Maybe Bluesky has "won"

Bluesky looks promising. In my bubble it seems like a lot of artists have been moving to it after some Xitter fiasco with AI training or whatnot (idk, I don't keep up with those news).

But, this:

> Radically open

> I think some might be surprised to learn how open Bluesky is. It’s trivially easy to grab an export of any user’s data. It’s also a core assumption of the service that all the data (aside from out-of-protocol stuff like DMs) is completely open.

I'm still skeptical of Bluesky having "won" until the average user is completely aware of things like this. I fully expect that there will be some drama about this openness at some point in the future.

When this happens, we'll see if people go back to Twitter again (how many times has it been already?); or if they embrace this new social network where your art and posts can be scraped waaaaaay more easily than in Twitter, so they're probably more likely to be used for AI training anyway.

Until conversations about these topics happen between non-tech users, I'm mostly just watching how the situation evolves.

I know a lot of artists who hate the idea of their work being used to train generative models, and I can’t blame them tbh. That being said, most of them know that they can’t prevent that from happening unless they want to stop posting their work anywhere public.

HOWEVER: there’s a big difference between posting your work publicly and having someone come along and use it to train their models against your wishes, and a platform changing its terms to say “And you’re giving us permission to use this to train our models”. They’re saying “no, you don’t have my permission to use my work and you’ll have to go against my wishes to use it this way”. It’s not a big difference in terms of outcome, but I think the principle of the thing is important to a lot of artists.