Probably because trains are limited in both weight and volume compared to ships and also less efficient. If you have this short route and know it’ll need this amount of cargo shipped it likely makes sense.

This single ship can carry more containers than any train could be expected to pull, likely by at least one order of magnitude.

All in all I’d guess the advantages are roughly:

• Reduced staff
• reduced energy use (land based shipping is less efficient almost by default)
• no need for infrastructure except ports (if you assume there is no train line or this shipping would move existing lines over capacity building this ship is likely cheaper or at least in line with 300km of rail)
• simpler logistics (loading / unloading)

Disadvantages:

• Speed (a train would likely move at 3-5x the speed)

I would also not expect the risk for catastrophic fires to be all that high. This ship has the batteries be containers. So once you’ve designed a container that is a large battery, you’ve already spent so much that a proper BMS including proper battery fire suppression as well as proper breakers/contractors are things you’ve built into it without even thinking about cost. The separation provided by building containers as the battery is the next line of defence if one container fails spectacularly, it also allows the batteries to be maintained on land, much cheaper than if they were part of the ship.

This is very interesting to me and I’ve played with this kinda idea a few weeks ago, the Activity Pub proposal you linked seems very sensible for communicating between actors but doesn’t really offer much of a path to create a platform. In my view creating a platforms is the reason this should exist, because current platforms (Amazon,Ebay,Uber, AirBnB,DoorDash,Lieferheld) are mostly just engaging in rent seeking from buyers/sellers on their platforms. Rentier Capitalism

I don’t believe a protocol can sufficiently challenge the current players without an underpinning organizational structure that ensures fairness and transparency to both sellers and buyers, when it comes to moderation, indexing, and categorization. Especially moderation but also hosting will have costs, and the consequences for bad moderation are likely much larger with commerce than with social media. So I would like a Coop with significant control from both sellers and buyers to provide the public facing platform which then federates with the Stores which can be self hosted by sellers (potentially as an extension to existing eCommerce Software).

Or alternatively two Coops if it’s not reasonable for the sellers to host their own Stores e.g.: Uber and AirBnB, here the sellers should outright own the one providing the Stores, and own the minority in the one providing the Coop. Obviously middle grounds could also exist where e.g.: a Platform for Delivery food federates with seller servers that are hosted on a local level by Coops comprising of restaurants of a region.

I very deeply believe something like this could make our commerce much better and fairer, and while getting it of the ground might be hard, I think because the sellers make money on these Platforms it should give real incentive to develop both the tech and the legal orgs as well as advertise for them, and for the sellers to invest real money into it, or maybe agree to kick 1-2% of a purchase back to the coop.

Generally internet culture In the Dach region is very active and forward looking, and potentially ideologically aligned with the idea of Fediverse and generally FOSS software and privacy. E.g. for Wikipedia language share German got overtaken by Spanish only within the last 5 years slipping from 2nd to 3rd suggesting some early adopter and internet participation higher than the norm.

Subjectively a lot of people here have uneasiness with big tech, and are relatively informed about alternatives.DACH on Reddit was also very big, and very ideologically opposed to API changes and general Reddit corpo behaviour. Subjectively again Dach and ich_iel felt like home when I joined, essentially like the Reddit culture I was used to, just with a little more progressive views across the board.

Also I suspect that German language speakers are fairly active within the English speaking parts of the internet in general, while Spanish and French as well as other non Germanic languages seem to have more disdain for English language content and sites, Germans and Dutch as well as Nordics are very comfortable with English as a common language.