More from The hunt for the next Twitter: all the news about alternative social media platforms
Today, a Hugging Face employee published data from 1 million Bluesky posts scraped from its API to the AI repository. He’s removed it and apologized, but 404 Media notes the set was “trending” all day.
Bluesky says it’s looking into ways to “specify consent (or not) for AI training.” but acknowledges that “It will be up to outside developers to respect these settings.”
Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu confirmed in an email to The Verge that the platform is “actively working” with its lawyers to ensure Bluesky’s compliance with the EU’s Digital Services Act’s information disclosure rules, as Bloomberg reports.
Yesterday, the European Commission called out that Bluesky has no page listing “how many users they have in the EU and where they are legally established,” as required by the DSA.
Update November 26th: Updated with confirmation from Bluesky spokesperson Emily Liu.
Meta seemed to have bought the domain earlier this year, sometime after it bought the company that owned it prior to the debut of threads.net, where Meta’s Twitter competitor lives.
Previously, visiting the threads.com URL didn’t show anything, but today, it shows... well, an error message. With a “Meta © 2024” and a Facebook logo.
Theo Sanderson created a visualizer that sends you through a tunnel of Bluesky posts as they happen. Maybe it’s pointless, like watching users bust cusses in real-time, but it’s also fun that the platform enables this sort of thing to be made.
CEO Jay Graber, who was on Decoder earlier this year, marked the occasion with a thread of 20 fun facts, like this one:
The platform may not be seeing Bluesky and Threads numbers, but the lines are also going up for Mastodon right now, according to Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko.
After days of explosive growth on the platform, the Bluesky Safety team posted Friday that it received 42,000 moderation reports in the preceding 24 hours (versus 360,000 in all of 2023).
The team added that it’s working to bring on new members and asks users to help by reporting troll, spam, and scam accounts. Bluesky has also implemented email verification for new signups.
Rough timing for the outages today. After crossing 15 million users yesterday, the site is already past 16 million today.
King, who might be partially responsible for the original $8 starting price for Elon Musk’s Twitter Blue (now X Premium), is leaving for Threads. Here’s his Threads profile.