When Bluesky CEO Jay Graber took the SXSW stage this week, she managed to make fun of Mark Zuckerberg without mentioning Meta at all. Her black T-shirt was emblazoned with black text stretching across the chest and sleeves, similar to the style of a T-shirt that the billionaire founder wore at an event last year. Graber’s shirt declared in Latin, Mundus sine Caesaribus. Or, “a world without Caesars.”
On Bluesky, users expressed such excitement over Graber’s T-shirt that the platform decided to sell replicas to raise money for its developer ecosystem.
The $40 shirt, available in sizes S – XL, sold out in roughly 30 minutes.
Zuckerberg has drawn comparisons between himself and the Roman dictator Julius Caesar — the particular shirt of his that Graber is referencing said Aut Zuck aut nihil, or “Zuck or nothing.” It’s a nod to the Latin phrase Aut Caesar aut nihil, be
8 Comments
sejje
> (Yes, it is weird that Zuck goes out of his way to compare himself to a violent dictator.)
Why can't news sites just report the news? Why do they need to tell me what to think about it?
jazzyjackson
[flagged]
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.
pathless
I forgot about BlueSky since, around ~2 months ago, every last person I followed on there moved back (reopened) to Twitter due to the user number falloff… I am so out of the loop now
drpossum
While I agree with the sentiment, Bluesky is not the answer to fixing social media.
Tade0
Perhaps merch is the path to successful monetisation of software products?
The Something Awful forums had a $9.95 registration fee. I'm sure markup on those $40 shirts is more than that.
Some game developers also embraced this business model:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/745810196/deep-rock-gal…
Personally I would not spend this much on a plastic mug, but it seems there were enough takers to fund continued development.
tempodox
> Mundus sine Caesaribus
That can allude to all the all-too-powerful overlords, in tech and politics. They should make more of those shirts and take mail orders. Maybe even an NSFW version with a middle finger.
averageRoyalty
The article, the store page and the tweet – none of them mention how many t-shirts were for sale. Was it 500,000? Was it 8?
Apart from being barely significant in the first place, the article lacks the context to even make its point. Journalists are meant to do research. This is just a big, sloppy retweet.