Convener: Gilles Dutilh (@depemig@social.coop)

Notes

• Gilles: Sex has the potential of making or breaking new technology, famously in the story of video2000 vs VHS. That would be one reason to talk about which place “sex” can have in the fediverse. A more important reason in my opinion, is that the internet seems to be a sick also as concerns sex work (including, but not exclusively porn). Many people work in sex business over the platform OnlyFans.
• What is wrong with Onlyfans (as with any monopolist platform selling user content)?
  • Takes 20% of sex workers income (and probably increasing)
  • Onlyfans defines the rules (think about that)
  • The monopoly makes content creators stay on only fans, because thta’s where the paying viewers are.
  • This is taking much of the agency from the people actually creating the content (hello spotify, hi github), while earning money over their back
• My open question: what could a federated platform/software look like enabling digital sex work.

I (Michelle Hughes - @MegaMichelle@a2mi.social) couldn’t make it to the session, but I wanted to mention a project for helping sex workers set up their own stores, and it has federated discovery features: https://conjured.ink/ They’ve sort of got 3 things going on:

1. Building a commerce platform that people can set up.
2. Building a federated discovery platform, where you can run a directory without hosting any NSFW content yourself.
3. Making lists of NSFW-friendly payment processors that people can work with.