Oh I never knew this!

Ah yes, exactly what I tell my boss when I do stupid stuff for fun

Imported US culture (movies, TV etc) has successfully planted the idea in a lot of people that teenagers under 18 are “essentially the same as little children”. So no one cares about technicalities.

The issue here is that most countries define the age of consent differently. I think we can agree that when a 16 year old agrees to sexual contact with another 16 year old, the dynamic is different than if they agree to it with a 40 year old. Absolutely. But that does not mean that the 16 year old doesnt understand what they are doing.

I can assure you that the judiciary system in my country does work. It’s just that these people either a. just want to beat someone up and need an excuse, or b. don’t agree with our laws and think it should be prison time for a 18 year old who wants to date a 16 year old, or a 21 year old who wants to date a 17 year old.

They lump far more people into the same group. They attack anyone whom they think they can, even if they know that their accusations are BS.

Just happened here in Austria. Police took 20 people into custody (13 have since been formally arrested) for luring people to fake dates where they beat them up.

The suspects said they hunted pedophiles, but at least in some of the cases they targeted young adults who expected to come to a date with 16-18 year olds.

Especially the part about his wife. Sounds very much like espionage to me.

No, anyone is able to create a “feed”

Problem being that any instance only displays those posts under a hashtag that it knows about. Currently, if I follow #formula1 from my home instance, I’m seeing different posts than if I follow #formula1 from a certain other instance.

Will probably get better with developments in that aspect in the next few years.

Surph_ninja is definitely right with one thing though: previously Meta used a pre-selected group of organizers who were able to fact check. Meta are now switching to a model where everyone can “fact check” (the former Twitter “community notes” system).

I take it that you missed the whole WordPress situation that developed over the last couple of months?

It’s about control over the intellectual property (trademarks, copyright) as well as control over the company which pays the developers. One does definitely not want a single person in control of these things, otherwise they can hold the whole project hostage (like Mullenweg is accused of, in the case of WordPress).

Additionally, the change also gives them a preferable tax status than the previous arrangement.

The point isnt money. The point is the “benevolent dictator” model, see Matt Mullenweg and the current WordPress controversy. The whole future of that software depends on this guy because he controls the most important assets (like the trademarks) personally.

Eugen and the whole Mastodon development team want to avoid a situation like that.

Bluesky has had a very fast development cycle and now already has features it didnt have 6 months ago. Mastodon’s main problem IMO is how long it takes for features to make their way into the live version. There are features on their github ready to be merged in for 2 years and when asked, no one on the development team was able to find out why it had not been merged.

Bluesky literally allows people to finetune controls on things like allowing quote posts and replies. Thats way more freedom that the average social media platform gives to a user.

Bluesky has the USP of people being able to choose from multiple algorithms or even use multiple ones at the same time; and that certainly has resonated with a lot of people.

The Mastodon devs have received a grant to work on a search/visibility tool in 2025, so I definitely expect developments there

The waiting list is still very long at this point. Probably don’t expect to get in for like 2 weeks…

Implementing mastodon.social instead of proper Mastodon, implementing no other fedi software – this scheduler has much potential/work ahead

What you see on Bluesky is a lot of people using their own domains for their handles. They are not hosting their own instances though, it’s only their identities. Their connection to the AT protocol still goes through the central Bluesky server.