How the Fediverse Could Save Democracy

Favorite Physicists & Mathematicians

Other notables: Stephen Hawking, Edwin Hubble

Other notables: Daphne Koller, Grady Booch, Leonardo Fibonacci, Evelyn Berezin, Benoit Mandelbrot

Liquid Victor : Media tracking and aggregation [used to assemble this presentation]
Prehensile Pony-Tail : A static site generator built in c#
TestHelperExtensions : A set of extension methods helpful when building unit tests
Conference Scheduler : A conference schedule optimizer
IntentBot : A microservices framework for creating conversational bots on top of Bot Framework
LiquidNun : Library of abstractions and implementations for loosely-coupled applications
Toastmasters Agenda : A c# library and website for generating agenda's for Toastmasters meetings
ProtoBuf Data Mapper : A c# library for mapping and transforming ProtoBuf messages

Data streams like "[Actor] did [Activity] to [Entity]"

Communication terms
- Actors
- Entities
- Activities
Examples
- This person bought this car
- This broker bought this stock in this amount for this customer
- This project manager updated this project timeline with this milestone

Most "thought-leaders" have a presence
- Some cross-post, others have migrated completely
- A tipping-point is coming
Tech-heavy at the moment
- Other domains are hit-or-miss
Sanctuary for underserved communities
- Moderation policies vary by instance
Requires some up-front decisions
- More barriers to entry than corp solutions

No algorithm
- No incentive to the extremes
- No advantage to being evil
Less corporate control
- No universal policies
- If your instance changes for the worse, you can move
- Lawsuits: still an attack vector
Less governmental control
- There will always be an instance...
- Support direct action
- Governmental blocks: still a risk

Inertia
- Change is a last-resort
- Discovery is hard
Open-Source is often a hobby
- Features may deploy slowly
- Distribution makes changes harder
- Moderation is time-consuming
Active subversion by corps
- Migration away is intentionally hard
- Predatory activities
- Bait & Switch
- Divide & Conquer
- Adversarial interop