Escaping ruling class and corporate domination is one of the reasons some people choose to migrate to the Fediverse. Even some of the other reasons, like ads, engagement obsession, political censorship, content sorting algorithms, can all be traced back to corporate control. While corporations don't have much control of the Fediverse today, could they in the future? One might think that Fediverse is designed to make this impossible. In my opinion, it is only designed to somewhat resist this, but it is still vulnerable to ruling class takeover. The ruling class doesn't need that now, as they already control all major social networks, and Fediverse remains a niche. But shall that change, they might be out to try to control it. Can they succeed? I'll admit and say I am very far from an expert, so I hope someone will correct me if I make any mistakes due to misunderstanding the Fediverse. Instead of centralizing a social network in a single instance controlled by a single entity, the Fediverse can be federated into multiple instances. However, to host an instance, requires some investment, and although it can be small for some services, it is a barrier that many people choose not to cross. Hence, as we have already seen, instances are controlled by either organizations or groups who pooled funds for their instance, or individuals who incurred the initial investment themselves. Not bad, so far. However, this does present an issue. If the Fediverse were to grow more instances, people who have money are more capable of starting new instances. It also favors people who don't live in countries where salaries and cost of living are lower, which would make renting VPS even more expensive to them. This gap is closed as the software gets better and more lightweight, but as it stands, this is how it works. The other problem is that many Fediverse networks are already sort of centralized, in the sense that there is one (sometimes a handful) of instances that are biggest. This means If someone were to take over just those, they may already have enough control. This is less of a problem for platforms that matured more and have more instances. If someone like Elon Musk were to go after the biggest instances and either offer money to buy them (which is very likely to work) or somehow pursue censoring the instances that don't, although that is not as easy as buying a single company (ignoring the cost difference), it is still quite easy. We haven't seen it because they haven't sought it yet, but I fear that the Fediverse is not as resistant to this as it should.

Posting this here about a problem I had because of a stupid mistake I made, and now it turned to be a mostly easy fix. I didn't find many resources online on it, so it may help people in tbe future. I mounted /proc, /sys, /run and /dev in a directory that I was making into a chroot environment. Eventually, I wanted to delete the directory, but forgot to unmount those directories. I deleted with `sudo rm -rf`. Yes it's dumb, I know. From what I learned, most of what I deleted would be restored with a reboot, except one part: efivars, which is located in /sys. This messed up my bootloader, and it was no longer booting into Linux, but instead windows (which is also on my system). I did not find a lot of resources on this online. I fixed it by booting into my computer with a USB with linux Mint on it. I use `refind` as my bootloader, which is awesome and simple. All I had to do was run the `refind-install` while chrooted into my system. It handles fixing whatever is wrong. After rebooting, I no longer had any issues.

I have a static blog. Think something like a site generated with a static site generator (like Jekyll, Hugo, Eleventy, etc) I've been thinking about making a separate backend for the blog with ActivityPub functionality to boost its discoverability. Is there any tool that can assist me with this? I wanted to make sure before I embark on building something from scratch. P. S. I am aware of WriteFreely, but I would prefer if the blog site remains a static site and decoupled from the ActivityPub stuff.

I am willing to hear differing opinions on this. I sometimes see people on Fediverse speak as if there is something inherently wrong about the idea of content sorting and filtering algorithms. There is a massive amount of content today and limited time. Content algorithms *could* provide the benefit of helping us sort content based on what we want. The most he urgent news, the most informative articles, the closest friends, etc. This might have some similarities with how Facebook and others do it, but it is not the same. Big social media algorithms have one goal: maximizing their profit. One metric for that is maximizing screen on-time and scrolling. Personally, I've been developing an algorithm to help me sift through the content I get on my RSS reader, as there's a lot of content I'm uninterested in. This algorithm would *save me time*, whereas those of Twitter and Facebook maximize my wasted time. In my opinion, algorithms should be: - opt-in: off my default, and the user is given a clear choice to change it - transparent: the algorithm should be transparent about its goals and inner workings Only with this, can algorithms be good. What are your thoughts?