Ex-Trump insider Lev Parnas over the weekend noted the situation surrounding the Los Angeles protests, saying "the clock is ticking" as Trump has "troops in the streets, tanks on standby, and plans to crush the resistance."
"I know a lot of you woke up this morning in shock—staring at the footage out of Los Angeles, asking yourselves: How could this happen? Is this real? Is this really happening in the United States of America? But let me be clear, folks—this is real. It is happening. And I need you to know that my sources deep inside Trump World have been warning me that what we witnessed overnight was no isolated event. It’s part of something much bigger. And what I have to tell you today is chilling," he wrote.
"Yesterday, when Donald Trump deployed over 2,000 federal troops into Los Angeles under the justification of 'restoring order,' most headlines ran with it like it was some isolated act of retaliation—just another example of Trump punishing blue states. And yes, part of this is personal. Make no mistake: this is revenge against California, against Governor Gavin Newsom, and against Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. But it’s not just about settling scores."
According to Parnas, in reality, "This is about control."
"What happened yesterday in Los Angeles was a test run—a dry rehearsal for something much, much bigger. I’ve been hearing from multiple trusted insiders that Trump’s inner circle—particularly Pete Hegseth and some of the more radicalized loyalists embedded at the Pentagon—are actively drafting operational plans for the mass mobilizations expected on June 14th," he added. "This isn’t just about Trump’s birthday. This isn’t just about another vanity parade. This is about shutting down resistance."
Parnas added that Trump "fears the American people rising up on June 14th, in all 50 states, with signs that say No Kings—with voices that remind the world that we are still a democracy."
"That’s why he’s pushing for tanks. That’s why he wants the biggest military display America has seen since the Cold War. Because he wants the optics of power. He wants to smother the story before it even begins. He wants his parade to dominate the headlines, not the marchers in the streets fighting for democracy," he said. "But I need you to understand this: According to my sources, there are discussions happening right now—within Trump’s most trusted circle—about invoking martial law if the protests 'get out of hand.' They’re looking for any excuse. Any video. Any act of violence. Any disruption. That’s all they need to justify a crackdown."
He then warned people not to fall for a trap being set by Trump associates.
"And it gets worse. What I’m being told is that Trump allies—including elements connected to Proud Boys, III Percenters, and other far-right militia networks—are planning to infiltrate the June 14th protests. Not to support them. To sabotage them. Their goal? Create chaos. Spark confrontation. Trigger a response from law enforcement. And then hand Trump the justification he needs to clamp down," Parnas wrote. "Let me say this loud and clear: We cannot give them that excuse."
Parnas went on to encourage peace, and told protesters to "stay vigilant."
That's why Trump distanced himself from and actively pissed off international allies while siding with dictators. This is why Trump has sunk the economy to promote only that of his insiders. This is the context under which Trump is considering taking over Canada and Greenland while pulling out of NATO. He has been promised a kingdom and he doesn't care how much worse off the country it is as a result of it because he only cares about being a malignant narcissist, just like the people propping him up.
We do not have the military power to kill half of our population beyond nukes. They don’t have the numbers to maintain control except in illusion. The fourteenth will be a staunch reminder to Trump that this is a hell of a large country, he cannot control it with force, and that tank parades don’t mean a goddamn thing except to egomaniacs.
We absolutely have the ability to kill half the population if you're not too picky about targeting and happy to rule through the idea of death from above rather than soldiers on the street in Mayberry. This also doesn't account for police complicity, and the fact that there's an alarming amount of right wingers who seem rather elated by the idea of potentially killing their liberal/leftists relatives, coworkers, classmates and neighbors.
In my division, everyone unanimously agrees that the administration is absolutely stupid and indefensible. Of those, every last one would outright defy any order to "kill half the population". We talk about it all the time - including with my Chief. ~60% of the officers I speak to also believe that the administration is conducting unlawful actions, and about 70% believe the administration is engaging in actions harmful to the socioeconomic and geopolitical standing of the USA. >80% of the enlisted personnel in other divisions at my command likewise agree that the administration is making stupid and indefensible decisions, and all of them would outright defy any order to "kill half the population".
Well we know that any power the world gives to the United States can be used by a petulant, insecure man-baby to serve nobody's ends but his own.
So yeah, America, if you had made better decisions, you would still be deserving of the title of the world's reserve currency. But here we are, times are a-changing.
That doesn't surprise me, because Drump's absurd import tariffs are interpreted by numerous economists as a sign that the US is actually bankrupt.
Judging by its national debt and weak economy, the US would probably have been bankrupt years ago if the dollar weren't a reserve currency. That's precisely why it's so absurd.
The so-called Mar-a-Lago Accord, which is anything but an agreement, seems to me to be a desperate attempt at blackmail, playing off the (conventional) military power of the United States against the rest of the world - as far as I know, most economists consider this to be completely bonkers.
I, on the other hand, think that this serves two main purposes: to maintain the illusion among the US population that the US is still the superpower it was in the 1980s (it is not), and to personally enrich the US president and his partners.
Britain’s serious crime agency has frozen UK property worth £170m belonging to the former land minister of Bangladesh amid a crackdown on former allies of Sheikh Hasina, the autocratic leader deposed in last year’s student-led revolution.
The National Crime Agency (NCA) confirmed it had frozen assets belonging to Saifuzzaman Chowdhury, who is among allies of Hasina whose sizeable UK real estate portfolios have come under scrutiny by authorities in Dhaka investigating alleged corruption.
Analysis of Land Registry documents indicates that all of Chowdhury’s more than 300 properties are subject to asset freezing orders, preventing them from being sold or transferred.
These include a luxury home in St John’s Wood, London, bought for £11m in 2022, and an apartment block in Fitzrovia, bought for £12.65m a year earlier, part of a portfolio bought for an estimated £170m.
The hacking mystery roiling the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s rightwing government is deepening after researchers said they had found new evidence that two more journalists were targeted using the same military-grade spyware that Italy has admitted to using against activists.
A parliamentary committee overseeing intelligence confirmed earlier this month that Italy had used mercenary spyware made by Israel-based Paragon Solutions against two Italian activists.
But the same committee, which launched an investigation into the hacking scandal in March, said it had been unable to determine who was behind the targeting of a prominent Italian investigative journalist, Francesco Cancellato, whose news outlet has been critical of the Meloni government.
Now a report by researchers at the Citizen Lab has revealed that a close colleague of Cancellato, Ciro Pellegrino, who is head of the investigative outlet Fanpage.it’s Naples bureau, was also targeted by a user of Paragon Solution’s spyware, which is called Graphite. The Citizen Lab said a third journalist, who chose to remain anonymous and is described as a “prominent European journalist”, had also been targeted with the spyware, it said.
I'll note that California was trying phase down new gas cars over a period of years, and still allowed 20% plug-in hybrids at the end of the phase-down.
Israel is facing a shortage of Arrow missile interceptors, raising concerns over its capacity to counter long-range ballistic attacks from Iran, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing a senior US official.
The Jerusalem Post has reached out to the IDF and other sources for comment, but cannot verify this report at this time.
According to the report, the US has been aware of the issue for several months and has taken steps to bolster Israel’s missile defense systems by deploying additional US assets across multiple domains – land, sea, and air.
The verbiage is a little funky in this case. This war is definitely one of Israeli aggression but Iran is indeed launching counterattacks on Israel. I don't necessarily think OP was trying to say otherwise, they possibly just used the term attack instead of strike.
The fines will be a "minimum" punishment, and it will continue to seek civil damages for compensation for the costs incurred in more serious cases.
Ryanair, Europe's largest airline, announced Thursday that it will impose fines starting at €500 ($579) on passengers whose disruptive behavior leads to their removal from a flight.
The budget carrier said it hopes the fine will serve as "a deterrent to eliminate this unacceptable behavior onboard our aircraft."
"It is unacceptable that passengers are made to suffer unnecessary disruption because of one unruly passenger's behavior," a Ryanair spokesperson said.
Interesting coincidence: Ryanair raises its fines right after the EU eases compensation rules for delayed flights. Almost like they were waiting for it.
A Chinese-backed militia is protecting new rare earth mines in eastern Myanmar, according to four people familiar with the matter, as Beijing moves to secure control of the minerals it is wielding as a bargaining chip in its trade war with Washington.
China has a near-monopoly over the processing of heavy rare earths into magnets that power critical goods like wind turbines, medical devices and electric vehicles.
But Beijing is heavily reliant on Myanmar for the rare earth metals and oxides needed to produce them: the war-torn country was the source of nearly half those imports in the first four months of this year, Chinese customs data show.
Trump is telling all kinds of lies about this. Gavin Newsom mentioned that Trump had lied to the media about having discussed sending the National Guard with him in a phone call.
“Economic damage from populist rule is typically severe,” they find. “Over 15 years, real GDP per capita is 10 per cent lower compared to the nonpopulist counterfactual.”
And
they rarely leave after losing elections, but more often amid “major scandals that lead to impeachment or resignations, constitutional crises and refusals to step down, as well as coups, suicides, or deadly accidents”. One of the paper’s authors, Schularick, has said it’s “totally naive” to imagine Trump will simply walk away in 2028
TL;DR; Selling off land in places without jobs doesn't create useful housing for people. What it does do is turn what had been public space into private space for the wealthy.
Every eight years we experience another turn of the Ratchet.
Republicans: We've privatized, deregulated, overpoliced, and gutted civil rights for another corner of civil society.
Democrats: Sorry, there's nothing we can do to fix this. You guys just should not have voted Republican. Anyway, here's Richie Torres, keynote speaker at Welcomefest, to tell progressives to fuck off.
Hey, we started making some changes as part of this term.
Trump does more in six months than Biden managed in four years, despite having thinner Congressional margins and far less popular support.
Again, this goes back to DeJoy. It goes back to ICE administration. It goes to Biden's intervention to kneecap labor during the COVID era strike wave. It goes to Merrick Garland sitting on his hands for four fucking years while Republicans continued to commit crime after crime.
Biden didn't make progressive changes. He squandered his time in office, refused to impede Project 2025, and sent hundreds of billions of dollars into the pockets of Republican mega-donors that ultimately wrecked his VP's chances at an electoral win.
For what? So he could keep funding a genocide in Gaza?
Gov. Jared Polis on Thursday vetoed a measure that would have banned the use of many computer algorithms to set rent in Colorado, saying it could have outlawed some legitimate technologies used by lan...
Since arriving in Mali in 2021, Russian Wagner mercenaries have abducted and detained hundreds of civilians in former UN bases and military camps shared with the Malian army. Our investigation, as part of the Viktoriia project, reveals secret prisons where abuse and torture are carried out with total impunity.
For more than three years in Mali, Wagner mercenaries have detained and tortured civilians in secret prisons located in military bases, according to Forbidden Stories’ investigation.
Democratic US Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont introduced legislation on Monday to prevent the use of federal funds for any "illegal wars” in or against Iran without approval from Congress.
Sanders introduced the "No War Against Iran Act", which contains an exception for self-defence as enshrined in the War Powers Act and applicable US law.
“It is imperative that we make clear that the President has no authority to embark on another costly war without explicit authorization by Congress,” Sanders said in a statement on Monday.
Democratic US Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont introduced legislation on Monday to prevent the use of federal funds for any "illegal wars” in or against Iran without approval from Congress.
A senior officer at the Pentagon has come under scrutiny over a series of social media posts sharply critical of Israel, its leadership, and US foreign policy in the region.
Colonel Nathan McCormack, who leads the Levant and Egypt branch at the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s J5 planning directorate, has used a semi-anonymous account to post numerous comments targeting Israeli actions and US support.
The posts, reportedly written since the 7 October 2023, have sparked outrage among pro-Israel circles in Washington. Here’s what he said:
“Netanyahu and his Judeo-supremacist cronies are determined to prolong the conflict for their own goals: either to remain in power or to annex the land.”
“Israel’s actions over decades have prompted the accusations of ethnic cleansing and genocide.”
“The Western states go to great lengths to avoid criticism of Israel, much out of Holocaust guilt.”
“Our worst ‘ally.’ We get literally nothing out of the ‘partnership’ other than the enmity of millions of people in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.”
“The US has not been an honest broker. We have overwhelmingly enabled Israel’s bad behavior.”
Responding to the idea of relocating Gaza’s population, McCormack wrote that Israel wants “to expel them and cleanse ‘Eretz Israel’ (Greater Israel) of ethnic Palestinians.”
Since June 2024 he also called Israel a “death cult”
"The posts have sparked outrage among pro-foreign nation circles in Washington." Can't think of any other US ally including the no. 1 lapdog UK that would ever receive this royal treatment.
Remember during the election when the Trump admin was supposed to be good for Palestine. So many people on ML specifically were convinced that Trump was going to solve the crisis.
it's almost like the issues with the United States government run deeper than the President.
well we experienced different posts at different times then I know obviously it's not a homogeneous board, nowhere is, but I can tell you that's the subset I dealt with did.
that being said I'm not so interested in laying blame as I am with getting people to engage with the Democratic process outside of major elections.
2) I don't see how that's in any way relevant to an advisor being removed from his post because he ain't frothing at the mouth chanting death to all Arabs
I definitely saw a lot of people from ml who were saying stuff like that when trump started talking to Israel in the first week or so of his presidency. They're not representative of all of .ml, but they were quite a vocal minority
The only thing remotely close to this that I saw was people saying something like: "will be really funny if Trump solves that shit now after the DEM doing nothing for months"
Marx rejected the enlightenment view that ideas alone were the driving force in society or that the underlying cause of change was guided by the actions of leaders in government or religion. The "great man" and occasionally "great woman" view of historical change was popularized by the 19th-century Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) who wrote "the history of the world is nothing but the biography of great men". According to Marx, this conception of history amounted to nothing more than a collection of "high-sounding dramas of princes and states".
Something interesting is happening in how Australians think about their own country’s influence in the Pacific. According to the Lowy Institute’s 2025 poll, 39 per cent of Australians now see Australia as the most influential power in the Pacific Islands, a notable increase from last year’s result of 31 per cent.
Australia has overtaken China, previously seen by Australians as the dominant player, which holds steady at 34 per cent.
These figures suggest a shifting perception domestically, perhaps reflecting Canberra’s energetic “listening” diplomacy, through which Australia has ramped up diplomatic effort and significantly increased financial assistance to the Pacific over the past three years. Canberra’s approach of marrying generous aid packages with not-so-subtle diplomatic leverage on security matters appears to have resonated at home.
[...]
While Australia is undeniably the largest aid donor in the region, and uniquely maintains a diplomatic presence in every PIF member state, Beijing’s bare-faced influence-building is plain as day.
The China-Pacific Island countries Foreign Ministers’ meeting last month foreshadowed increased Chinese presence in security and policing, development, and stronger economic ties with those Pacific countries that recognise China over Taiwan. Beijing’s blend of visa-waivers, economic incentives, infrastructure financing, and diplomatic duchessing, ensures its presence is both felt and appreciated across island capitals.
In 2024, China registered 26 Coastguard vessels with the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission, signalling a more assertive regional maritime presence. It is not clear how China intends to deploy its more than two-dozen vessels, but if the dynamics in the South China Sea are any indication, it will likely result in Chinese vessels harassing other countries, while protecting its own fishing fleet – widely understood as often responsible for illegal fishing in the Pacific Ocean.
[...]
To Canberra’s chagrin, plenty of Pacific countries are evidently happy to buy what China is selling, even while some countries including PNG and Fiji are aligning more closely to Australia’s worldview.
Therein lies the rub: while perceptions do matter, it is Pacific countries’ own strategic choices that will ultimately be the deciding factor in who has influence and how the regional balance of power is shaped for decades to come.
On the Fireside Fedi interview with Jerry ( the admin of Infosec.Exchange Mastodon instance ) a scary truth was suddenly revealed ( on 34:11 ): Just to keep the instance up and running he needs to spend up to $5000 a month, pretty much out of his poc…
And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.
Ok? What on earth would be the motivation to let these people keep spending your money instead of letting them go spend someone else's?
ETA: Especially if their reason for leaving is that you had the audacity to ask them to pitch in for the cost of the resources that they're using. Oh, the humanity.
So the question is, what the hell should we do about this? How do we solve this? How do we even approach to solving it? Should I setup a forum page, somewhere, or a chat, where people can discuss everything and start approaching something? Or are we simply doomed?
That's a decision for each server admin to decide for themselves. This particular admin has apparently decided that $5000/mo is worth it to them to run a server without ever asking people to pitch in, which I find absolutely bizarre, but whatever.
They can go a long way towards reducing that cost themselves by..... asking their users to pitch in. Some people will pitch in, and reduce their out of pocket expenses. Others will leave, further reducing their out of pocket expenses.
If they haven't done the bare minimum that they can do to help themselves, then this isn't a problem for the broader fediverse community to solve.
The admin of the third largest mastodon instance is constantly asking for donations and still has trouble to pay his own rent.
If it was an exceptional case, I'd be glad to help. but when it happens every other month, it shows that this continued behavior of sacrificing your own well-being is irresponsible.
then this isn’t a problem for the broader fediverse community to solve
This is the natural end result of every volunteer run instance, you don't find it odd that over the last 40 years of the internet not one fediverse like server or community has survived or even been mildly popular?
I'll repost this because for some reason the other post got deleted, it was regarding lemm.ee shutting down, they were concerned that one of the largest Lemmy instances is shutting down and the future of Lemmy:
You're 100% right to be concerned and to be honest I have doubts lemmy will ever crack more than a few million users, the same thing happened with Mastodon, something that relies so heavily on volunteers running the infra almost inevitably results in burnout because the fediverse works on a disincentive basis:
Basically the more popular a server is, the more funding it requires, the more admins it requires, the more work it requires, and all of this is on a slim margins or more likely requiring on people to donate time/money/effort 'for free' is a huge ask.
The supply of people sitting around doing nothing all day who care enough to dedicate their time/effort/money to running a social network... for free... is a very small group, almost as small as the amount of people who are willing to donate every month to a social network.
You can find mods of communities are usually fans of the communities they mod, it's a topic they enjoy and so the incentive for them to invest their time is to keep their community clean and great. But running a social network which has hard costs not just time is a whole other thing
This is opposed to a regular website or social media network, where as it gets bigger, it makes more money through ads/subscriptions, the incentive is to get bigger to make more money
And then they can simply pay for the hard costs like hosting costs/bandwidth and people to do the shit no one wants to.
The reality for me is that the money has to come from somewhere, you can do a paywall like newspapers do or beg for donations every page visit like the guardian/wikipedia do, or the usual suspect allow advertising, but the money has to come from somewhere.
Thus the fediverse has a disincentive to growing larger, it is simply easier and more sustainable to remain small
Small servers run by self-hosting enthusiasts for their friends and family.
Institutional servers (schools/universities running servers for faculty and students, companies running servers for their own employees)
Servers run by media institutions for journalists + maybe for subscribers (on a separate domain)
Servers provided by telcos, tied to their phone service (get a contract for mobile and that gives you access to our AP server)
Commercial providers who charge a flat subscription for access (mastodon.green, omg.lol, my own communick)
We need to get rid of the idea that we can have a sustainable Fediverse infra running on volunteers alone. It is not working, all the growth potential that we have is stunted because people keep lying to themselves.
Nobody is stopping any of your bullet points from happening. Those are all options today. Any one of those groups can spin up an instance and nobody is going to stop them. Some already have
But isn't the idea of forcing someone to (not) run their own server however they want antithetical to the whole concept of the fediverse?
You can defederate your personal server from open registration servers if you want. But you can't "get rid of open registration instances." That's just stupid.
I am not saying that there should be an executive order to make open registrations illegal, or to force anyone to do it.
What I am saying is that the admins themselves should change their attitude about it. I understand that most of them are doing out of generosity and because they hope that by offering free spaces they will get more people to join, but I'd hope that by now most people would have realized that this is (a) not sustainable and (b) counterproductive. The reason that we don't see a lot of the alternative models around is because the open registration instances suck out the air of everyone else in the economy.
If we keep working with this assumption that open registrations are fundamental to the Fediverse, we are going to continue is the slow decline to irrelevance. The Fediverse is never going to die, but it will be forever stunted in its potential.
That I can agree with. But I think it's just inevitable growing pains. Free and open instances will, over time, shut down because they're obviously unsustainable, so they won't be sustained.
As they do, people will be left searching for instances to move to, and more and more, they'll find that free instances just aren't an available.
Free and open instances will, over time, shut down because they’re obviously unsustainable, so they won’t be sustained.
How many of the 5.5k users from lemm.ee are going to say "Lesson learned. If I want an instance that is sustainable I should look for a professional instance or run my own"? I'm not going to say zero, but I really doubt it's going to be "more than 3".
The problem here is that while individual instances may die, there is always a new ~~sucker~~ enthusiast coming up thinking "my server will be different".
The problem here is that while individual instances may die, there is always a new ~~sucker~~ enthusiast coming up thinking “my server will be different”.
Interesting... the more time passes and your previous arguments fall along with the instances that you supported, the more you are resorting to tone policing.
I didn't insult anyone. You are putting names out there of admins of existing instances when I was talking about the general story of about how there are constant wheel of new people coming up.
You are gasping as straws, as if ostracizing me would ever validate your arguments. This is getting tiring.
Lemm.ee didn't shut down because it was financially unsustainable though. It shut down because the admin team didn't want to do it anymore.
Plenty of people have offered to take lemm.ee on and AFAIK nothing has progressed, but handled in a different way there could have been continuity and no need for users to transition away.
Given that the issue wasn't one of finance and rather one of effort/will, how does charging for access change anything? The owner could decide they have had enough, walk away, and shut everything down anyway, no?
It shut down because the admin team didn’t want to do it anymore.
It shut down because the admin team didn't want to do it for free anymore. There were just too many people, too many bad actors for little reward. By charging for access, you manage to both increase the reward and reduce the amount of people, so the whole equation changes significantly.
how does charging for access change anything? The owner could decide they have had enough, walk away, and shut everything down anyway, no?
Sure, but the amount of pain that I get from my ~50 paying customers is infinitely less than the headaches that you'll be getting.
You can't ask people to join small servers that have the biggest risk of shutting down without creating migration toola thst migrate all the content along the likes and comments
Size by itself is not the main predictor of risk. My instance is the only one on the Lemmy/kbin/Piefed side of the Fediverse that is exclusive for paying subscribers. It has never had more than 10 active users. This week it is celebrating its second anniversary - coincidentally I set it up on the same day as lemm.ee - and it has outlived a whole lot of instances.
My point still stand. People won't go to small instances that have change of shutting down thr most. Like i said in my very first comment we need better migration tools to encourage people to join small instances
There will always be "First we need this, then we will start supporting it" excuse. If you think better migration tools are needed, support the developers so that they can make it happen.
Deploy Lemmy on Elest.io and get a working dedicated instance in less than 3 minutes. You can Relax knowing that we are taking care for you of install, configuration, encryption, backups, software updates, os upgrades, live monitoring, alerts, live m…
Institutional servers (schools/universities running servers for faculty and students, companies running servers for their own employees)
This is the best long term strategy. News orgs should be hosting their own Mastodon instances at the very least. Same with schools and government.
It solves a number of problems - for them. So many news organizations and government offices are reliant on Xitter. That means that they are at the mercy of the owner of the platform for their messages to the public. Hosting their own instance puts them in charge. They can get out messages reliably and the public can trust that they are who they say... Just like an email address or URL.
Schools pay lots of money to private corporations to run bespoke university messaging systems, and are likewise reliant on those companies to provide administrative services such as moderating. Moving those communications in-house will be cheaper and simpler.
We should all be pressuring schools and local governments to adopt these technologies.
But that can not be the only solution. My university offered email accounts for every student. In 1999 this was a very big deal because the commercial services were super limited - Yahoo! Mail offered 2MB, IIRC. But the account was only available while you were an student.
If you get rid of open registration instances and start charging, you'll immediately lose huge amounts of users back to Reddit or whatever alternative is free to them. The echo chamber will be even more pronounced, and whatever success Lemmy/Mbin/Piefed have had will dry up.
Most people don't want to self host. And most people aren't willing to pay. So you have an issue in front of you. Do you actually want users and interactions? Or do you just want a place where very dedicated nerds can crow to each other about whatever self-hosting tricks they pulled off while occasionally backed by an addicted whale (who, upon noting the monotony and small userbase, will probably move on quickly)?
Everything, especially digital things, is backed by a small group of whales supporting everyone else. It's a mix between addiction and community-building instincts. Right now, said whales are the server hosts and a handful of users. Because of the desire to lead a community, and the addiction of social media, it keeps going. You say it isn't sustainable. I say it's a cycle. The specific instances don't matter until it becomes a corporate situation. All that matters is that there's at least one instance with enough people active to provide the gratification to the whale.
If you get rid of open registration instances and start charging, you'll immediately lose huge amounts of users
That is not necessarily true. you can have for example just a bunch of people that like to self host and they will invite their friend. This will be just a small constellation of smaller instances and they don't have to be completely open registration.
Most people don't want to self host.
You don't need most. If 1% of the people can show initiative to self host and serve 100 people, it should be enough.
Everything, especially digital things, is backed by a small group of whales supporting everyone else.
Bad economics and bad incentives. What you are describing is not just a natural law that can be avoided, but it is part of the reason that we are in this mess.
Software has this amazing property of being virtually free to copy. But the things that we do it and the labor that is required of us still has a cost. We need to bring back some sense of human scale to digital platforms, and the only way to do it is by letting us set a limit to the size of the organizations.
The reason is easy: one likes the fediverse, wants to contribute for it and wants to enabled people to use it even if they can't afford to pay for it.
On a smaller scale, that's not much of a problem. I'm glad I can host for some people who don't have money at all. Some of the others donate and some don't and that's fine as well.
@jerry@infosec.exchange , I'm sorry to bother but is it really true? Are you paying almost $5000/month out of your own pocket?
If true, why? This is not sustainable. Don't you think that by letting so many people free ride on your generosity, you end up hurting yourself and the possibility of cottage-industry of professional hosting providers?
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Maybe the problem is that they are using ridiculously overpriced enterprise services like AWS or Azure, which provide their own solutions for a lot of common things like backups, replicas, logging, etc, but cost 100x more than what you can get with DIY on some cheap VPS if you're fine with spending 1.25x more time.
Also, given that the instance is called “infosec.exchange”, you can be sure that he is not running this on some cheap VPS.
because cheap VPS will not give you enough bandwidth, or they oversubscribe their datacenters and their advertised speeds are far from real, or they have terrible support and if something goes down you are going to have a hard time to bring things up while having to explain to 10-15k people why things stopped working, or because the reason they manage to get such low prices is because they are selling user data on the side...
I'm not saying that the only correct alternative is to go to the big cloud providers, but there is a reason why "cheap" is not the sole criteria to choose a service provider.
Yes, the cheapest ones might have some risks, I mostly presented it as an example of what the opposite extremity looks like. There is a lot in-between, something a bit more expensive is even more guaranteed win. For example last time I used Hetzner, I had a server with 64gb RAM, 2TB SSD, and 16 cores Ryzen for something like €34/month. Hetzner support is very decent and they're very well known, have decent reputation and been providing their services for a long time.
I'm currently watching the interview (quite interesting, to be honest, funny to watch an interview about Fediverse services). Could you please share the timestamp when Jerry talks about finances and costs?
Ok, so you are not taking anything out of pocket at all? That's better than most, I suppose.
Still, during the interview you touch on the subject of how the donation model is not sustainable and it can only works at the scale that Fedi is right now. Wouldn't you consider then switching to a different model?
The only real option is to charge people. Hosting isn't free. It costs money to run a website. That money needs to come from somewhere. If it doesn't come from advertisers, it must come from users.
There could be a verity options for that. But I like the simple annual subscription. Each and every user pays. Spread out the cost as much as possible. It's only fair.
Provided there is an "upper limit" on what scale we are talking, Ive often wondered, couldn't private users also host a sharded copy of a server instance to offset load and bandwidth? Like Folding@Home, but for site support.
I realize this isn't exactly feasible today for most infra, but if we're trying to "solve" the problem, imagine if you were able to voluntarily, give up like 100gb HDD space and have your PC host 2-3% of an instance's server load for a month or something. Or maybe just be a CDN node for the media and bandwidth heavy parts to ease server load, while the server code is on different machines.
This kind of distributed "load balancing" on private hardware may be a complete pipe dream today, but it think if might be the way federated services need to head. I can tell you if we could get it to be as simple as volunteers spinning up a docker, and dropping the generated wireguard key and their IP in a "federate" form to give the mini-node over to an instance, it would be a lot easier to support sites in this way.
Speaking for myself, I have enough bandwidth and space I could lend some compute and offset a small amount of traffic. But the full load of a popular instance would be more than my simple home setup is equipped for. If contributing hosting was as easy as contributing compute, it could have a chance to catch on.
This is not how the fediverse works. Each server keeps a whole copy to themselves of all that they've accessed in the federation.
Cost of hardware is only a fraction of the total cost. Even if we solved the issue of running the Fediverse at scale with negligible costs, we still are not accounting for all the labor of volunteers, instance admins and developers.
I realize that is not how the fediverse works. I'm not speaking about the content delivery as much as the sever orchestration.
That's why I'm saying if somehow it could work that way, it would be one way to offset the compute and delivery burdens. But it is a very different paradigm from normal hosting. There would have to be some kind of swarmanagement layer that the main instance nodes controlled.
My point was only that, should such a proposal be feasible one day, if you lower the barriers you could have more resources.
I myself have no interest in hosting a full blown private instance of Lemmy or mastodon, but I would happily contribute 1tb of storage and a ton of idle compute to serving the content for my instance if I could. That's where this thinking stemmed from. Many users like me could donate their "free" idle power and space. But currently it is not feasible.
That's not really how it works. If it was made to work that way, it would still be a relatively small group donating their own compute resources to subsidize everyone else. Which is what we already have, and isn't very scalable.
I responded above, but my point kind of was that it doesn't work that way, but as we rethinking content delivery we should also rethinking hosting distribution. What I was saying is not a "well gee we should just do this..." type of suggestion, but more a extremely high level idea for server orchestration from a public private swarm that may or may not ever be feasible, but definitely doesn't really exist today.
Imagine if it were somewhat akin to BitTorrent, only the user could voluntarily give remote control to the instance for orchestration management. The orchestration server toggles the nodes contents so that, lets say, 100% of them carry the most accessed data (hot content, <100gb), and the rest is sharded so they each carry 10% of the archived data, making each node require <1tb total. And the node client is given X number of pinned CPUs that can be used for additional server compute tasks to offload various queries.
See, I'm fully aware this doesn't really exist on this form. But thinking of it like a Kubernetes cluster or a HA webclient it seems like it should be possible somehow to build this in a way where the client really only needs to install, and say yes to contribute. If we could cut it down to that level, then you can start serving the site like a P2P bittorrent swarm, and these power user clients can become nodes.
Most people are only willing to pay with non-monetary resources (PII, ad data, etc.). You can't approach this with charging money in mind, because people will just go back to the places where they aren't expected to pay. Start charging for Mastodon? The majority will go to Bluesky, Twitter, and Threads. Lemmy would just feed back to Reddit. Either that or they'll drop off social media altogether.
We've already got proof of this: PeerTube. Most PeerTube instances either charge a fee to upload (call it a 'donation' if you prefer, but if you're gating an action behind money, that's a fee), or simply don't allow any users not connected to the admin to upload. YouTube, Twitch, Dailymotion, and a few other sites are free. The sites where it's free to perform the core activity will keep winning, especially as we see rising inflation and increasing costs.
No, I stopped looking at instance or software a while ago. The threadiverse has seemingly matured enough that the average user doesn't have to care anymore.
It's not about the software. I am just pointing out that Communick's instances are only available for paying customers, so his argument (everyone should pay a little bit) is at the very least backed by his own actions.
Regarding Peertube: I see the problem of Peertube on the other end of what you are saying. People are not using that much because even those that have a presence on PeerTube still depend on YouTube to make money. If PeerTube had a way to help with monetization, then more creators would be interested in publishing exclusively on PeerTube, even if they had to pay something to upload/distribute videos.
If you charge, you also have to offer a better experience than the free options. There's no reason instances can't use ads for people unwilling or unable to pay. For me I'll gladly pay for an ad-free experience.
I just watched the section of the interview where Jerry (admin of fedia.io and infosec.exchange), and he said that
There are a lot of people who aren't that lucky. Even charging a 1$ fee is too much. That is their lifeline, it's their way to connect to friends, and search for jobs. To me, I don't think it's appropriate to gatekeep it with a monthly fee.
The thing is that ads pay almost nothing. I'd be very happy to pay 4x what an ad would pay. But the problem is I can't sent 0.12 to someone when I watch their video because 50% of that is gobbled up by transaction fees. So the only option is to bulk donate which either requires pooling money in a 3rd party or the user donating a bulk amount ($10). Users really dont like giving away $10 when it feels like they get nothing in return. Its all mental but its a very real problem. We will pay for $10 of dogshit food but not $10 for a software product we've used for 100s of hours.
Join the Communick Collective. Set up a fixed budget (let's say $10/month) and then split that however you want between the people you want to help. This solves the micropayments issue and would show creators still addicted to Youtube revenue that valuable contributions will be rewarded.
i know most of ao3's budget goes to server costs. they get by with volunteer labor and donations, but they mostly host text. i genuinely have no idea what a sustainable model would look like for the fediverse, that doesn't just treat volunteers like disposable rags we toss when they get inevitable burnout.
If Blender had a patreon or coffee or kofi, I would happily subscribe to something like $3/month. I know artists that have tens of thousands of paid subscribers and their minimal plan is $3. Blender could achieve hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers eventually imo. To make things interesting, they could release prebuilt binaries of some subprojects like NPR fork, only to subscribers, also they could do partnership and paid plugin giveaways every month to subscribers. It just needs a bit of dedicated SMM work. One-time donations just don't hit the same. I do those maybe once a year or two, and don't do another one until I get the feeling "it's been a while".
And if he will ask people to pay to use it, they will, rightfully so, switch to a different instance.
I joined my instance's patreon and donate $1 / month. I know it is not a lot, but so far the admin says he is doing fine on cash flow, should that change I will up my donation if able.
I just watched the section of the interview where Jerry (admin of fedia.io and infosec.exchange), and he said that
There are a lot of people who aren't that lucky. Even charging a 1$ fee is too much. That is their lifeline, it's their way to connect to friends, and search for jobs. To me, I don't think it's appropriate to gatekeep it with a monthly fee.
No questions from my side, just a big thank you to mention Mbin, Lemmy, the Fediverse in that interview. It's probably the first time for me where I watch a video talking about all of this, which is curious with how part of my daily life it is.
I still haven't watched everything, but one of your quotes sounded resonated with me "We're only here for a short time. Why should we be a-holes to each other, and not just try to enjoy ourselves?"
The Mastodon instance I'm on has around 200 people (not all of them active), and received around €800 in donations last year,. Total costs were less than €300.
I think the problem of scaling kicks in when we go after demographics that are less charitable on average.
Hi all. It’s Jerry from the interview talking about infosec.exchange. I think it’s important to understand some apparently missing context in the discussions below. I was talking about a hypothetical future where we saw tens/hundreds of millions of active accounts on the fediverse. I don’t believe the current funding model can support that, and I also don’t think the “spin up your own host” model will work for the masses, either.
I host close to two dozen different fediverse services, from lemmy to mastodon to mbin to peertube and lots more, and all that takes some significant hardware to run at larger scales. My objective has been to provide a fast and reliable fediverse experience, and so I’ve focused more on that than on making my servers scream, and so I’ve landed on hosting the fleet on a series of Hetzner Dell servers with 10GB interfaces, and that is not cheap.
Freemium is the way to go. All the essential features are free; you can pay for extra stuff like special emojis, coins(like Reddit silver/gold), or customizable profiles. It could be either a subscription or à la carte.
Simply giving something in return would incentivize people to donate more.
Unlike Reddit, the profit should give back to the communities by adding more features, paying developers to maintain open source projects, giveaways etc.
Misskey is probably the only fediverse software that actually allows admin instance to put ads.
Its flagship instance, misskey.io (which also the second/third (?) biggest instances on fediverse), use freemium scheme for running the server. They have to do this as they have 600K users, with 20K visits per day. Their paid tier upgrades are mostly adding non-essentials stuff, such as drive capacity from 5GB to 30-100GB, profile and avatar decoration (similar to Discord stuff), or more webhook. They runs community ads, from indie games, vtuber promotion, comic release, or local art event. They also have one corporate backer, Skeb.jp, which an art commissioning platform.
Not saying that all instance should do this, but it could be a great learning.
Feddit.dk is not a huge Lemmy instance but I've managed to not have to pay anything so far due to generous user donations. It works quite well I think. I think Mastodon is just not quite as effective in gathering people like this to donate, that's my guess at least.
At the U.N. Ocean Conference, Tonga’s princess called for recognition of whales’ legal rights. The move is one of several rights of nature initiatives happening at the conference.
It'll be interesting to see if they try this with Northern Ireland next. Politically a bit more of a hot, well, er, maybe "potato" isn't the best choice of word in this instance, but as far as sharing a land border with an EU nation goes, it could smooth over a few problems that Brexit created in that part of the Isles.
Gaza’s health system is at breaking point, overwhelmed time and again by scores of people killed or injured near aid distribution sites, the UN World Health Organization (WHO) said on Tuesday.
Non-techy restless activist do-gooder Jeremy Flatt has found himself having to administer a mastodon instance at nwt.social and has some questions to ask of slightly more techy Paige Saunders. @jer...
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Mudita Kompakt is a minimalist phone designed for mindful living. Featuring an E Ink screen, long battery life, and distraction-free tools, this E Ink phone helps you stay focused and unplug with ease.
The Trump administration claims to be fighting an existential battle against insurrectionary forces in Los Angeles. In truth, it created this cynical spectacle itself, deploying troops and inflaming tensions to distract from its policy failures.
It’s really funny to me because I live six miles from the area. Each day working from home I wonder if I would even realize there were protests had I no access to the internet or people telling me about them.
Come si diceva, un nuovo disco va assaporato lentamente, se poi il disco in questione è dei Radiohead, allora la regola va moltiplicata. The King of Limbs non è un disco facile, chi conosce e ama i Radiohead è preparato a questo. Molte loro uscite hanno spiazzato e anche The King of Limbs, in parte, mantiene questa promessa... Leggi e ascolta...
Come si diceva, un nuovo disco va assaporato lentamente, se poi il disco in questione è dei Radiohead, allora la regola va moltiplicata. The King of Limbs non è un disco facile, chi conosce e ama i Radiohead è preparato a questo. Molte loro uscite hanno spiazzato e anche The King of Limbs, in parte, mantiene questa promessa. Chiamiamole ricerche, esperimenti, poco cambia, il loro percorso sonoro è sempre all'insegna dell'innovazione e dello stile progressivo... (Continua a leggere... artesuono.blogspot.com/2014/07…)
Profitez des vidéos et de la musique que vous aimez, mettez en ligne des contenus originaux, et partagez-les avec vos amis, vos proches et le monde entier.
Eyes and Teeth are all pointing the correct direction, he doesn't have hotdog skin full of giant viens, and the text is easy to understand, this is not my RFK.
Hong Kong authorities have warned their residents against downloading a Taiwan-made game called Reversed Front: Bonfire, which they're accusing of advocating...
For those wondering without wanting to click, the title is "Reversed Front: Bonfire". It's supposed to depict an independent Taiwan and Hong Kong which is what obviously pissed off the delicate sensibilities of the CCP.
Sadly a mobile game so it's not really worth your time as it has in app purchases.
But what could be worth your time is Devotion, a Taiwanese horror game which is not available on any store front (but their own) after an easter egg criticial of Xi Jinping was found.
Internal 82nd Airborne Division communications reviewed by Military.com reveal a tightly orchestrated effort to curate the optics of Trump's recent visit, including handpicking soldiers for the audience based on political leanings and physical appearance. The troops ultimately selected to be behind Trump and visible to the cameras were almost exclusively male.
One unit-level message bluntly said "no fat soldiers."
"If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don't want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out," another note to troops said.
As President Donald Trump viciously attacked his perceived political foes, he whipped up boos from the gathered troops directed at California leaders, including Gov. Gavin Newsom.
For this story, Military.com reached out to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's office as well as the Army and the 82nd Airborne Division directly with a series of questions that ranged from the optics of the event to social media posts showing the sale of Trump campaign merchandise on the base, to the apparent violation of Pentagon policies on political activity in uniform.
Internal 82nd Airborne Division communications reviewed by Military.com reveal a tightly orchestrated effort to curate the optics of Trump's recent visit, including handpicking soldiers for the audience based on political leanings and physical appearance. The troops ultimately selected to be behind Trump and visible to the cameras were almost exclusively male.
One unit-level message bluntly said "no fat soldiers."
. . . Service officials declined to comment when asked about the extent to which troops were screened, whether soldiers displaying partisan cheers on television -- a violation of long-standing Pentagon rules -- would be disciplined or if soldiers who objected to participating in the event, citing disagreements with the administration, would be disciplined or admonished in any way.
"This has been a bad week for the Army for anyone who cares about us being a neutral institution," one commander at Fort Bragg told Military.com on the condition of anonymity to avoid retaliation. "This was shameful. I don't expect anything to come out of it, but I hope maybe we can learn from it long term."
The article is some great and ballsy reporting, and the other details are pretty shocking. The military is being rapidly corrupted to becoming a partisan force that serves Trump above America
The military has always been heavily populated by some of the shittiest people. The prospect of carrying a weapon and killing others or just wielding power over others, attracts a certain type of person. In the US since at least 9/11, there's been a disgusting amount of military propaganda that has certainly brought in some people that care and want to do the right thing (for the ignorant wrong reasons) but also the shits that are all in because they think they're tough shit.
Service people don't deserve any more respect than any other profession, and I'd argue in many cases, they deserve less respect. There's hasn't been a draft in a hot minute, so everyone currently in is voluntary. Some soldiers do wind to in life threatening situations, but it's far from the most dangerous job and to me, killing innocence in the middle east for no good reason doesn't earn you any valor in my book.
They're all a bunch of pawns, and I've seen about 2 out of all of them actually stand up and oppose the Trump admin and thousands of others bend over, take it, and ask for more. This article and LA further reenforces my belief that being in the military isn't something noble, but more akin to being in a gang where all of the members are brainwashed and have no spines.
I'm glad this came to light. It's not surprising; this is Trump's whole fake-it-till-you-make-it game with his presidency, from the moment he actually paid actors to cheer for him coming down the escalator in 2015. He's always, always focused on the appearance of things rather than the substance.
ON A PLANE OVER UPPER NILE STATE, South Sudan (AP) — Swooping low over the banks of a Nile River tributary, an aid flight run by retired American military officers released a stream of food-stuffed sa...
He doesn't care about that, he cares that voters will blame Republicans.
It's why traditionally they give everyone tax breaks and then set the ones for the poors to expire when a Dem will likely be in office, and the ones for the wealthy never expire.
There's none of that now, shits going to get bad and there's no one to blame that doesn't have an R by their name.
Oh little buddy, it’s too late now. You’ve made your bed with Nazis, and it’s full of piss and shit, but now you have to lie in it.
If you’re not rich or powerful enough to float to the top – and you’re not – you’re going to have to deal with the Nazi filth. Too bad absolutely nobody warned you. Oh well.
Does the bill still have that clause that says judges are no longer allowed to try to limit the executive branch? Because that's the clause we should be campaigning against.
"If we don't watch out, people are going to get hurt, people are going to be upset. It's going to be the No. 1 thing on the nightly news all over the place," Justice, who served as West Virginia's governor for eight years before winning his Senate seat last year, told Politico.
Because, apparently, no one of any value has been hurt yet. He never figured it out, there’s just a personal consequence now. He looks old as shit, I hope hell claws him under the earth soon and cooks him for eternity.
All the comments from all cross posts on a single page is great. You can also add your own user flair like you could on Reddit, which lemmy doesn’t support. I haven’t messed with it much yet, but the ability to make lists of communities into feeds also seems really useful.
Dr. Alon Ben-Meir is a retired professor of international relations, most recently at the Center for Global Affairs at NYU. He taught courses on international negotiation and Middle Eastern studies.
“Queer people know what it means to struggle against the government, know what it means to struggle against the status quo. And, most importantly, we're not as easily controlled…”
I'm more convinced that they're just taking all of the databases and putting them in an ai bot and asking it to construct a pro trump narrative and then immediately turning it all over to Palantir to fulfill more of their master searchable file on every single bit of information on everybody. For what reason? Who knows? Only Peter Thiel and the other vampires in charge.
Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky,\ Seven for the dwarf-lords in their halls of stone,\ Nine for Mortal Men doomed to die,\ One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne,\ In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.\ One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them,\ One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them\ In the Land of Mordor where the Shadows lie.
A lawsuit disputing the results of the 2024 election has moved forward after it was revealed that former Vice President Kamala Harris received no votes a New York county.
As President Donald Trump viciously attacked his perceived political foes, he whipped up boos from the gathered troops directed at California leaders, including Gov. Gavin Newsom.
I'm genuinely curious to what extend the societal divide extends into the armed forces. How can can there be trust among soldiers in combat situations if they are diametrically opposed on fundamental things like this.
Hey it could be worse, you could be the jackass who named an area Mentone "beach" here in San Bernardino, fun fact it's not a fucken beach. Forest falls is more of a beach.
Opposite statements. Either they follow orders or they are loyal to the constitution. Can't do both right now.
I can't fathom the industrial amounts of pure propagandium that Americans must have been huffing to think the military will ever be on their side. Blind and unconditional obedience is literally the only way militaries can function properly and everything about them is organized to promote that.
US military apologists (even before Trump) will say "but soldiers are legally obligated to follow the constitution first and must refuse unlawful orders" like Abu Ghraib didn't happen in my lifetime. We all know that 90 % of soldiers will wipe themselves with the original copy of the declaration of independence if Trump orders them to. And those that refuse will be dishonorably discharged, or worse.
The divide absolutely exists. There is a lot of conditioning for following orders and working as a team. That doesn't erase conflicting ideologies, beliefs, or even personality conflict. At the extreme the military will remove outliers from the military, but at the individual level you learn who you trust and who you can rely on. Then you do what you can to mitigate those who you don't trust.
Militaries all over the world also have a long history of killing their own people for not fitting whatever the group around them wants. Sometimes for justifiable reasons, like incompetent leaders likely to get their subordinates killed. Other times for things like someone being uncomfortable with blatant war crimes.
There is nothing magical or special about the military. They just have more weapons. So the solutions are violent more often than the average office job.
I am more than mildly surprised at the amount of brown people in the above article's picture. I can almost understand a certain type of white person cheering for him, deluded as they may me.
However I can not fathom why a non white person would even think about it. They are not only traitors to their country, but also to their race AND to what their race has had to fight for for generations. It boggles the mind.
I watched some bit of this earlier in horror and while I was playing a hard game of "spot the differences between this and nazi speeches" I heard Trump mistaking WW1 for WW2. This is the lunatic in charge of the world's biggest army. We are so cooked...
There sure are fucking truck loads of them in that picture.
I remember when the French helped us beat some tyranny away from our borders, and although I wouldn't ask them to get their hands dirty when we start wrestling ourselves, I sure wish we could channel some of their energy into the people who "oppose" things like this.... From their couch.
I long to see French level of protesting here in the states.
Quite a stretch to call cheering the President traitorous, person could almost say that's the opposite of traitorous, cause, yknow, a non politician actually doing something about the president is one of the real definitions of traitor.
Cheering for a traitor is traitorous. The traitor in question being the president doesn't mitigate that in the slightest - to the contrary, that's the most damaging traitor we could be cursed with.
Their allegiance is supposed to be to The Constitution of the United States of America, not to a tyrant who is ineligible to be president and wipes his ass with The US Constitution. The military is also supposed to be above politics.
Just seven of 50 surveyed GOP lawmakers are planning to actually attend the president’s birthday festivities over the weekend, reported Politico. [...] Those sticking around include some of Trump’s most stalwart MAGA supporters: Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene (who told Politico “of course” she’d be there), Byron Donalds, and Elise Stefanik are all planning to celebrate. Representatives Cory Mills, Rich McCormick, John McGuire, and Lisa McClain are also expected to be in attendance.
They could be busy with shit in their states, they could not want photos/videos/records of them attending the events to exist in the future.
When your opponents say you are trying to become a police state and trample peoples rights, you probably don't want to be featured standing next to a tank on civilian streets.
In 1-3 years when they believe they will be running for office during an election that will potentially have far more people fleeing the MAGA agenda as people see the results, they will want to distance themselves and appear to have maybe been a more "moderate" Republican candidate. Hard to do standing next to a military vehicle resembling those that you rolled into metropolitan cities and whatever ensued occured because of it.
I dunno, I think attending someone's party for themselves is pretty fucking cringe. They've already kissed the ring, I can't imagine it's fun for them to grovel. They just do it when they have to satisfy the crown and virtue signal to their base since they didn't vote for them as much as they did for a Trump green light. Nobody is twisting their arm in this case.
I don't know mate. Standing in front of a tank and shutting down down Fat Boy Hitler's farcical thuper duper birthday parade would be one for the history books. There's not a farts chance in a hurricane that this doesn't go down as a comical clusterfuck.
This whole parade is getting shut down, I promise you.
Major news outlets will not cover the protests. They will happily film the parade though. They will put forth an air of cautious optimism to endear dear leader to their outlet. The only way this gets any MAJOR public attention is if people stop the parade. It will be stopped, there will be a LOT of police action, which will prompt riots, which will prompt more attention. Trump may use it to enact martial law, but he'll do so at his own detriment. It will not look well at all, but the cancellation of his parade, plus the chaos that will be martial law will only spark more civil discourse throughout the nation.
Well that would be nice if everyone was on board. But even if the people that hate him don't turn up, the people that love him will. That would be enough for him.
Not so fun fact: Trump is actually a fan of the way China handled that. Here's the quote:
"Then they were vicious, they were horrible, but they put it down with strength.That shows you the power of strength. Our country is right now perceived as weak... as being spit on by the rest of the world."
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I created a secondary Pixelfed account to test the share functionality, but none of the posts I've shared from my main account are showing up in the new account’s feed.
Try again after following the account that post. Having someone from your instance following a remote user is the best way to insure proper federation of content in the fediverse.
if your two accounts are on a different instance, federation takes a while, your follow signals to your instance to synchronize the content from the other account, and it's not instantaneous, it's queued along the requests of everyone else on your instance.
Fediforum happened this week, porting your social graph cross-protocol with Bounce, Bonfire gets closer to release, a prominent Lemmy server shuts down, and much more.
I also run a weekly newsletter, where you get all the articles I published this week directly in your inbox, as well as additional analysis. You can sign up right here, and get the next edition this Friday!
FediForum and related announcements
The FediForum unconference was this week, with three days of sessions, keynotes and demos. The event was originally scheduled for April, but got cancelled at the last minute due to drama around transphobic statements made by one of the co-organisers. The individual in question left FediForum, and instead FediForum set up an advisory board with a number of community members. This edition of FediForum had keynotes for the first time, by ActivityPub co-creator Christine Lemmer-Webber, author Cory Doctorow, and Ian Forrester, who lead a Mastodon instance at the BBC. There were also a large number of demos (list here) and unconference sessions about a wide variety of subjects. I’ll write more about both the demos and the keynotes once the videos of them will become available online, likely next week.
Bounce is a newly-announced tool that allows people to migrate their social graph across protocols. It is made by A New Social, the organisation behind Bridgy Fed. The ability to port a social graph from AT Protocol to ActivityPub reshapes what is possible within the Open Social Web. For that reason, I think Bounce is a meaningful release, with its power mainly being in altering the shape of these networks. I wrote an essay on that this week that goes into the philosophical side of Bounce. For more practical information I can recommend this coverage by TechCrunch and The Verge. Meanwhile, A New Social’s CTO Ryan Barrett has shared all the updates and new features that have happened to Bridgy Fed over the recent months.
Music sharing platform Bandwagon shared more information during Fediforum on their development work, and how they are working on integrating album sales. A dev blog by Bandwagon recently shared their plans on adding a premium subscription, and how album sales work. During a Fediforum session, developer Ben Pate shared some screenshots on what this looks like. WeDistribute has a deep dive into Bandwagon and the current state of development based on the latest FediForum session.
Bonfire is an upcoming fediverse platform that has slowly been reaching the end of the line for development, and they announced the release candidate version of Bonfire 1.0. It is a framework and platform for building communities on the fediverse, and has a large variety of features and extensibility. One of the standout features is circles and boundaries. Circles allow users to define lists of accounts, and boundaries allows users to determine on a per-post basis to what circles each post gets shared. This creates a significant amount of flexibility on how to handle private posts, something which is in huge demand within the open social web. Bonfire also gives users a large amount of control over how they see and filter their feed. For more of a philosophical take on that, I recently wrote about how Bonfire’s approach on custom feeds compares to Bluesky’s approach. The developers are inviting people to install their own instance and experiment with the new features. It is unknown when Bonfire will be ready for a full 1.0 release. For another look at Bonfire, TechCrunch also covered the story.
Filmmaker and fediverse evangelist Elena Rossini has released her fediverse promotion video, which was highly anticipated by the community. The video can be viewed here, and tells the story of why the fediverse matters for a lay audience. The video is worth paying attention to for two reasons: first of all, it is a well-produced promo video for the fediverse that explains some of the core ideas in an accessible manner. Secondly, the video has gotten a huge amount of support from within the fediverse community, with a large number of prominent people within the community supporting Rossini’s work. One of the challenges of analysing a decentralised community is that there is no singular decentralised community, there are a wide variety of different groups and cultures. However, by seeing how and who responded positively to the video, it becomes clear that Rossini’s video does represent a dominant and popular understanding of what the fediverse is, and why it matters. In that way, analysing the video does provide good insight into the one of the more dominant and popular cultures of the fediverse.
Shutdown of Lemmy and opportunity for PieFed
Lemm.ee, one of the biggest Lemmy servers, is shutting down at the end of June. The team says: “The key reason is that we just don’t have enough people on the admin team to keep the place running. Most of the admin team has stepped down, mostly due to burnout, and finding replacements hasn’t worked out.” This has some significant impact on the wider Threadiverse community, as the lemm.ee hosted a significant number of popular communities. This makes server shutdowns on Threadiverse platforms signficantly more impactful, as they also impact people who do not have an account on the platform. Community migration is challenging, and there are no specific tools to help with a community with migrating to a different server.
The shutdown of the Lemm.ee server provides an opportunity for PieFed, a link-aggregator platform similar to Lemmy. PieFed is over a year old, that has seen significant development and new features beyond Lemmy, but has not managed to gain traction yet, with growth of users being slow. However, now that communities on the lemm.ee. server need to find a new place, PieFed is emerging as one of the main destinations. In turn, this is giving PieFed some much need promotion and awareness within the Threadiverse community, with PieFed doubling the number of accounts within a week. Lemmy clients are also starting to add support for PieFed, with the Lemmy client Interstellar already supporting PieFed. PieFed also uploaded two PeerTube video walking through all the moderation and administration features the platform has.
Platform updates
Ghost’s work on implementing ActivityPub is getting close to an official release. In their latest update, Ghost said that their ActivityPub integration will be part of the Ghost 6.0 release, which will come in ‘a few weeks’. The team has been working on ActivityPub for over a year, and have grown from 3 people to 8 people now working on their social web integration. For Ghost, the ActivityPub integration is more than just another connector, describing it as ‘a statement that the open web still matters’.
Mastodon is planning to release a new update, version 4.4, with the first beta now available. Some of the new features include the ability to set more feature content on user profiles, more list and follow management tools. For admins, there are better tools for setting legal frameworks, moderation tweaks and more. The biggest feature of the patch is that it will display quoted posts. The highly requested feature will only be fully available in version 4.5, which will include the ability for users to create quoted posts. Mastodon CTO Renaud Chaput says that he expects version 4.4 to be released at the end of June, with version 4.5 scheduled a few months later in September of October. The organisation also shared their monthly engineering update for May.
PeerTube released their latest version, 7.2, with a new design for video management and publication pages. PeerTube also now has more features for handling sensitive content. Creators can now add an explanation of why the content is marked as sensitive. Users also have more flexibility with how they want sensitive content to be handled, with various different configurations between hiding, blurring or warning about a video with sensitive content. PeerTube is also running a crowdfunding campaign for the mobile app, which has now crossed the halfway mark at 35k EUR. This milestone is for video management from the mobile app, with the next milestone being for livestream support in-app. The PeerTube app developer also shared a blog post with his thoughts on the technical framework considerations for building the app.
Hollo is a single-user microblogging platform, and their latest release has a significant number of new features, including better OAuth and various upgrades to the UX. Developer Hong Minhee also announced that independent fediverse developer Emelia Smith will join as a co-maintainer for Hollo.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! You can subscribe to my newsletter to get all my weekly updates via email, which gets you some interesting extra analysis as a bonus, that is not posted here on the website. You can subscribe below:
In this case that's exactly what we need, someone with more money than god that can set precedents to protect the authors and artists that need it the most.
It doesn’t matter it was the evil empire getting that result
It does if it only benefits evil empires. The open source tools can't afford the price which only leaves the big AI companies that can and Disney who holds the data.
All this will do is add a fat price tag and censorship. Artists will not get paid and AI will not go away, the jobs will still be lost. It's the worst of both worlds.
when disney wins there will be nothing left to sue, with the result that now the entertainment industry, which has the available training data, will also have the AI technology, and the only one who profits is disney - because in this situation all open source GenAI is fucked.
I dunno, we've seen corporations come at each other many times before.
Most of you people won't understand this, but copyright and patent laws aren't going to be around forever. They don't help the working class and it's only a matter of time before new generations rise above our tunnel vision and indoctrination.
I mean, just look at this case a prime example. Who is the one suing? Disney. Who stands to benefit? Disney.
Are the random joe's suing? No, they can't afford it. The laws do not exist to protect them. It's another reason why we never see big corporations challenge copyright and patent laws. They know they make more money with them.
I don't see the irony. They perceive AI as a loop hole and need to squash it to keep their grip on things. If anybody can just prompt a movie in ten years, their business is dead. If a small group of indie animators can make a fully fledged movie, their business is dead.
They made it fucked up in their favor, this lawsuit is a continuation of that.
Disney isn't fighting for the little guy. They will still agressively use it to cull their own workforce. They want to control who can use it and don't want to compete against an indie animation scene.
Show me where I can download Midjourneys full model to run it locally and then we can agree to call it "open weights". Unless their base model and training data is also available, it's not open source.
I'd say do it more... generate more star wars media until Disney gives it up as a golden goose to milk. Doesn't matter if it's ai or whatever fuck disney...
The Google-owned site has provided moderators with new guidelines and training on how to deal with inflammatory content that breaks YouTube's code of conduct, writes The New...
Well yes. You obviously still can’t say “le dollar bean” without getting nuked from orbit. YouTube is a goodly Christian corporation after all, can’t have such content.
Are you implying you don't use YT at all? Or you use it and choose to be unhappy with it?
Just curious, I often get mad because they need to censor words, but not to the degrees to say 'fuck this place" and move to the other (unborn) alternative.
Yes they are, some from the very conception of YouTube perhaps, but they are not real alternatives a real alternative would be one where all your subscriptions also upload the same content there, it is totally not YT based and you get the same or similar ecosystem Google provides, I don't think too many channels fit this.
I mean, if your requirement for a youtube alternative is that it's as big as YouTube, you're just guaranteeing that there will never be a YouTube alternative...
Yeah perhaps, we are here on Lemmy after all, which I consider a Reddit alternative, but with YouTube the thing is different because we follow individuals, and here we follow subjects, hopefully somebody can truly stand out against Google in the video field, a movement big enough to motivate content creators to check it out, the last thing I hear was about Odysee, which I think is a step in the right direction.
almost all the right wing contents get pushed to the front. there are some that are also rw that is buried by the algorithim, because they are loud mouths, i wonder if this will change for them too.,
Good. I don't really care about youtube, but less censorship is always a good thing.
How can you people say you respect science when you support silencing any criticism of it? That's not science. That's religion.
That said, this criteria clearly only exists to protect "influencers" who make youtube a proportional amount of money. If you have a channel with very little traffic and you say something controversial, you'd better believe your "freedom of expression value" will not be high enough to outweigh the corporation's perceived "harm risk."
youtube shadowbanning, demonitization and censorship is the most retarded shit that's ever happened to the internet. the whole website is videos and comments of people who cater to kids and commercial advertisers and cant say shit.
We will (still) allow children's cartoon characters to be mutilated and put into explicit situations and then push them as child friendly, but how dare you use a swear in the first 15 seconds of a video or say the work kill.
Intention: YouTubers can stop with the whole self censoring shit.
Example: Unaliving; PDF file; grape; etc.
Reality: Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, and other right wing grifters receive zero censorship while YouTubers still have to self censor to receive monetization.
How long before Google locks YT down only to Chrome on Windows, Mac, ChromeOS, or Android, and blocks it from loading at all on non-Chrome browsers and on Linux or iOS, blocks it from loading at all if ad blockers, including hardware-based ad blockers ala PiHole, are implemented, and enforces hardware security measures ala TPM2 for authentication, and ensures that no one can download and re-upload YT vids, with DRM?
Basically, I wouldn't put it above them to ensure their video platform only runs on their browser, on hardware and OS platforms they deem worthy of running it, even down to somehow implementing a Vanguard-style rootkit.
A peaceful protest is underway against mega corporations attempting to impose DRM on the web, aiming to gain control over all content possible and making our lives worse.
They won't ever say it out loud but they have always removed videos for mentioning alternative frontends or other technology they view as direct threats to their revenue stream.
See the issue here is Google/Youtube still get to be the ones to decide what "may outweigh the harm risk". And the answer I bet will usually be whichever one serves their financial interests.
Which on one hand sure, it is their platform after all. But don't do me dry and claim you used lube.
I still wouldn't trust Google not to nuke my channel on a whim even in spite of those relaxed moderation rules. What's stopping a little bribe from the right company or political party from causing them to backpedal or even tighten their grip further?
This is why one should at least mirror their content to PeerTube or a similar alternative platform like that even if they're not going to just outright post future content to said alternative and give up on YT altogether.
I agree. We've seen enough times in the past where a creator would get a strike from a video several years old because the rules changes. Anyone legit should be careful.
Moderators were previously told to remove videos if one-quarter or more of the content violated YouTube policies. Now, that limit has been increased to half.
This seems like alien speak to me. They announce that shit, someone read it, and then repeated it in an article. But what does it mean?
Can you have 6 contents and make 2 really crazy? Can you tell people to commit violence for 5 minutes and then review a game for 6 minutes? Is there a dude with tvtropes open going through and marking the contents of content?
Great, now that 50% of a video can be a direct call for genocide, does that at LEAST mean I can use ONE instance of a "bad" word or speak of "icky" things like death and drug abuse without being demonized?
I like freedom of speech but it seems like it would be pretty difficult to weigh those things against one another. what is the metric that they have in common? I don't know that there is one
This morning, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released new data on inflation confirming what many of us have felt at the register: grocery prices are rising again.
‘Wildly underprepared’: National Guard troops sent by President Trump to Los Angeles amid immigration protests are seen sleeping on floors in exclusive photos
The protestors really need to get the CANG to switch sides and face off against the police. Low key convinced that’s a real possibility if orangeboi or Hesgeth tries to order them to do something really beyond the pale.
I empathize with the hope that the national guard would side with protesters in violation of their orders, but is there any historical precedent for that?
On the other hand, there have been plenty of historical confrontations where the national guard has engaged in violence against demonstrators.
Maybe it can be different this time, but I don't know.
TheObviousSolution
in reply to disguy_ovahea • • •Mirshe
in reply to TheObviousSolution • • •RedPostItNote
in reply to Mirshe • • •Mirshe
in reply to RedPostItNote • • •wanderingmagus
in reply to Mirshe • • •blazeknave
in reply to wanderingmagus • • •wanderingmagus
in reply to blazeknave • • •In my division, everyone unanimously agrees that the administration is absolutely stupid and indefensible. Of those, every last one would outright defy any order to "kill half the population". We talk about it all the time - including with my Chief. ~60% of the officers I speak to also believe that the administration is conducting unlawful actions, and about 70% believe the administration is engaging in actions harmful to the socioeconomic and geopolitical standing of the USA. >80% of the enlisted personnel in other divisions at my command likewise agree that the administration is making stupid and indefensible decisions, and all of them would outright defy any order to "kill half the population".
Any other questions, civilian?