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Mastodon | social media empowering independent journalism (Perugia International Journalism Festival)
Inizia:Venerdì Aprile 11, 2025 @ 6:30 PM GMT+02:00 (Europe/Rome)
Finisce:Venerdì Aprile 11, 2025 @ 8:30 PM GMT+02:00 (Europe/Rome)
Join Mastodon for an aperitivo at the International Journalism Festival!
Are you curious about how Mastodon is shaping the media landscape for independent journalists? We will host an aperitivo together with a short presentation covering the latest trends and developments in Mastodon. After our presentation, join a discussion and networking session with the Mastodon team, where you can share your ideas and experiences.
Complimentary drinks and light bites will be provided.
This event is open to all, but registration is required, as space is limited. Please RSVP via this link.
Join Mastodon for an aperitivo at the International Journalism Festival!
Are you curious about how Mastodon is shaping the media landscape for independent journalists? We will host an aperitivo together with a short presentation covering the latest trends and developments in Mastodon. After our presentation, join a discussion and networking session with the Mastodon team, where you can share your ideas and experiences.
Complimentary drinks and light bites will be provided.
This event is open to all, but registration is required, as space is limited. Please RSVP via this link.
We watched "A Complete Unknown" last night. It was a great movie about what making music means to a culture and to oneself. Timothée Chalamet does a great job as Bob Dylan. The music is awesome and moving. Ed Norton is a sweet, deep Pete Seeger. The emotional stakes are high, and the Night That Dylan Went Electric feels like a personal and movement watershed. Don't miss it.
#2 cannot be said, printed, or displayed in the United States of Amerika because it promotes, hints-at, or makes visible the possibility that gender and preference are complicated.
"4. All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations."
Yes, but it's also potentially part of the problem. We can wall them off from the good-Fediverse, but the nature of the thing is that the dark mirror fediverse continues to exist and to connect the worst people.
Truth Social was born out of Mastodon And so were a lot of extremist instances which are still active and popular.
The nature of the Fediverse and by extension most FOSS is that they are open and unrestrictive with their software access/usage.
On the other hand, it did also give rise to a lot of political groups from varying parts of the political spectrum.
I think so social media platforms shouldn't lean towards one side of the spectrum. A diverse set of views and opinions should be welcome. But it almost never is the case. Each platform is known for having one kind of bias or the other.
Take Bluesky, it's filled with Left-leaning people who left Twitter because of Musk/Trump. There's a homogeneity to the politics of the opinions shared over there. Some would call it an "Echo Chamber."
Truth Social- Only MAGA idiots.
X- a bit of both.
Fediverse- Depends on the instance. 😀 One can interact with all kinds of people here, and I think that's a good thing as far as exposure & bias is concerned.
I may be wrong but I think that basically "normal" people (I want to exclude those that are really motivated to be fascists or that kind of stuff) move to the far-right because of a lack of critical thinking. They fall in the trap of "easy solutions for difficult problems".
The place where you build that kind of immune system is the school.
I can see this path:
Bad school -> lack of critical thinking -> populism is OK.
Rebuild a good school system and you'll have better citizens, better citizens can tell a lye from a truth.
yeah - it's architecturally freedom-shaped in a way that forces people to deal with what is harmful, who is part of what community, and what is unacceptable. Centralised platforms are shaped like unfreedom and have difficulty with nuanced pluralism, tending to ignore issues (see Meta in Myanmar) or simply decide on a single stance which is enforced (the many things you can't say on TikTok or get demon(it)ised for on YouTube. For better or worse we hash things out here.
IMHO, anyway. It's not the prevailing leftism, but the structural pluralism.
yes, but becoming insular is what we have to watch out for. Silly Fedi-vs-Bluesky spats, for example, will get us nowhere. People use what's convenient and what the people around them use.
no technology is neutral, but no technology is capable of solving social problems on its own.
Furthermore, the advance of the shit-right among the population is not a spontaneous problem, but is determined by enormous investments that the timocracy has allocated and continues to allocate to orient public opinion, ensure the loyalty of publishers, finance politicians and manipulate elections.
The closed and manipulative algorithms of the platforms modify democratic balances, while open ecosystems consolidate democracy, stimulate diversity and incentivize participation.
The Fediverse can therefore be a solution to the extent that it constitutes an alternative to manipulative technologies.
As for the advance of the right In fact, the problem is not the populist right in and of itself, but rather the fact that the populist right constitutes an extraordinary vector for bringing the predatory aristocracy of large technological companies to power.
This may be a Masto-specific problem but it sort of feels like everyone is raising alarms non-stop without coming up with solutions. People screaming "Trump is doing this" or "ICE is doing that" but barely a word is devoted to calls for action. It's just non-stop doomerism almost designed to make the reader feel helpless and despondent.
I think if the fediverse is going to play some sort of role in pushing back on these things, we need to start, well, pushing back.
It's a haven for those of us who are already here, but without a way to draw the masses (something which not everyone wants), @gangrif is right.
It provides a welcome respite from places like Bluesky, but it's far from an antidote to corporate run, billionaire owned social media. It's hard to convince the average person to use Mastodon, especially when big names/accounts that dominate those other places trash it all the time, perpetuating the notion that it's hard to use and characterizing its users in a negative way.
Yes, but... we are still lacking tools to manage discussion and clamp down un-wanted interactions / trolls / toxic behaviours _at scale_ (<- that's the key point).
The latest Pixelfed bug is interesting, in that a bug in _another service you don't use_ may potentially expose your toots against your wishes.
I can only think of more encryption as the solution to this last point, but I think that's not trivial.
If you’d like a way to feel that a better path for us is not only possible but within reach, I strongly recommend you spend as much of 100 minutes as you can with this conversation.
It’s with Audrey Tang.
We would need also to strengthen digital and especially media literacy. Populists (especially those on the far-right) play with fear and psychological terror to manipulate people.
Media literacy has worsened at least in the western world – if not globally.I also would guess that this is why bipartisanship seems so unthinkable for many.
Thanks, everyone. My answer is "Yes, but". The "but" being that we have to continue to make it more of a part of the lives of more of the people on the planet.
Lavori in ambito scientifico o in un ambiente in cui, in ogni caso, potresti leggere PDF con margini ampi impostati in Computer Modern? Vuoi rilassarti durante le ore di lavoro? Ecco il client Mastodon perfetto e di sola lettura per te: Mastodon-LaTeXclient trasforma la tua cronologia in un documento, così puoi tenerla aperta in modo molto discreto su uno schermo di lato!
I'm up early to try to see a bit of the eclipse. We've got some cloud cover but I'm gambling we'll get a tiny bit of the occlusion between the horizon and the clouds. 🤞🏼
The most upsetting part of this response, to me, is that it seems like Rumeysa Ozturk had her visa revoked and was arrested not because of anything she personally did, but because of the movement she associated with.
That's dark. It sounds like the Administration is going to dish out collective punishment to the most vulnerable participants in the anti-war movement for the actions of some other people at the protests.
yes. This a demoralizing tactic that authoritarians have used for years. It exists to make you worried about the whims and moods of a person rather than have rules and laws that we can all rely on. Keeping people nervous and afraid
Is the tactic
On purpose. The less it makes sense the more it works.
This newbie who just celebrated 100 days of #selfhosting was able to install #Apache and #Varnish on her #Ubuntu VPS (to prevent the "Mastodon Hug of Death" for link preview cards on her self-hosted Ghost blog). She's very proud of herself for all the sudo commands she successfully ran today. And she's weirded out talking about herself in the third person, so: I did it YAY.
LOVE LOVE LOVE this Linux / self-hosting journey I'm on. Thank you for all your support & encouragement ❤️
love that you are taking us on this journey with you. I would like to enter the realm of self-hosting too and its very inspiring to see you doccument so much of the process.
@liaizon aw thank you! It means a lot coming from you.
Well, after my PeerTube miniseries I will write about what it's like to self-host with the help of #YunoHost. It's very very easy to do (including updating / maintaining things). I'm self-hosting Friendica, GoToSocial and Pixelfed thanks to YunoHost.
My self-hosted Ghost blog is on another VPS and a whole different story - pure command line prompts for that one. Trickier but very satisfying 🤗
I don't know if you've looked into it, but I like using nginx with docker. If you run nginx-proxy, in combination with acme-companion, you can spin up any number of domains on it. This includes stuff like "git.mydomain.net" and "social.mydomain.net" and...in addition to otherdomain.dev. Each time you do this, acme-companion goes and registers for and sets up https from letsencrypt. AND you have set yourself up behind a reverse proxy, which adds a bit of security.
I had to set up some #Varnish config for another reason: I needed a reverse proxy to redirect the traffic to different containers. Performance gain appeared as a side effect 😁 Did you come to use #Hitch as TLS proxy too?
@zerkman I have no idea what Hitch is so please do tell ! I’m very very green and I may give the impression of expertise but I’m not a sysadmin and I barely know what I’m doing. I’m mostly copying and pasting commands in Terminal 😅
Basically, Hitch manages all the encrypted TLS traffic (the security layer that is being used by HTTPS), then you don't need to manage encryption on the apache/nginx side.
Being able to handle all your private keys in a single place is very comfortable.
It might be possible your hosting service is already managing encryption for you, that being the reason you don't actually have to bother about that.
@isadora @thecoffemaker I already initiated a mass migration to Signal in Jan 2020 for family and friends (to keep in touch with me - cause I was OUT).
But they all still use WhatsApp (in addition to Signal) 😕
completely abandon WhatsApp is an almost impossible mission 🙁 Local businesses, govern services, banks and a lot of people and institutions end up forcing us to keep a WhatsApp account... but the fact they have an alternative is fantastic!
I'm also a "forced" WhatsApp user, but my family and close friends are using XMPP to keep up with me and these 16 people have all my heart to accept talk to me by my own messenger that I lovely call isaCloud Messenger 😁
@isadora and then five years later you recommend them to use an amazing tech which will let them not only use their mobiles but also all their devices to talk with you 🤗 plus they will have access to the amazing federated community of #xmpp
For me it's the fringe only (bangs) as I also have long hair. But Steven says it looks great. He would, of course! I made a better job of his. Have a great weekend Elena!
I remember those early days with fondness (and a bit of exasperation as well). After decades of self-hosting almost everything I needed over time, I'm relaxing in retirement watching everyone else doing it now.
hey, congratulations! I used to be a big Varnish guy, in the pre-HTTPS-everywhere days. I know that magical feeling when you get the rules working just right and see performance take off like a cheetah. 🤠🍺👍
hi! That is great! I don’t think I’d have leveled up so fast by myself
If you ever find yourself in need of performance optimization, I put up some tips over here, and some of them might be useful: github.com/GuillaumeRossolini/…
I love reading about your progress. Going from dipping a cautious toe on the Mastodon beach to plunging head first into the Marinara Trench of Linux and Fediverse self-hosting. And evangelising about it in such a great accessible way. You have a lot of stuff to be proud of.
In the current aggressive imperialism of the US, some Americans online insist that they don't approve of war and shouldn't be lumped in with the Americans who are banging the drums for war.
It's not the job of Canadians, Kalaallit (Greenlanders), Panamanians or Gazans to make you feel better and absolve you personally of complicity in potential invasions. We have other things to do.
It's *your* job to make sure the wars don't happen. Stopping wars is hard; you need to start now.
That's almost equivalent to lumping English peasants in with the aristocracy who first enslaved them, then used that model around the world (and it got worse). There is no longer a functioning democracy in the USA. You can resist the best you can, but I don't think they can do much individually right now and you can't really put this on Americans in general.
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.
Hmmm, as someone who has protested every US war in my lifetime, and that's no small number, I recall the Canadian state being a key player in many an imperialist venture. Our movements know no borders, right?
I agree with some of the arguments people make against this stance, but I want to note how this connects with the "not my president" approach some take.
Even if you didn't vote for him, don't like him, and wouldn't cross the street to piss on him if he were on fire, that doesn't mean you get to evade responsibility. If you (I) wear an American flag or otherwise use the privilege of being American, then you (I) own a bit of the responsibility.
Btw I just tooted this Guardian opinion piece about someone involved in "disengaging" people from falling down conspiracy rabbit holes and purity spirals into the realms of evil ideology.
I gather we should see much more of that kind of concerted efforts. Because what I see in most calls to activism boils down to choosing sides and take position in the activist army ready for war. While it may come to it, dear god, let's avoid bloody civil war.
What I see all too often is that people for whom there is the slightest suspicion they do not conform to the set norms and values in a particular in-group, they are immediately ostracised by cancel culture, blocked out. This inability to accept that there are shades of grey, and making an effort to pull back stray souls into the light, is a sure way of seeing them slide further away, eventually into fascism.
🤔 "trying to disengage others" is what more people should try.
In Sydney’s suburbs, I fell in with other traumatised loners – and we found scapegoats for our rage. A trip into the city changed everything, says Matthew Quinn of Exit Australia
while all that may be true, I would suggest that such statements are only helpful as a release of frustration and anger. They do little to gain allies in any cause and instead sow division in the very ranks you’re trying to enlist.
I would posit that similar (equally justified) sentiments of anger and frustration aimed at men for not doing enough during the MeToo era resulted in riper conditions for the likes of Jordan Peterson to gain a following, which in turn contributed to the fascist pickle we find ourselves in down here.
I could be justified in saying it was the responsibility of all Canadians to stop your madman Jordan from spewing all his hatred south of the border. Note how that statement makes you feel. Does that kind of passive aggression motivate you to do something about him? No. It sows the very division that makes achieving our mutual goals further out of reach.
I see you. I hear you. I feel you. And we will do what we can, but that may not be enough. Iraq remains fresh in my memory after all.
who is asking for absolution, though? We’re quite busy trying to stop fellow residents from being abducted and disappeared for having an opinion on a war that is close to an even split when it comes to US public opinion. While simultaneously every institution from education to mail delivery and even weather forecasting is under attack.
Close to 1/3 of people here support those abductions and similar abuses against immigrants. When it comes to aggression against Canada only 6% are in favor. That’s unheard of in US public opinion. There are probably more people who believe the earth is flat than people who want to invade Canada.
This whole regime is an embarrassment and needs to be stopped. Aggression towards Greenland and Canada are just a small portion of the ills we’re facing. Insisting it become our top priority and kvetching if anyone points out how unpopular or unlikely to gain traction those things are doesn’t really serve any purpose.
@Evan Prodromou I can understand the logic of your post, but studies have been conducted about how much influence the people really have on government. In the United States, people still have influence over the state and local governments, in most jurisdictions, but they have little to no influence over the federal government. The policies are mostly decided by lobbyists and special interests and corporations and the wealthy, and even if the public opposes a law or policy, they are unlikely to stop it or get it changed.
I do agree that we need to "start now" as you say, but I think you overestimate the influence the public has at this point.
@scott I guess I just don't know how much it matters to someone under the rubble in Mariupol if Fyodor Fyodorov of Yekaterinburg didn't vote for Putin and privately disapproves of the war.
@Evan Prodromou We are doing everything in our power to prevent abuses by the government. We've been trying for years, and we can't guarantee that we will succeed. Especially considering that the courts and politicians won't even stop flagrant violations of our rights. You basically just blamed the Jews for not stopping Hitler. I know you mean well, but that is extremely upsetting and inappropriate.
@scott I think you need to re-read. I am not blaming anyone; I'm saying that asking to be excused from blame by people who are dealing with the real risk of invasion is unfair; those people have other things they are doing. If that doesn't resonate for you, please feel free to ignore!
we should be able to talk about anything mostly without getting blocked unless you tag people with stuff they probably don't want to see or clearly don't want to interact with you anymore. the emotional stuff is usually what we most need to discuss and share content with alternative views/info. #SocialWeb
Evidence suggests that many are safe to say even the most abhorrent of things on the internet, so much so that any topic might reasonably be considered safe to at least begin a discussion.
Deeper examination of that evidence would likely yield relative levels of safety based on arbitrary but obvious genetic markers, ideology, geographic location, origin, other cultural indicators or lack thereof.
But, what I know is, none of us are actually safe at all.
I guess it depends on who's talking. I'm a white privileged woman evolving among leftist, I can talk about Palestine, stand for Palestinian people, participate on fundraisings etc., it will not have bad consequences for me. I responded accordingly, knowing that what's true for me isn't necessary for other 😐
I said "Yes, but" because I feel like it is (for me) now but it might not be later. And I think for other people it's not safe now. There are a lot of people in the US who really don't seem to understand how this topic gets discussed on a more international stage. And safety can mean different things to different people. Freedom from consequences (arguments, social media backlash) or freedom of liberty and life?
Thanks everyone who replied. My answer is "Yes, but". I think it's better for people in Canada and Europe than in the US; I don't know much about the rest of the world. I think for people in the US or traveling to the US, it's a good idea to be careful. Oh, and obviously if you're posting about how great the Trump Gaza Casino will be, I think you're going to be OK in the US and you might be complicit in crimes against humanity in other places.
Or war crimes... depending on the exact circumstances, mass deportation can go either way.
Not for nothing, any US service member that was involved in that sort of thing would be exposed to the jurisdiction of the ICC, since it would be action in the territory of a state party to the Rome Statute.
Oh, and please don't use antisemitic language or stereotypes. It does not help end the war, free the hostages, feed the people of Gaza, or provide freedom and security in their homes for Palestinians and Israelis.
the current climate in the US distinctly reminds me of traveling through the USSR and communist China. We were monitored and watched our public conversations at all times. Chilling.
The ATmosphereConf was last weekend, independent relays are starting to appear, and more.
Conference
This weekend was the first ATProto conference, the ATmosphereConf, in Seattle. Over two days there were a large number of speakers and sessions, with over 150 people in attendance, and a significant number watching the live streams as well. I could not make it to the US, so for a full overview of the event, I recommend this extensive article by TechCrunch’ Sarah Perez, who was present at the event. The entire event was livestreamed, and all talks can be viewed via this YouTube playlist.
Some assortment of thoughts I had while watching the livestream and VODs over the last few days:
Bluesky CEO Jay Graber gave a short speech, about her background as a digital rights activist, and how she is now “holding the door open, so people can see another world is possible”. Graber is clearly aware of her position, where she is seen as a figurehead of the network, while also wanting to build a decentralised network where there is place for competing platforms. Being a figurehead of a network, without becoming the de facto leader of the network, while also holding the leadership position of by far the largest organisation in the network, is a challenging position to balance.
Bluesky CTO Paul Frazee talked about where Bluesky came from and where it is going. One of the things he talked about is the consideration of why Bluesky decided on their own protocol and not ActivityPub. His answer focuses on practical considerations, especially how ActivityPub handles identity and account migration. Watching the ATProto Ethos talk by Bluesky protocol engineer Daniel Holmgren it struck me that the question could also be framed as a matter of lineage. Holmgren talks about how ATProto takes inspiration from the Web, Peer to Peer systems as well as Distributed Systems. Placing it in such a context makes it clear that ATProto has quite a different background and other ways of thinking than ActivityPub has.
Ændra Rhinisland talked about how community projects can become load-bearing for the network, without adequate support structures for the people who run such projects. She also runs the popular news feeds using Graze. Graze has been adding support for advertisements, and Ændra is one of the first to take advantage. In her talk she walked through how at current usage rates, the feeds could generate over $20k per month in ad revenue. She plans to use this revenue to support the queer communities building on ATProto, and showed early plans for a self-sustaining fund powered by Graze’s feed revenue, to support initiatives such as Northsky.
The talk by Ms Boba is a great indication of how much under-explored design space there is on Bluesky and ATProto. Her talk focuses on labelers and fandom communities, and has some great examples of how they can be used outside of moderation.
Blacksky founder Rudy Fraser gave an excellent talk, describing Bluesky as a skeuomorphism, meaning that it imitates the design of the product it’s replacing. This phase is a part of the adoption cycle for new technologies, but Fraser does not to stop at imitation but instead explore the new ways that communities can be build online. Fraser is specifically interested in building platforms that can serve mid-sized communities, ranging from hundreds of thousands to a few million people. The Blacksky community is an example of this, and Fraser hopes that Blacksky can inspire other communities to do the same. His framing of content moderation as community care and not a cost of business also resonated with me.
Erin Kissane’s talk goes into detail about vernacular institutions, local and grassroots organisations and practices that are often illegible to outsiders but deeply embedded in local communities. This allows them to be close to the needs of their community members, but makes them hard to see and understand from the outside. This outside illegibility is a double-edged sword: IFTAS served a crucial role for trust and safety in the fediverse ecosystem, but had to shut down to a lack of funding as a result of being illegible to financiers.
Bluesky PBC has been working on a new version of the relay that makes it easier and cheaper to host, under the Sync 1.1 proposal. This new version is now starting to roll out, showing a significant drop in resource usage. Bluesky engineer Bryan Newbold shared some statistics here. Independent ATProto developer @futur.blue set up his own relay as a speedrun. He shows that a full network relay can be run on a 50USD Raspberry Pi, with an easy-to-follow tutorial here.
That full network ATProto relays are cheap to run has been known for a while within the ATProto developer community, but that knowledge has not spread much yet. One reason for this is that independent developers have set up relays primarily for their own use, sharing access with a few friends, but no other publicly accessible full-network relays exist yet1.
Upcoming short-form video platform Spark is building their own complete infrastructure. Spark’s relay will publicly accessible, and hosted in Brazil. Having ATProto infrastructure outside of US jurisdiction is a conversation that has come up regularly, and often followed by the assumption that the alternative is to have infrastructure like a relay hosted in Europe. Spark is bringing in a slightly unexpected twist here, by having the first publicly accessible relay that is not owned by Bluesky PBC being hosted in Brazil instead.
Having other relays that are not owned by Bluesky PBC has been the subject of a lot of conversation, and the Free Our Feeds campaign was founded on the idea that a significant financial investment is needed to do so. Furthermore, it assumes that such a relay is not only expensive, but that it requires an extensive governance infrastructure to manage it. The current developments regarding relays call both of these assumptions into serious question: relays are cheap, not expensive. Furthermore it seems that there is enough incentive that organisations that are serious about building their own ATProto platforms are willing to run their own relays.
In Other News
Bluesky PBC has published a proposal on how they want to handle OAuth Scopes. OAuth Scopes is one of the main projects on the roadmap for the first half of this year. Currently, logging into an ATProto app via OAuth requires you to give that app permission to access all the data for your account. OAuth Scopes allows an app to only ask for the permissions that are necessary, and not the entire account. There are two problems that need to solve: the technical part of making it work, as well as the handling the UX to communicate clearly to people what data an app wants to access. The challenging part of the UX is how to handle the translation from the technical description of the data that is requested (stylised like ‘app.bsky.feed.getFeed’, for example), into a way that is understandable for the everyday user. The second challenge is that apps require permission not for one, but for many types of this lexicon data. A third-party Bluesky client that is restricted to only Bluesky data will still have to request a dozen of these Lexicons. A long list of technical lexicon names makes it impossible for regular people to have an informed opinion on what data is and is not being accessed. Bluesky PBC’s proposal is to group different lexicons into bundles, and create new lexicons that reference these bundles. Scoped OAuth can then request access to a bundle of lexicons, with a description that is legible for regular people.
Git repository platform Tangled is working on news ideas how a GitHub alternative might do things differently, and one of their first proposals is defining two types of pull requests. For another look at Tangled, this blog post experiment with what the platform allows.
One of the talks at the ATmosphereConf was by independent developer Rashid Aziz, who is the co-founder of basic.tech. Basic is a protocol for user-owned data, and seems to be fairly comparable to the PDS part of ATProto, with the major difference that Basic allows for private data on their version of a PDS. Aziz used the combination of these two protocols to create private bookmarks for Bluesky.
The new Record Collector labeler automatically displays if someone has been using other apps in the ATmosphere outside of Bluesky.
Rocksky is a new music scrobbler service on ATProto, that is currently in closed beta testing. It allows people to connect their Spotify account and automatically ‘scrobble’ (track) the music they are listening to.
The Links
Some tech-focused links for ATProto:
ATCryptography is a package with cryptographic utilities for the ATProto, written in Swift.
A blog post by independent ATProto developer Mary about ‘AT Protocol, OAuth, and well, decentralization’. Mary also published a repository car file explorer this week.
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! If you want more analysis, you can subscribe to my newsletter. Every week you get an update with all this week’s articles, as well as extra analysis not published anywhere else. You can subscribe below, and follow this blog @fediversereport.com and my personal account @laurenshof.online on Bluesky.
Cerulea.blue is a publicly accessible relay, using a custom implementation, but it is limited to non-Bluesky PDSes. ↩︎
So, here's my defense plan for Canada. Basic philosophy: it is unsafe to wait for an attack.
1. Get public confirmation from NATO that Article 5 applies even if the aggressor is also a NATO member. 2. Send an ultimatum to Washington demanding a public acknowledgement of Canadian sovereignty by the President and confirmation of non-aggression. 3. In the absence of that acknowledgement, sever diplomatic ties, close the borders, and embargo trade. Blow bridges, tear up roads and rail lines.
there is one problem I potentially see with closing the borders: trans people from the US who might be seeking asylum in the next few months and years.
@brennx0r @ch0ccyra1n I don't know what to tell you. Canada is a real country with almost 40M people in it, not an imaginary safe zone for American dissidents. I think it's imperative for all countries to take in refugees and asylum seekers, but maybe procrastinating until there's a war happening on the border you're trying to cross isn't the best plan.
as a German, it very much reads like third reich. I talked to couple of random others, yes the speed of USA degredation scares us. It is faster than in our nightmares/known timelines.
@Breedlov @brennx0r @ch0ccyra1n agreed. And obviously I am not in charge of Canada's defense. I don't know how a country defending against an invasion keeps a corridor open for refugees and asylum seekers from that same invading country. Maybe it's possible, I dunno.
@brennx0r @chad @ch0ccyra1n apparently the Ukrainians kept humanitarian corridors running across the front lines in their war, so I'm sure the Canadians could figure out something similar. But: crossing the front lines in a shooting war should be a last resort, not a primary plan.
4. Evacuate Canadian civilians from the border area; probably 300km or more. Yes, this is where most Canadians live. 5. Declare a security corridor of 300km on the other side of the border, in US territory. Any military activity in that area is a sign of imminent aggression and will prompt a defensive strike. 6. If anything occurs, surge forward and take territory. Keep any war on US soil, not in Canada.
The goal is to get Canadians out of harm's way for a shooting war with short-range missiles (500km-1000km); keep something like an economy running, although severely curtailed by the loss of US trade and any facilities near the border; and bring the maximum pain to the US economy, civilian morale, and government.
We have thousands of kilometers of borderland between the continental US and Canada, as well as Alaska and Canada. Even if the US makes headway into Canada, we can identify areas of the US to occupy. The psychological effect of having US territory occupied by a foreign country would be really devastating on its citizens.
While fighting on enemy territory may be the correct military strategy, I'm not convinced taking enemy territory will inevitably have a significant effect on enemy morale. Ukraine advancing into Russian territory doesn't seem to have crushed Russian morale; or, alternately, Russian morale is already shot and the war machine does not depend on the morale of Russian soldiers or civilians.
nothing's inevitable. Americans are daintier than Russians, though. Surviving occupation is the national sport in Russia, but Americans haven't had to do it for 250 years.
@skyfaller I don't think military plans are about finding One Weird Trick to Avoid Invasion. It's about finding weaknesses and exploiting them the best you can. I think occupation is a real weakness, and keeping the fight in US soil is also important.
Military planning is to identify goals and accomplish them in ways most surprising to the enemy.
Ideally, with no one hurt.
I like the first part of your plan the most: address this through the already extant treaties of international law - WHICH ARE ALSO US LAW. (See US Constitution, Article III, section 2)
The USA maintains a substantial reserve most of the time. And again, they have another source for the hideously bad bitumous oil the refineries are mostly set up to use.
My gut feeling is they have enough for 3-6 months, excluding rationing or conservation policies. Given that 20% or so of the refineries are working with light cruide, there is a domestic supply chain for the change-over, and could likely be at 40% within 6 months to a year.
Yes, but Canada is very likely to be a quagmire of costs if they do. And become unreliable.
If they are willing to consider that, they would also be willing to consider invading Venezuela. But, since they are being very palsy with M Putin, likely their cheapest option would be to switch policy on Venezuela, backing him to annex the Essequibo region of the Co-operative Republic of Guyana in exchange for controlling their oil industry.
Look, I'm on your side here. You're making the same mistake about Americans that the Japanese made at Pearl Harbor and al-Qaeda made on 9/11.
I'm not saying don't seize territory, I'm saying don't do it with the assumption it will worsen morale. It won't. It will harden resolve, not weaken it.
I suggested occupying low-population areas to put a lot of red on the map and attract military effort to those spots, so the war happens on US soil instead of Canadian soil.
That is probably not a great strategy from the American side, but I think popular opinion would insist on it.
It also gives something to negotiate over: you return southern Ontario, we return the Alaska panhandle or whatever.
oh, definitely try to have the fighting on US soil. As to low population areas, Canada is going to need to strike at relevant US military bases, wherever they are.
You are speaking in anger and fear, which is understandable, but time has come, alas, for cold-eyed military pragmatism.
@siderea @skyfaller oh, I'm not angry! This is just a thought experiment, not a serious plan.
Like I said, I'm just a software developer, not a military planner. I was just wondering, if a war is coming, what would be the best ways to survive as a sovereign nation?
I think, as the much smaller nation, we'd need to use other advantages: territory, initiative, allies. Being passive probably wouldn't work, I think.
@siderea @skyfaller Yeah, but that opens up a whole different can of worms. I think it's a lot harder for the US to break off a proxy war with China than it is to break off a war with its own NATO allies (ex-allies?). And popular support of a war against a Chinese proxy right on the US border would probably be much higher than for a costly war of conquest.
I don't know it matters. Once a war effort starts, the Trump administration isn't going to let it end.
Please understand, the reason he wants war is as much to organize US society around it as it is to gain any of Canada's resources. "We have always been at war with Eurasia."
He doesn't want war to get something. He wants war for war's sake.
@skyfaller Americans haven't had the enemy on our soil since 1942 and that was a remote island in Alaska. Tanks rolling down main St USA would make the consequences real for even the most cultish mouthbreathers
@fluffykittycat I'd say that the US has had the enemy continuously on our soil since the Civil War, if not since its founding, but I understand your point. Not enough Americans know about events like the Tulsa race massacre, and don't recognize slavers and homegrown fascists as occupying forces.
@skyfaller @fluffykittycat I think with luck and initiative, Canada could take some low population areas with high emotional value deep in US territory, like Yellowstone or Mt. Rushmore. The goal would be to require the attention of the US military to keep the fight over there so we don't have to fight over here. I don't think having to deal with partisans in big cities would be efficient.
Also, all nations, especially those who have been wronged in some way by the US, are invited to join in on the Sacking of the States. Together, we will build a new world on top of the old.
Another principle is jumping before we are pushed. if we wait to let troops and ordnance move to the border, while we hope to preserve trade with some last-minute deal, we're done. We have to take the initiative in our own defense or we will be subject to the whims of Washington.
indeed, I would hope some experts are on top of it. As an American, it’s also hard not to do armchair scenario speculations about surviving and mitigating disaster if possible. Grim stuff.
Last note: I am a software developer and standards enthusiast, not a military planner. I hope that PM Carney and his cabinet are having aides develop much, much better plans at this level of seriousness right now. I'm sure theirs will be a lot better than mine.
@davew if it’s any consolation, the us military is woefully unprepared and understaffed, they’d have to instigate a draft and I don’t see that going down without riots newyorker.com/magazine/2025/02…
Oh, one more thing: a common strategy for invaders is to let domestic rebellions happen, and then come in to "protect their rights". Hopefully CSIS and the Mounties can come down hard on any Canadian going on Fox News to invite invaders to come annex our country. It's a valid political position and thought experiment in peacetime; when there is a real possibility of a war, it's treason. Straight to jail! And definitely don't allow any kind of trucker convoy demonstrations in large numbers.
One temptation would be to get military support and other aid from China. It's a huge economy, would benefit from our economic resources, and has massive military resources.
I think this might backfire badly. It would go from a war of choice for the Americans to a war of survival. They would probably fight more desperately than if it was just Canadians and their European allies.
The Commonwealth has already chimed in, in a very subtle way. Prince Charles did a photo shoot aboard a warship in his Canadian uniform that apparently is also reflective of his role as king of Canada. Or whatever. I’m not for kings per se, but Canada has the backing of the UK and Europe as well. And by the way, most of us Americans.
@bplein I know! I think the Royal Family has been pretty supportive, although they have to be indirect. We'll see how it goes. And I know that Americans don't want a war!
- Tactical bombers are a big problem; they have a range of 1500-2200km and you just can't get out of their range and stay out of the Arctic Circle. - The Great Lakes present a lot of opportunities for fuckery. It's about 8000 km of US shoreline. - There is probably also a lot of opportunity for counterattack on the coasts. - What happens to the 60K US service members in the 100-200 US bases in Europe? Good question!
You are really gaming this out. Only this week was I trying to wrap my head and heart around what physical aggression would really look like. Thoughts I never ever had
Hey champ! Eh, I probably overthink it. I think the big thing is, we are not set up for a war with the country 10 times our size, with 30 times our annual military budget, with which we share like 9000km of borders. But we might be able to make a war too costly to wage against us. We can't fuck around, though.
@Milnoc I guess it depends on where NATO falls on preemptive attacks as self-defense. I don't know about it. If they say no, we'd have to decide which was more important: NATO support or the initiative.
I mean, I dig your enthusiasm and forward thinking, but... Many American states in the north near the border wouldn't probably be too bothered by becoming Canada. You're unlikely to encounter resistance in say Maine or Minnesota.
But your problem comes in considering this as a land war action. The US wouldn't move infantry in until after Shock and Awe...that's been their strategy for the last 3 engagements.
Also, Donald has fired all of the actual War College generals. There is nobody in charge of the US military who understands tactics. These are small, stupid men. And you know what happens if you back small stupid men into a corner? They do crazy shit.
Do you have faith that Donald's army wouldn't launch tactical bomb busters, white phosphorus and chemical weapons into Toronto just like they did in the Middle East?
Palestine was a test run to see what "democracies" could get away with when it comes to mass destruction. It's a lot.
@MissConstrue no, I totally agree that a lot of warfare would be artillery and bombers. That's why it's crucial to get the civilian population out of harm's way, either by moving them North or overseas to Commonwealth allies. Unlike Gaza, bombing Canada wouldn't be like shooting fish in a barrel; these fish can swim away.
Oh, absolutely. Americans do not know how it feels to be occupied; haven't had it happen since 1812.
I can't guarantee we wouldn't bite back like a rabid dog, but I can guarantee it would fuck with our identity fiercely to have a foreign sovereignty holding our soil.
@mark The more time and resources that were spent dicking around trying to recover the Alaska Panhandle or northern Maine would be time and resources not spent on Canadian territory.
I think the best move would be to hold a lot of rural area or wilderness, not any cities or even big towns (expensive and hard to hold). Make a big red stain on the map on the nightly news, with minimal effort.
You also have those of us in the U.S. that grew up in the border states. We love Canadians, many of us have been across the border many times.
Bring a military truck filled with maple syrup and well help you stage a whole invasion for the cameras, go make some waffles, pancakes n bacon together, and I hope you brought your skates because we may not want a war with ya but we're happy to face ya on the rink!
@richlitt I think in a shooting war there are some pretty specific definitions for being part of the resistance, and they don't count posting about the "Cheeto-in-Chief" on X.
I agree with you on that. I just recognize that a good amount of my friends and community will likely agree with you if there is aggression from the US to Canada, and would likely be interested in doing physical acts of warfare against a fascist state.
The goal of taking US land would, I assume, be to cause regime change in the US to stop future aggression.
@phil @richlitt sorry, maybe I wasn't clear. "Make it hurt for citizens" means economically and politically, not mass slaughter of civilians. I'll make sure to update that.
I don’t think 300km from the border and keep the economy running is possible. That’s the entire Montreal to Windsor corridor, and half the country’s population.
@sean @preinheimer another option is calling on our fellow Commonwealth nations to take in children, seniors, and non-combatants, like we did for the UK in WWII.
@preinheimer Those both sound like the same outcome to me. In the case where we nearly-all need to give up all of our homes, schools, hospitals, jobs, and other infrastructure, we'd just be occupying ourselves—we'd be so demoralized, malnourished, and disease-ridden, that we'd be easy to conquer.
I think I'd rather lose in the first wave than suffer all of that and lose anyway because we're trying to huddle into tents and hope the wheat delivery isn't droned again.
@sean @preinheimer oh, yeah. Sorry, my plan is to win. Surrendering is always an option if you're willing to give up sovereignty. Maybe in a generation or two, there'd be an opportunity to rebel.
@preinheimer preemptively abandoning territory esp your most valuable real estate is just plain nuts + we have long range missiles so it's surrendering in advance for naught
@peachfront @preinheimer it takes less than an hour to get from the US border to cities housing 2/3 of the population. There's just no time for evacuation when an invasion has actually started. If you're going to evacuate and keep most of your population from being occupied, it has to happen ahead of time.
I'm sorry to say it, but there's no way to reconcile these objectives. In principle, you could evacuate the population ~250 km from the border, but there's no housing or anything there, so they'd have to live in tents, which is contraindicated by the existence of something called "winter". Constructing housing for that many people doesn't go quickly, even if you haven't abandoned all your industrial facilities (see below) ; and likewise, the heating fuel pipelines are mostly close to the US border, as are all the nuclear power plants.
Crucially, nearly all the industrial facilities bar some mines are located close to the US border, as are almost all the port facilities. So, even if you can divert all imports and exports to different markets (which is very difficult because of the close cross-border integration of many industries, such as cars), there's no good way to move all that stuff without the ports which empty to the Atlantic via the Gulf of St Lawrence.
Barring several independent and very large strokes of luck, your proposed solution would be more destructive than an all-out war.
Now, considering how stupid the people in Washington pushing this bizarre anti-Canada agenda are, threatening it might be believed. I have no way to predict that.
@tsukkitsune I'd love to hear a better plan! Some countries, when invaded, have left large parts of their populations to be occupied, which does lower cost and logistics issues, at the cost of morale. You're also leaving a big economic powerhouse in the hands of the enemy. An occupied GTA is not providing material or funds to the Canadian government; it's all going to Washington.
It would definitely be easier for everyone in the US if it was only an invasion of Canadian soil, I agree. I just don't think it's a good strategy for Canada.
Do you think the majority of Canadians can be convinced that the USA under Trump is an existential threat before an actual US invasion? Because your plan won't be politically feasible if most Canadians believe the US is still fundamentally friendly until the US initiates military action.
not an easy answer. The other option is sacrificing these populations and letting them get bombarded and/or occupied. I think evacuation is the better choice.
isn’t most of Canada’s economic activity well within 300km of the border? You can evacuate all these people without blowing up Canada’s entire economy.
@juliette that's when you start handing out weapons from the Armory and homemade bomb manuals and tell the people to resist the occupation. The US military has proven they can't properly occupy a country even one as poor as Afghanistan, Canada would be a more formidable foe pound for pound
@lakelady it could be partial; move non-essential people north or overseas in tranches. Pull back the final groups only when bombardment or attacks get too heavy (destroying infrastructure as they pull back).
@lakelady another option would be declaring the security corridor much further into US territory; 500-1000km south (again, if we are concerned about short-range missiles). That is down to Virginia, Nebraska, or Northern California, and almost all of Alaska. It's possible but I think it's a lot harder to cover and defend.
@lakelady I don't think there's a win condition where we let US troops and vehicles mass on the border, with most of the Canadian population within an hour's drive, and wait until they invade before making a move. There's just not a lot of territory between Niagara and Toronto to manoeuver.
Where do we send 20 million people though? The suffering caused by that kind of an evacuation would be unimaginable as we don't have the infrastructure to handle that many - even one percent of that.
I'm sorry, I agree we need to have a strong plan, but pre-emptively invading the United States is, frankly, insane.
Nothing will more quickly galvanize Americans to believe Trump's lies about how we are soooo bad. Our vestigial armed forces are in no position to make such an effort. Salients are a nightmare to defend, even if forces are equal. We would be carpet bombed to oblivion. Abandoning cities just gives them free real estate. Lower home prices 🇺🇸!
I think you might need to read through it again. In this case, the US has expressed its intention to attack and is moving troops into position within reach of the border.
Letting those troops get into position and cross our border before taking any action would be insane. Especially with 2/3 of the population only an hour from the border.
And don't worry about real estate! It will be much less valuable when it's been pounded into rubble by American bombers and missiles.
At present, if there's a full scale invasion, no such thing is possible. This is the most powerful military in all human history we are talking about.
To be clear, yes, a troublesome insurgency that adds to the domestic American polycrisis such that continuing is impossible is likely our only hope. But we should not be unrealistic. Vietnam went on for ages.
And moving millions of people hundreds of kilometres is simply not feasible and would pretty much immediately end our economy.
@AlexanderVI so, because resistance would be hard, accept an occupation and lose any advantages whatsoever, and hope guerrilla actions nudge towards collapse of the empire?
no, I am not saying that. I'm specifically saying the invasion piece is not a good idea, in my opinion. Many other aspects of your plan are sound goals, and I sincerely hope we can avoid the worst. I agree we need to maximize friction.
I'm taking a Scouting approach: Be Prepared. We need civil defence organization and emergency preparedness efforts so we can support each other. We should be massively expanding something like the Reserves, maybe even a Swiss approach.
I think our only win condition is surviving long enough that the invader loses their will to continue the war and comes to the negotiating table.
I think holding US territory would be bad for US civilian morale. It would concentrate American firepower on troops in Minnesota, Idaho and Northern Maine rather than on the GTA.
It would also give us something to take to the table. Exchanging territorial gains and returning to pre-war borders would be a good outcome for us.
I appreciate this perspective, and it's worth gaming all avenues out, especially novel ones, given this wildly novel context.
I should have better highlighted our concurrence on the need to prepare infrastructure for destruction - Army Engineers should already be planning for how to blow bridges and interrupt transportation routes. The Navy should look for potential chokepoints in the St Lawrence that could be made unnavigable. We should be vigourously pursuing European missile systems.
if you sincerely believe the Canadian Forces can go toe to toe against the US military, I completely understand your reasoning. From the numbers, and from what I have seen of the US military up close, we are going to have very different opinions on that.
I am glad we are at least having frank discussions about this. I hope DND is as well.
For clarity, my family came to Canada as refugees when New York was evacuated in 1783. I have personally lived in the States. I will not do so again
@AlexanderVI one hope would be that moving troops and weapons to North America for a war would destabilize other regions, requiring redeployment of those troops back to Europe, the Middle East, East Asia, or whatever.
But the US has about 1M active service members in the US right now. They wouldn't have to move anyone.
I suppose, ironically, we would basically be partially re-running the strategic situation in the 13 Colonies in 1776, though the larger power is, geographically speaking, now less advantageously positioned, from our point of view.
Sadly, this time I don't think #France is going to bankrupt its treasury to help out the little guy. Macron doesn't want to end up on a guillotine.
I understand your strategic logic, I just don't think it's realistic. In military matters, the defender has a natural advantage. We have time to prepare the terrain. So maybe we need to get landmine production fired up.
Sallying out of the fort is an extremely dangerous manoeuvre, and is usually done in desperation.
But with that said I know your first few steps require guarantees from our allies. Were such in place and credible, we would be in a better place. I am not confident.
@Milnoc yes, that is entirely the point. The majority of the Canadian population is far too close to the border. We have to evacuate or we'll be entirely occupied within hours.
As far as I can tell, it’s not doable. They can hit everything we have from the air.
If they send a very small task force to seize a power plant or something, we can shoot them. Anything more than that quickly requires recourse to science fiction.
@smiteri yes, long-range bombers can hit anywhere in Canada. Short-range ones can hit pretty deep.
Moving our people away from the border lowers that risk, though. And maintaining a security corridor inside US territory to make it harder to keep up a bombing campaign may help too.
But our cards are not great. Our best advantages: very long borders, huge territory, European and maybe Asian allies, big dependence by the invader on our energy supply.
@smiteri a big mistake, I think, would be to make big concessions in hopes of staving off an attack -- concessions that would weaken our already slim ability to retain sovereignty. So, turning over control of key sectors of our economy, like energy, or even worse control over government or the military. If we know it's coming, we need to get ready, and not try to buy peace from an aggressor.
“Moving our people” and “maintaining a security corridor” already beg so many questions that we’re into science fiction, and they’d be a tenth of an obstacle to a superpower that regularly runs wars on other continents.
@smiteri yes, both extremely hard to achieve! I think evacuation is a huge effort here. During the Blitz, the UK moved almost 4M civilians out of high-target areas.
What percentage of Canadian civilians in the invasion zone -- about 25M people -- could move North or overseas is a big question. Obviously, we'd need military there, and workers in defense industries.
@smiteri About 6M people left Syria during the war there. So, given numbers like this, I'd guess something like half of Canadians evacuate that area, best case.
@smiteri I don't think maintaining a security corridor is science fiction! This is the longest demilitarised border on the planet, after all. We'd have to use our own air force and missiles to keep it demilitarised as best we can -- and yes, I realise that's an oxymoron. But I don't think the US military is in position for an invasion of Canada, and we have a chance to make it harder for them to get in position.
I don't want to be overly provocative, but I've suddenly become much less opposed to the idea of Canada leaving the NPT...
Article X allows a state to leave the treaty if "extraordinary events, related to the subject matter of this Treaty, have jeopardized the supreme interests of its country", giving three months' (ninety days') notice.
I've honestly never heard anything as self-destructive as the American goverment picking a fight with Canada and I've been going to AA meetings for 13 years
Consider taking Michigan first, and skip blowing up that nice new bridge you're building. About half of us will welcome our new Canadian Overlords as liberators.
I agree with this, not sure why the rest of NATO are ignoring trumps threats, maybe they are not taking those seriously enough and think it is just bluster.
@zleap I fully expect both the Other NATO partners and Canada are well aware of the risk and are planning contingencies, that's what Defence Departments do, and they have access to Intel not found online. They're not likely to hold a press conference on it 😅
An accelerated switch to renewable energy, an oil embargo on #KochNetwork, and a contract cancelation on its allies #AtlasNetwork and #RockbridgeNetwork will defund a fascist movement.
The US's interest in rare earth elements and Russia's focus on developing the Arctic economy and shipping provide a potential framework for the two countries to coexist on the planet.
I would like to think that if we tried to invade Canada, the northern states would rebel against the federal government and/or most of our troops would refuse to obey those orders.
I am, unfortunately, not as sure of this outcome as I would’ve been just a few years ago.
I'd love to see American opposition stop this preposterous, fratricidal war before it gets even near starting.
American citizens seem to be taking the atrocities threatened by their government lying down, and politicians are more interested in minor domestic issues than in stopping a continent-wide war or other military excursions.
You might want to delete "tear up ... rail lines" because Elon Musk it seems doesn't like our train systems (at a minimum, one of them) anyway. Why spend the effort if these bozos may do it for you?
When I first saw a picture of Musk's child-sized submarine, my first thought was "Dolt Cart", a "brilliant" device used on the first ascent of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley and apparently never used again because, when on a nearly vertical wall with overhangs, flakes, etc., it would tip over so often that it was more trouble than it was worth.
The cart was named after its inventor, whose nickname was "The Dolt".
I can't imagine any statement that Trump could make will matter. Canada must move fast and break things to rearm using European and South Korean tech. K-2 Black Panther tank (South Korea) K-9 Thunder self-propelled howister (South Korea) Destroyers without usa fire control system Gripen fighter Sweden French submarines 5.56 ammo produced outside of usa 7.62 ammo for machine guns outside usa - all with tech transfer and factories in Canada
The _only_ way to deal with bullies is to let them feel, in the first millisecond, that if they mess with you they'll have a fight on their hands.
They back off. The Rancid Kumquat has followed that script many times. And yet, because he sits on top of the richest, most nukeified country in the world, people keep acting like appeasement will solve something. It _never_ does with bullies.
@Tabby_Schaf I'm sure there are ways to make it work, but there are also 193 other countries on the planet. I'd recommend fleeing to one that your country is not trying to invade.
they have some more borders. But once they crossed they continue to flee by plane. If I were American, I would cross the border to Canads and the take a plane to Australia, New Zealand, evtl. Portugal, GB
@Tabby_Schaf well, I guess if there were a war going on on the Canadian border, you'd have to go to Mexico instead, and then fly from there.
It feels extreme to ask Canadians not to defend themselves from an invasion, so there's a convenient exit path for American emigrants? Am I misunderstanding the question?
yes you misunderstood and eventually me too misunderstood: I thought you spoke of closing the border right now. In the moment of invasion you have to do.
@Tabby_Schaf also, in doing a little research, there are usually humanitarian corridors maintained for refugees and asylum seekers, sometimes maintained by international organizations. Apparently, even some political dissidents and other Russian refugees did go across the battle line into Ukraine!
don't think they could, because even Ukrainians of the Eastern parts had to go to Russia, then to the Lituvian border. Initially there was a corridor in Sumy and Sapphorishija. Now since long all is closed, no escape.
@Tabby_Schaf As someone who would love to move to Canada (but can't right now due to family), I'm with you on this. If the US did invade Canada, it would be absolutely foolish for Americans to try to escape there - only to potentially be recaptured. A better plan is to stay put and sabotage/fight the fascists, or escape to a different country.
@Tabby_Schaf @Andres4NY Right. In this case, the US government gives confirmation that it intends to invade. That's when the border would be closed. So Canada could prepare to stop the invasion.
@Evan Prodromou Americans have no interest in going to war with Canada. Sure, it would be neat if we didn't need a passport anymore, but there is no economic benefit of going to war. And considering that Canada is part of NORAD, they would figure out if the U.S. intended to invade Canada really quickly since it is a joint command. Simply cutting off the Canadian's access to intel would be a huge red flag.
@tejan it was 11 years between the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the fall of Saigon. About 2M people died. I'm sure it was a comfort to them to know that the war was unpopular in the US, but probably not very much.
1. Move 1600 agents into the US. 2. Each priority target is assigned 2 independent teams of sniper + spotter. 3. When the numbers stations transmit the "go" code, all teams act at once to take out the entire Forbes 400. 3a. Successful teams move to secondary targets, such as healthcare insurance executives or nutso pillow hawkers. 4. No one is left to profit from shooty wars or trade wars with Canada.
Start by Putting up a chainlink and barbed wire fence at the border with a second steel wire and steel post barrier 50 meters back as a buffer, might sound harsh but it will be necessary at some point.
TBH I wish a Senate committee would haul their recently-promoted colleague Marco Rubio in to enter that public acknowledgement of Canadian sovereignty into the Congressional Record.under oath.
@thecueball thank you for the hobby advice! I will see what I can do. I have a big garden, but I mostly grow native plants. I just got some of these, though, which I'm looking to plant this spring:
@thecueball I am definitely a complete amateur with defense plans!
The only thing I know is that the US military is about 30 times bigger than ours, and the US economy is about 13 times bigger than ours. If we want to survive an invasion, we'll need to use whatever advantages we can get -- territory, initiative, allies.
If you were a nation-state supporter, what would you do to try to maintain Canadian sovereignty in the face of an American aggressor? Rough sketch.
The point of these steps is that we don't benefit from delay. If it's going to happen, we need to start getting ready immediately, and not spin our wheels hoping for some change in policy.
1 and 2 are good for political pressure. But don’t blow up bridges and close the border because we’ll need that. Geography and force discrepancy mean that regular forms of military resistance are bound to fail. We should instead take advantage of these facts: 1- We have a huge border 2- 80% of Canadians look and talk like Americans. 3- The American people are extremely divided, even more so when it comes to invading us. 4- The US Army couldn’t handle insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
You missed an important detail, I’m talking about partisan tactics on US soil. But mainly it’s leveraging divisions within American society. Remember that millions took to the streets to protest the Iraq war…a far-away conflict against “brown people” of a different religion who had “attacked” the US.
If steps 1 and 2 clarify their intentions, it would probably be easier for us and our allies to provoque a US civil war than for Trump to unify his fractured country againt Canada.
@nantel yeah, definitely agree. The only way we retain sovereignty is to survive long enough that domestic opinion in the US turns against the war. So: robust defense and support insurgencies.
Diplomacy is the policy of saying nice doggie, nice doggie while you get a big stick. NATO except for Germany and France has not stood by us and will not stand up to Trump. We need to move fast and break things to rebuild our military so we have a 'steel porcupine defence' so usa know it will cost more to invade than it is worth. We should also look at the Finnish reserve system which focuses on defense skills and not marching around.
Let's Invade the motherfuckers ! You got a piece Evan ? I can provide if you need one, I have some guys in Alberta if that's in your reach. Long range, auto, decent armor, second hand, unregistered, pristine conditions, fair price and a free ammo pack for you.
Because 2/3 of Canadian population and infrastructure is within 1 hour's drive of the US border, we really can't feasibly wait for the invader to put a toe over the line before defending ourselves. By the time they cross the border, it's too late.
my guess is that US won't attack Canada directly but might first attack Groenland(Danemark, a NATO member) for which Canada would need to respond accordingly with article 5.
Word is that Trump has already asked its military planners to make propositions...
@waps that would suck, but it would also meaning fighting on someone else's territory, not ours (sorry, Greenland). And imperial wars in harsh climates are difficult and unpopular. It would also mean a multi-front war for Canada, though -- not easy!
just tabling number 1. would almost certainly confirm the end of NATO as an organization that members can put confidence in, and that’s assuming it would pass without objection. The US regime has zero interest in constraining itself.
@mamba yes, I think it would be a huge deal and maybe break the alliance. I don't see any way to avoid that drama, except to concede in advance that the answer would be no.
Stupid plan, don't you think, I mean, frankly, it is stupid that this is indeed neccicery ! The plan that you outline is a good plan, don't get me wrong, but it is stupid.
For you saying "is #nato #article5 also applicable betwéén NATO-members" there is some history: #France has a mutual defence argreement with #Greece because of the tread #turiye poses to Greece
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to develop Web standards.
I don't understand what your question is. What announcement are you talking about?
This was a session at the W3C Breakouts Day 2025. We had an hour-long discussion about how ActivityPub-enabled profiles and content show up in browsers. I did a presentation, which is here:
Call it "2-5 ish", because some of what I do blurs the definition of "club", and also at least one membership is in arrears so "belongs to" might be up in the air.
Surprised to see such a large lead for zero. I wonder how it might have been different 5 years ago? I imagine the pandemic changed a lot of that, which may not have recovered fully.
define “club”… Orlando Amateur Radio club (that’s easy… club is in the name) ARRL? It’s a “league” but kind of a club. What about professional associations? Are those clubs?
I do a lot of polls on my account at Mastodon. I get the same questions or requests multiple times, so I made this FAQ to make it easier to reply. Q: Why do you do so many polls? A: I like to think…
I counted social/educational and skipped counting professional in my response, for me a division between what I associate with because I want to versus do out of career necessity. Good and thought provoking poll question. Thanks!
That's a really broad definition of "club". I chose "2-5" on your poll, but with the inclusion of political parties it's 5+
Turns out all the "clubs" I belong to are organizations trying to effect some public good. I belong to no social clubs, no sports clubs (#WRCycle is an advocacy group).
@bobjonkman Yeah, I only picked Democrats Abroad Canada and the NDP Outremont because they are organizations I actively participate in, do calls with, go to meetings for. It feels like a club relationship, more than participation in other orgs. I left out advocacy groups I don't actively participate in, like Équiterre. I should probably do a full inventory at some point!
@bobjonkman I'm a member of two political parties, but with limited real involvement, so I didn't count them. There are phases in your life when you have more or less time for activities outside of home and work, and I'm at a low ebb now.
I've never been in a club and now I'm curious, what do you do in one? I mean, my understanding of a club is either a golf club for rich people like in movies or a weed club for smoking
An essay on user preferences, and how the fediverse’s interconnected network of communities can play into that, as well as some other news.
User Intents
The Bluesky Company (Bluesky PBC) recently announced a proposal to add User Intents to the AT Protocol (ATProto). The proposal allows people to set account-wide preferences how their data should be handled outside the network. It gives people the ability to opt in or opt out their account from a few different things, such as bridging to other protocols or not wanting any of their data being used in generative AI datasets. The proposal is similar to how robots.txt works, meaning that it is a machine-readable format which good actors are supposed to abide by, but is not legally enforceable.
I cover both the fediverse and Bluesky (including ATProto) under Fediverse Report because these networks are deeply interconnected and influence each other. Decisions on one network, like Bluesky’s User Intents proposal, can influence how the fediverse develops and builds their own features. My goal is to help readers understand the fediverse more deeply. By observing how Bluesky’s approaches default user preferences, the fediverse can build their own systems that use its strength of having many diverse and connected communities.
The proposal by Bluesky PBC is as follows:
People are able to set their preferences for four different categories:
generative AI
protocol bridging
bulk datasets
public archiving and preservation
These preferences are account wide. They are valid not only for Bluesky, but for every app build on ATProto.
The default value is ‘undefined’, not opt-in or opt-out.
Projects which are intending to use the public data should decide for themselves whether data reuse when the intents are classified as “undefined” is acceptable or not.
the current proposal is set to lead the way for more granular user preferences, allowing people to specify on an app-level or post-level what their preference is.
Also, some concepts of ATProto that are relevant, which makes the protocol different from ActivityPub:
On ATProto, a user has only 1 account, and can use that account to log into any service. This is in contrast with ActivityPub, where you need a new account for every service.
Data on ATProto is public by default, and designed to be accessible. Everyone has full and free access to the data of the entire network.
One thing about user preference settings in social apps is that they are a bit of red herring. The majority of people never change the default settings. Giving people choice is a good thing, but it is impossible force people to choose: the majority of people will just not choose anything. This makes it so that the default value for any preference is hugely important, as it is the de-facto value that the majority of people will experience.
Bluesky PBC tries to avoid this issue by introducing a default “undefined” value. The advantage of using a default value of “undefined” is that Bluesky PBC will not overstep their boundaries and determine the preference of everyone on the network, including people who are not using Bluesky but are using other platforms on the network. The downside is that Bluesky PBC effectively makes no decision at all for the majority of people. Bluesky PBC leaves it to the organisations who use the data to determine how data can be handled if the preference is set to “undefined”. These organisations are likely to value their own interests more than the interest of people whose data they intent to process.
Bluesky PBC has three options here, that all have a downside:
If Bluesky PBC sets default values for how ATProto account data can be handled it reinforces its centralising role in the network.
If Bluesky PBC does not set a default value, no decision is made for the majority of people, and it is left to organisations whose goals do not align with those of the people whose data they process.
If Bluesky PBC sets User Intent not on an ATProto-account wide level, but only on an per-app basis, choices quickly become overwhelming if users must set preferences for every app.
So far I’ve only been talking about Bluesky and ATProto. But the fediverse has a long history of debates, conversations and drama on how to deal with data processing that happens outside of the network. Some high-profile cases include the blowup around Bridgy Fed considering making the bridge between the fediverse and Bluesky opt-out, or the backlash against Searchtodon, which saved user’s timeline locally for searching.
These debates are around data scraping, consent, things being opt-in or opt-out. But one of the struggles that the fediverse has had is to build structural solutions. A significant portion of the fediverse does not consent to have their data handled outside of the network. A persistent problem is that this preference is not expressed in a machine-readable way. This leads to an endless cycle of new developers coming in that are not familiar with the culture who then cross lines of consent and it all blows up in drama again.
Moreover, the fediverse and ActivityPub have a significant advantage on how to deal with the dilemma of setting default values over ATProto. The fediverse is a network that is build up of many different communities connecting with each other. A variety of communities allows for diverse preferences, which can also be expressed in setting default values. And it is a shame that the fediverse is not capitalising on this advantage.
There are communities from whom discoverability is important. Just as there are communities for whom not being easily publicly discoverable is important. These preference can differ within an individual as well: people treat personal photos shared with friends differently from blog articles.
The fediverse can sidestep the question of default account values because people have many accounts on the fediverse, for different use cases. This gives the option to set a different default value for different services. A Pixelfed platform for close friends should set stricter default data-handling preferences. A Mastodon server for blogging platform Medium that has the goal of giving more visibility and reach to its writers could consider setting default values to be more open.
The power of the fediverse is in that there does not have to be a single default at all. Instead, communities and servers should be able to set default values for themselves. This can help shape the tone of the community, and makes it clear what the identity of a community is about. What’s even more powerful is that this only concerns the default value, giving people the ability to set their preferences as they desire. The state of the open social web is such that there are now two protocols in competition with each other. That gives the ability for the fediverse to take ideas from other networks, and improve on them in a way that plays up to the unique strengths that the fediverse has.
The News
Reminder: next week will be FediForum, on April 1-2, and you can register here.
FediverseSharing: A Novel Dataset on Cross-Platform Interaction Dynamics between Threads and Mastodon Users is a new academic paper (currently under review and up on arXiv) that explores the interaction between Threads users and Mastodon users. It takes a dataset of 20k Threads users that have fediverse sharing enabled and compares it to 20k Mastodon users that have interacted with these Threads users. The main goal of the research is to build up this dataset and share it with the community for further research. How sharing a dataset of aggregated user interactions relates to the above essay on user preferences for being included in bulk datasets is left as an exercise to the reader.
PeerTube has done a major redesign for their v7 of the software that came out a few months ago. The organisation now shared the design and development reports that shaped the update.
IFTAS recently had to shut down most of their larger projects due to a lack of funding. One of their projects, FediCheck is now available as open source for someone else to continue with. FediCheck is a deny list management tool that allows server admins to subscribe to external deny lists.
The Lemmy developers will hold an AMA on Wednesday March 26th.
Last week, Ghost made their ActivityPub integration available in public beta for Ghost Pro subscribers. Their weekly update says that now over 250 sites already use the integration. WeDistribute has a hands on with the new features that Ghost offers.
Note: Last week I wrote about the new fediverse platform Forte, and said that the repository did not include an install guide. This is incorrect, the guide can be found here.
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:
I do a lot of polls on my account at Mastodon. I get the same questions or requests multiple times, so I made this FAQ to make it easier to reply. Q: Why do you do so many polls? A: I like to think…
Yunseo Chung, a legal permanent resident who has lived in the U.S. since she was 7, participated in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Immigration agents visited residences looking for her.
Good on her for fighting this. Shame on the administration for making her fight this. I cannot wait for this to end up in the Supreme Court and for the administration to be smacked down for this blatant and illegal attempt to restrain free speech and punish dissidents.
good luck. I was feeling done with the program so switched to interactive intelligence specialization and took software development process instead. What’s your specialization?
@Schneems Computer Systems. I'm doing great in the program; very happy with the content and workload so far.
This is the first semester I've taken two classes -- on top of my full-time job and non-profit work. But the second class is ODA -- I didn't take CS for undergrad, so I wanted to to refresh my data structures and algorithms before going into IGA.
This is my 5th semester, so I'm on the downhill side. Really enjoying it so far!
I didn’t have a CS degree either (but now I do!). My undergrad is Mechanical Engineering.
I felt I got enough data structures and big O in High Performance Computing. That class was grueling but fun. In hind-site maybe I should have taken Algorithms and picked easier electives 😅
UPDATE: Officially the problem has been "fixed". But lets see....we will look for another provider and in case we will be forced to move, we should be able to do so in a day or two.
Our TROM.tf server was flagged by the hosting company as "Abuse: NetscanOutLevel: scansnarf-ng detected Netscan from: We have indications that there was an attack from your server." - and we have a few hours to fix the issue else they are going to shut down the server....
Please be aware of that since the websites may go down and we may have to move to another hosting provider...
This is very bad news but unaware what it can be. Please keep an eye on status.tromsite.com
We will try to update there in case anything happens.
We had a custom search with some JS scanning searx.space/ for best instances to search with. Maybe that was a red flag for the hosting. We have removed that and redirect now to searx.neocities.org. Lets see...
Ghost si apre al Fediverso per migliorare le newsletter
La piattaforma ha attivato la connettività al Fediverso, permettendo così agli utenti di condividere i propri contenuti su piattaforme social che supportano il protocollo ActivityPub, come Mastodon, Pixelfed e Friendica. Una novità non da poco, che mira appunto a rivaleggiare con alcuni nomi noti sulla scena come Substack.
Aggiungo anche un piccolo commento personalissimo sulla 💩💩💩💩💩 razzista che gira su Substack, per consigliare a tutti coloro che stanno utilizzando quella piattaforma di migrare altrove
Northsky is a new cooperative that is building their own space for the trans and queer community on Bluesky/ATProto, multiple apps are starting to work towards financial sustainability, and more.
Non c'entra con quello che hai scritto, ma ogni volta che vedo un tuo post e la tua foto di profilo, mi vengono in mente le Sturmtruppen e sono contento 😀 Mitico fumetto che non leggo da troppo tempo.
Ciao @botolo86 mi fa piacere che anche l'icona del mio profilo sia in qualche modo utile ma per la precisione, e con tutto il rispetto per Bonvi, rappresenta il buon soldato Sc'vèik protagonista dell'omonimo romanzo di Jaroslav Hašek ed è opera del grande illustratore ceco Josef Lada. L'ho scelta come simbolo dell'antimilitarismo... e in ricordo di quella che fu la birra ceca 😃 Qui l'incipit del romanzo: latradizionelibertaria.over-bl…
Il Buon Soldato Sc'vèik di Jaroslav Hašek Capitolo I - Come ebbe luogo l'intervento del buon soldato Sc'vèik nella guerra mondiale "Sicché ci hanno ammazzato Ferdinando", disse la fantesca al signor Sc 'vèik , che avendo lasciato da qualche anno il..
Uno dei capitoli più discussi della bozza delle nuove Indicazioni nazionali è quello che riguarda l’insegnamento della storia, capitolo redatto dalla sottocommissione coordinata dal professore Ernesto Galli Della Loggia.
Newsletter publisher Ghost is now connecting to the fediverse in public beta, updates about the bridge that connects the fediverse with Bluesky, and more.
Newsletter publisher Ghost is now connecting to the fediverse in public beta, updates about the bridge that connects the fediverse with Bluesky, and more.
The News
The public beta for connecting Ghost to the fediverse is here, and the ActivityPub integration is now available for Ghost Pro subscribers. Ghost is a publishing platform for sending out blogs via email. With this latest update, Ghost now has another method of distribution, namely via the fediverse. Ghost’s integration with the fediverse consists of two parts: sending out long-form articles published on Ghost into the fediverse, and a reader app to the fediverse from Ghost.
Publishing Ghost articles on ActivityPub makes them accessible to the rest of the fediverse, similar to how WordPress with the ActivityPub plugin works. For users of Ghost this is an easy sales pitch, it is simply another free and automatic distribution channel for their blog. The second part of Ghost’s integration with the social web is a reader app. This app allows Ghost users to browse and read posts on the fediverse. It is split up into two parts: an inbox for reading other long-form posts from Ghost or WordPress, and a feed for all other types of posts. This allows accounts on Ghost not only to send out posts via the ActivityPub integration, but also to connect, respond and follow their audience. It even allows you to post short-form microblogs (notes), just like you’d use on Mastodon, that do not show up on the Ghost website. This makes the Ghost integration a full fediverse experience.
A New Social is the non-profit organisation that builds and manages cross-protocol tools for the open social web. The organisation currently manages Bridgy Fed, the connector that allows accounts to ‘bridge’ between both ActivityPub, ATProto, Nostr and more, and is currently in the process of setting up and launching the organisation. In their first update they shared this week, A New Social shared that they have a board of directors, consisting of Erin Kissane, Ben Werdmuller and Susan Mernit. Bridgy Fed Config is the first upcoming launch that they announced, scheduled for early April. To bridge their account, Bridgy Fed currently requires people to follow the Bridgy Fed account on their platform, which can be confusing and opaque for people as to what is actually happening and if it is working. The upcoming Config settings page allows people to log in with their social web account (Bluesky, Mastodon, Pixelfed) and turn the bridging on with a simple switch. A New Social also mentions supporting Threads with the new Bridgy Fed Config update, which is currently not supported by Bridgy Fed.
Forte is a new fediverse platform, that comes from the lineage of Hubzilla and Streams, created by the same developer Mike Macgirvin. Forte’s major feature is that it has Nomadic Identity over ActivityPub. Nomadic Identity means that you can port your entire account, including your posts, settings, social connections, etc. It is slightly different than the account migration that Mastodon has, which transfers your social graph to a new account. With Nomadic Identity, you create a single identity that can be connected to multiple different servers, so when one server becomes unavailable, all your personal data can be transferred and accessed from another server linked to your account. Forte, as well as Hubzilla and Streams, remain on the bleeding edge on what’s possible with ActivityPub. However, Forte also suffers from the same issue that its predecessors have, namely that getting to use the software is surprisingly difficult. By design there is no way to see a list of Forte servers. Forte mainly targets people with technical know-how, as the code repository does not include guide on how to setup your own Forte server. It leads to the funny situation where I would like to give Forte a try because I’m interesting in trying out the new features, but I legitimately do not know how.
Myo is a new image-focused client for the open social web, and allows you to connect your Mastodon, Bluesky and Nostr accounts into a single timeline. Combining multiple accounts into a single timeline is similar to OpenVibe, but Myo instead focuses media, in a design that is more reminiscent of Instagram than Twitter. Myo is made by the same developer as SoraSNS, which is also a multi-protocol app that focuses on microblogging instead. Myo and SoraSNS are both available for iOS.
ActivityPub badges is a new project that is currently in development to build a badges/credential system similar to Credly on ActivityPub. The project is currently at the proof-of-concept phase, where badges can be created and send over ActivityPub.
IFTAS, the non-profit for collaborative work on trust & safety on the fediverse, recently had to shut down various of their services due to a lack of funding. In their latest update, the organisation talks about how they are rescoping and moving forward, as the organisation itself is not shutting down. IFTAS will continue with various community support projects, such as their community platform IFTAS Connect. They will also continue providing insight into commonly blocked domains, in a scaled down version of the shut-down FediCheck program.
A new form of spam/scam has recently emerged on the fediverse, and it involves private messages from an account that identifies itself as ‘Nicole the fediverse chick’. So many people have gotten a variation of this message that it is quickly becoming a meme on the fediverse. It is unclear what the exact purpose of this spam is, with either a doxing ex or an elaborate 4chan troll as likely explainers.
This article by Fassbender examines how state surveillance treats federated and decentralised social networks, focusing on the BlueLeaks dataset, which contains a large amount of internal documentation of state surveillance organisations. Fassbender writes: “[…] surveillance actors are less interested in understanding decentralization within platforms, but rather look at organizations first, then take an interest in all platforms that they spread to. This means that any platform (or in the case of the fediverse, grouping of platforms that share a method for interconnecting) can become suspect.”
Sneak peek: Mastodon’s upcoming update will finally include the ability to show all replies on a post.
FEP Search Tool is a small web tool to search all the FEP’s.
Forum software Flarum got funding by NLnet in 2023 to implement ActivityPub, but recently decided that this effort would be postponed for the foreseeable future.
Notes on migrating an account from Mastodon to GoToSocial.
A Manyfold 3D viewer directly in a Mastodon timeline.
Roboherd is a tool to build automated Fediverse actors.
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:
We're excited to release version 7.1 of PeerTube, which continues to evolve graphically, but also to simplify your discoverability! Let's take a close...
Ian Robinson
in reply to Evan Prodromou • • •