Notices by Kathrin (kathrin@trouth.eu)

I'll lure you in with politics and keep you hooked with porn.

...trial records of Catharina Linck, executed for sodomy with another woman (her wife) in the German town of Halberstadt in 1721, stated that ‘[o]ften when a woman touched her, even slightly, she became so full of passion that she did not know what to do’, that she had had sexual or intimate relations with prostitutes, maidens and widows and ‘had never been intimate with a man’, and that before she was beheaded she declared that ‘even if she were done away with, others like her would remain’.

Good #morning, counts and cunts!

We've just surpassed 30000 words, which means our little soap story is now officially the longest continuous text I've ever written. And none of it is anything I can publish on Amazon, since there's just way too many unsavoury elements in it. Which means, I'm really only doing this for fun, shits and giggles. A sort of writing exercise that got so wet and slippery, it got out of hand.

@feditips

Let's say, Eugen at one point says: "You know what? I'll take 450 million and sell the project and website to Meta." That money can shield you quite well from the public outrage it would create and the more of a threat the fediverse poses, the more money our enemies are likely to spend on silencing it.

Everyone has a price.

@feditips

That's true, but they more or less maintain the HTML standard. You would have to have a lot of skill and dedication to come up with a different standard and implement it. Also, if the big browsers (or, for the fediverse, the big apps) don't support your competing standard, you're just running your service for yourself.

I'm not saying it can't be done, but right now we absolutely rely on the common goodwill of all fediverse developers. Bad apples can spoil the bunch.

@feditips

You could say the same about HTML and yet big tech has hijacked the W3C to implement DRM, for example.

@feditips

And finally

5. There are a number of legal problems the fediverse is ripe for exploitation for. Copyright is a main issue - every server just violates copyright on the daily, on a mass scale, simply by including posts from other servers in their timeline that the individual user has not given consent to. Enterprising attorneys may discover this as a source of income in the not too distant future.

5/5

@feditips

4. I think we underestimate the power billionaires can have when they want to take over an entire technology. If they really put their power and money to it, they don't need to "outcompete" us with their own services, they can go to the root and sabotage ActivityPub itself.

4/

@feditips

3. Moderation is still an unsolved problem, in that bad actors can only get acted on 𝘢𝘧𝘵𝘦𝘳 the damage has already been done. Centralized platforms can actually get out in front of this easier because they can at least implement some pre-screening during signup. The fediverse signup process is completely unmoderated, as bad actors can just use bad platforms (or their own) to launch their harassment from.

3/

@feditips

2. Similarly, it is still much too difficult (or mostly downright impossible) to move accounts between different fediverse services. If a whole project withers away - usually because the lead and only dev loses interest - it can leave an entire ecosystem with nowhere to go.

2/

@feditips

The problem is, the fediverse is more brittle than this makes it sound. It's still better than any centralized platform, but it's not as robust as it should be:

1. Small servers can and will go down without a warning, leaving users stranded and their data lost. The Mastodon pledge tries to get a handle on this, but only works when people adhere to it.

1/

@feditips

This is a long read, but it very succinctly explains why these things inevitably always will happen on centralized systems:

https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow/

@mastohost

Thank you so much for keeping us updated!