_lucy if you worked for the NHS you're the last person anyone should take seriously on gender issues. Notoriously backwards service, still stuck in the 1960s. It's like an anti-credential
@julieofthespirits Exactly correct! These plutocrats are "anarchists," in the same way a certain group of like-minded white men labelled themselves the National Socialist German Workers Party.
Some people just love to maliciously twist definitions for both propaganda and political purposes. Problem is, they're good at it.
@julieofthespirits Exactly and it makes me wonder what other cryptobro propaganda someone has fallen for if they don't understand how Libertarians rebranded themselves as anarchocapitalists. @RandomDamage @Moss @davetroy
@RandomDamage @Moss @davetroy But "National Socialist Party" sounds so positive!
/s
@Moss @davetroy seconded; they are marginally "ancap" (anarcho capitalist) but plenty of tescrealists are happily swinging to / already were hard statist now that a hard right austerity administration is coming to power in the US. like cryptocurrency, it's a technocratic capitalist movement that seeks to seize power from the state and, rather than dismantle it, turn it into a money printer for a new(ish) generation of totally unaccountable plutocrats.
@jplebreton @Moss @davetroy I prefer "neo feudalist." They all want to be feudal lords.
@0xF21D @jplebreton @Moss @davetroy
They are all people deluded in the shared belief that the climate catastrophe & global nuclear war they are building towards is survivable...for those with bunkers.
@0xF21D @Moss @davetroy see Varoufakis' "technofeudalism", though i think that's just a fancy term for capital (behaving exactly as it always does, when it has enough power) devouring yet another critical layer of the society it depends on. tescreal values (less rhetoric) are sort of "inspired by" feudalism but it was an extremely simple paradigm whereas the economic mechanisms today depend on complexity, obscurity, interdependent.
@jplebreton @Moss @davetroy you mean like how investment schemes always have an overly complex description of how they work in order to hide the grift, and the identity of the person doing the screwing?
@davetroy Anarchism is “no rulers including myself.” Libertarianism (in recent usage) is “no rulers except myself”, with the implication that literally everyone else is just a resource to exploit. A sort of “distributed monarchism” with trade agreements between a million rapacious kinglets.
@Moss yes, I know. But there are a lot of people interpreting those philosophies in ways that suit themselves.
@davetroy I’m sorry but “professional liars misuse terms, so I will too” is not the seat of logic you might have thought it was.
@Moss if you're curious, the specific strains I'm referencing is LeFevre-ian voluntarism and autarchy, and Konkinist agorism. Both of them want to dissolve the state, hence they are, by definition, 'anarchists.'
@davetroy Destroying the state is not the only defining characteristic of anarchism, it is only the most simplistic freshman-level element. The specific right-libertarian people in the specific case of bsky funding are all power-hungry exploiters, not devotees of a narrow historical branch of political philosophy.
@Moss yes, and yet they still would consider themselves "anarchocapitalists." You should take this up with them.
@davetroy You chose to carry water for them, all on your own.
@Moss no, I'm sorry, I did not.
@davetroy @Moss "anarchocapitalists" would have worked just fine - then it's clear what context and what history there is behind it, which people are being talked about and their lineage.
To talk about these people being part of "anarchist movements" in the first post of the thread is just misleading and incorrect. Because as others here say, anarchy is about abolishing all oppression and hierarchy and not just the state.
@radicalresilience @davetroy @Moss This is the crux of the problem.
Anarchists do not consider "anarcho-capitaiists" to be anarchists. All anarchists oppose capitalism, and all anarchism is against all forms of hierarchical control, not just the state's.
You've created a long thread of people telling you the same thing over and over, none of which was necessary to what you wanted to write. This kind of "anarchists want to destroy the state, and so do warlords, therefore warlords are anarchists" just isn't going to fly on Mastodon.
@richpuchalsky @davetroy @Moss The acting president had an early run in 2020 fabulating about anarchists and antifa, enemy of the state style. Dave, what would you say if your proclaimed anarchist actors distance themselves from being anarchists in 2025? Would that tilt your classification? I guess not because let's be honest: we often like to justify what we want to think. Justifications are an exchangeable decoration more often than the result of a free collaborative deliberation.
@richpuchalsky @davetroy @Moss This is partially due to the nearly universal malpractice of confusing chaos and anarchy with disorder and unorganized states. When properly understood, chaos is actually highly ordered and that is why anarchists believe in it; warlordists and capitalists believe in hierarchical organization, but the caps who like to take advantage of disorder and unorganized ppl call themselves anarcho- because they take adv of the confusion to sound cool, like co-opting punk
I went to your profile to leave a note that you don't understand the meaning of anarchism, and saw that you're an investigative journalist.
Yikes, perhaps you need to investigate anarchist theory before you spread bullshit.
Do you believe "free speech absolutists" are actually invested in free speech for everyone?
Do you believe Hitler was a socialist because the Nazi party was called the Nationalist Socialist party?
You're watering down your own credentials.
@davetroy
here's some investigative journalism for you (from Wikipedia):
"Robert LeFevre, recognized as an autarchist by Murray Rothbard, distinguished autarchism from anarchy, whose economics he felt entailed interventions contrary to freedom."
Anarcho-capitalists say they want to dissolve the state, but they also say they want "systems of private property enforced by private agencies" - which most actual anarchists would consider quite state-like.
You seem to be a liberal journalist and liberalism/capitalism is a right-wing authoritarian ideology.
Therefore Dave Troy is a right-wing authoritarian journalist.
Yours was a mischaracterization, mine is not.
It could be worse, they call MAGA a #conservative movement, although they are the most revolutionary (or perhaps the only revolutionary) significant movement of our time.
I shifted from regular posting here in Mastodon to BlueSky because that platform is more lively & less probe to downtime (well, the instances I use anyhow) - I will move again whenever - its not like I am anyone who monetises my social media posts
The big gorilla X is currently rotting as a repository of far Right BS with an owner putting his thumb on the scales - anywhere is better than that
@davetroy Thanks for the thread. I agree with your recommendations: Bluesky needs to publish a clear and convincing "trust story"; and peopel should be very skeptical about the long-term possibilities of Bluesky.
Also, on the moderation front, Dorsey was replaced on #Bluesky board by Mike Masnick, who's also very libertarian. Masnick's a lot smarter than Dorsey, and does understand the importance of content moderation. Still, one of the examples Masnick's "Protocols not platforms" paper that inspired Bluesky (and Nostr) uses to discuss about why the protocol approach is better is that it allows Alex Jones fan to still reach his audience: "those who don’t wish to be bothered with his nonsense need not deal with it; those who do wish to see it still have access to it."
https://knightcolumbia.org/content/protocols-not-platforms-a-technological-approach-to-free-speech
I still see Bluesky as a useful short-term Twitter alternative (Meta and Threads are already doing all the things that Bluesky is likely do in the future, it's a lot easier to get up and going on Bluesky than Mastodon, and Blacksky is the only thing I know of in the decentralized world that's a good path for Black Twitter. Still, even without all the important points you make, and the "we don't have to ban Alex Jones" factor , they're a venture-funded startup, so once they need to monetize they're very likely to turn to an exploitative business model. So while it's situationally useful, it's not a promising long-term base.
@thenexusofprivacy thank you for that thoughtful commentary. I discussed a lot of this stuff with Dorsey ages ago, and know where it comes from.
Practically, I'm most concerned with the latter points you mention, about its funding model and likely trajectory.
@davetroy thanks, glad you thought it was useful. And yeah the funding model and trajectory would be concerns in any case, all this stuff just adds to it.
@thenexusofprivacy @davetroy
I'm thinking about making an account on BlueSky, but still keeping this as my "home". Thanks for all of this information.
I took it as a good sign that they just kicked Gaetz, Boebert and Greene off of the platform.
@thenexusofprivacy @davetroy I have tried to warn people and will continue to warn people about blue sky. An otherwise intelligent tech person that I used to follow on twitch was in complete denial when I tried to warn them as well.  Being autistic in this timeline is fucking exhausting.