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rKarpinski

> Zuckerberg has drawn comparisons between himself and the Roman dictator Julius Caesar

Thought it was Caesar Augustus? IIRC Zuckerberg has even claimed that his hairstyle is inspired by him.

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here he is training with Henry Cooper:

https://youtu.be/TvjsWmlOJmY

yea it's augustus, but Zuck's "Zuck or Nothing" playing off of "Aut Caesar aut nihil" isn't even referring to a particular Caesar, but it's use as the title Emperor, and attributable to Cesare Borgia.

I think Zuck's shirt is a good joke on everyone trying to displace Facebook from the market. BlueSky wants to be the next Facebook/Twitter, so IMO by not getting the joke the Bluesky shirt is a self-own.

> BlueSky wants to be the next Facebook/Twitter, so IMO by not getting the joke the Bluesky shirt is a self-own.

The point of the shirt seems to be that they don't want to be the next facebook. The article clarifies that. Whether they'll live up to that promise if they grow is another issue.

Oh they'll live up to the promise, because of the protocol's technical architecture. Also mentioned in the article, if they decide to go on a direction the public doesn't like, it's an easy fork.

It's an easy fork maybe, but where's the incentive to stand up a peer or replacement? They're made a paradox for themselves, in attempting to create adfree social media that moderates itself the userbase now expects the service to be free and ad free and heavily moderated by volunteer labor. This will work for a while spending millions in VC cash but I don't see the sustainability.

I've considered standing up a PDS a few times, and I think if I was going to design a financial incentive I'd wrap up a static blog host and personal cloud storage so I could charge a market rate fee (5 bucks a month for 100GB storage, whatever Dropbox is charging) and bluesky publishing and following just tacked on as a value add.

the real money would be in extending the protocol to support distributed marketplaces, so hosts could each have their own rules - disrupt Etsy, eBay, Facebook marketplace, but at some point you're getting into Silk Road 3.0 territory

I'm not laughing

Sounds right; Zuck’s threads generally are a joke.

I don't get it, could you explain the joke?

Sure. It's ironic, because someone saying "Emperor or Bust" is trying to become the emperor. Zuck is already zuck, so "Zuck or nothing" is throwing shade at everyone trying to be him.

You are trying way too hard, whatever your motive. A world without Caesars is the ideal of all distributed systems. To become the anti-Caesar perhaps.

The entire point Jay Graber is making with her shirt is that BlueSky does not want to be the next Facebook or Twitter.

I don't understand how you misunderstood that so badly that you came to this conclusion.

On the contrary, the phrase is a direct threat, "we are here to disrupt and take you down", maybe Jay Graber does not want to be the Mark Zuckerburg, but bluesky wants to be the next Facebook. its just evolving to diffuse the legal and ethical responsibilities of moderating. It's laudable and I agree with them on principle, but I'm not in love with the David Goliath framing. They're equally as silicon valleyish and VC funded as anyone else.

Even if they were as you say, a David and Goliath framing is 100% appropriate given the relative assets and market power of Meta and Bluesky.

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