A human being from a Finland.
It’s the second most controlled country in the world, right after North Korea.
A mad place!
Also, almost all places on trains are reserved for party members, meaning that to get to another city you neither need to bribe somebody or book your ticket a month in advance.
You can of course remedy the risk of corruption by making several compressed files instead of just one. Then you will lose only part of the data in the worst case scenario.
It does take a while to join all the communities you were subscribed to from your old instance, but I don’t think it took close to an hour. Of course, my new instance accepting my application did take its time. And I think that was several hours. But still: You give a few details today and continue tomorrow by subscribing to a bunch of communities.
I mostly agree with your comment, but want to nitpick about this part:
Fediverse is what it is because the people running the servers choose to do things a certain way.
This one is something I must disagree with. I’m using the instances (servers) I am precisely because the people running those servers choose to do things in a certain way. If they did them in a different way, I would be on a different server. In the Fediverse it is extremely easy to vote with your feet. The admins have very free reign over their instances, but that doesn’t mean that they have a free reign over the users of their instances.
And, while this is a bit off-topic, I also want to add an anecdote from around year 1998 or so. Back when they decided the name for our currency, Euro, the European Central Bank also decided that when speaking or writing in Finnish, it should be forbidden to say “For the Euro”, “From the Euro”, “Along the Euro”, “Behind the Euro”, “Without the Euro” or any sentence that includes both the word for “no” in connection with the word “Euro”.
Of course it didn’t mean to make such an absurd rule.
But in Finnish those words such as “from”, “for”, etc. come after the word and without a space in between, so they technically count as parts of the same word. And the ECB declared that “Euro” is a word that cannot be declinated in any manner in any language. There is no way of saying “from” in Finnish without adding an ending to a word, so this was something of a very shitty ruling. Obviously it was simply ignored. But it does showcase a situation where Finland had something that was completely unique in EU and got completely overlooked. Back then Finland was the only Finno-Ugric speaking country in the EU, and in Indo-European languages the decision made sense, but in the one country with a language from a different language family, it didn’t. The Finnish language got completely overlooked because Finland was so small, peripheral and insignificant. Maybe not a problem for the EU, but definitely a problem for us people living over here in our insignificant and unimportant corner of the Union.
I would prefer the veto rights being reduced strongly.
At the same time, being from a small country, it also worries me that small countries such as Finland can get trampled by the bigger ones. Finland has very close to 1 % of EU’s citizens. There is already a system where smaller countries get more places per capita in the European Parliament than bigger ones, but in the end it changes little. In the EP, Finland has 15 places out of 720, meaning we have about 2% of all the places. And therefore, about 2% of the political power. Assuming the MEPs who are from very different parties could even unite as one front in the first place.
It is a bit scary if Finland only has a 2% weight in any decisions made in the EU. There are already things where we are getting accidentally trampled: There are EU rules about having to add an additive to diesel fuel, to make it less polluting. However, that additive freezes in temperatures that are commonplace in winters in Lapland, at least in nighttime. This means, it is de facto illegal parking a diesel vehicle outdoors during a January night in Lapland. I do not think this was ever the intention of the lawmakers, but that’s the law they ended up writing.
But still: I think it might make sense that there would be some way of getting around a veto, but it should be made in some manner unappealing to use unless really needed. And also, the power should, in general, be moved from commission to EP, thus reducing the number of cases where the veto right exists.
I wonder if some kind of “emergency brake” could be deviced for situations where the parliament is about to make a decision that will disproportionately damage a member state. Maybe this could be organized as a law, so that a court could decide if something of exceptional national importance is being overlooked by the EP?
Doesn’t the pipe go through Poland? Why doesn’t Poland just stop delivering the oil?
100 000 $ per year is 8333 $ per month. That is a proportionally very high extra cost, even if the salary is high.
And this thing done by UK is just a publicity stunt. “You are welcome here. Come here!”
The Russia started actively supporting neo-nazistic organizations in ex-USSR countries around year 2005. That was documented back and there were news articles about that. For example in Ukraine that caused the prevalence of a nazi problem to increase steadily year after all the way until 2014 when that development got cut and the prevalence started decreasing.
Back then, 20 years ago, when there was more media attention about it, it was done only in ex-USSR countries, but it would be weird if the same concept hadn’t been extended to EU countries as well. Why wouldn’t it have been? It has worked extremely well for Putin in the original area, and there’s no reason to assume it wouldn’t work for him the same way within EU countries as well.
At least we should.
But, if we are playing that, then at 2 % of the intensity required. There’s a LOT we could do.
One thing I keep saying is that where Russians can still obtain EU visas, they should have to fill a short questionnaire about current events in the Russia and its war against Ukraine.
Something, where they’d have to know the basics of who has attacked whom and when, and also what has been happening at the front in the last 4 weeks.
In order to know which correct answers to learn by heart. they would quickly develop a network of delivering that information to everyone who needs it for applying a visa. That network could be used for getting reliable information about the situation in the Russia without the information having been tainted by Kremlin.
For most of the people applying for visas, that would be just “so, this is what they want to hear, so this is what I will tell them. I know it’s not reality, but I don’t care. That’s the correct words for them and I’ll get to visit something else than this shithole.”
But here and there, some people would figure out how much the Russian TV has been lying to them. And at the same time, the same sources of information that exist for visa applicants could be used by anyone who wants reliable information. That would sow the seed of a revolution.
That would be super useful for spreading awareness in the Russia! And basically from Kremlin’s playbook.
Maybe @jsonarray@utter.online can say? :)
(Though, I’m not sure if they read their Mastodon anymore. But maybe yes?)
I know. They’d exist anyway, but the scale is because of the Russia. They firstly give a lot of funding, secondly they do a lot of work to shape the discussions in the Internet. They put some “opinion” into the wild, then let local people do the talking. They only need to bootstrap the discussion, after which it will continue on its own weight without much need for further influence by the troll factory.
The only thing this petition can achieve is maybe getting a few people to move their donations to projects such as PieFed.
Beside that… Well, Nutomic and Dessalines are the two people who decide on how to act regarding this petition – if they should remove themselves or not. I find it unlikely that they will look at the finished petition and go “oh, people want us gone. Okay, we’ll do that”.
But yeah: Do not give money to Lemmy. There are other projects that are compatible with Lemmy and have use for your money as well, without being assholes :)
It’s very largely Putin.
We know about how he made Ukraine’s far right stronger and stronger until 2014, but there’s less talk about how he has done the same everywhere in the countries that used to be under Soviet rule. And then, around 2014, he started seriously expanding the same to the west, as well.
Because Germany has made a big effort picturing Soviet Union as a hero country that saved Germany from Nazis, anything that would be somehow against the Russia has been traditionally seen as pro-Nazi. So, it’s extremely difficult to talk in Germany about how the Russia is doing evil things. In Germany the Russia has had exceptionally free hands to operate. And they’ve used the opportunity. AfD is an offshoot of Kremlin.
No worries :)
You could just read from sources you have subscribed to and skip the “All”. That way you don’t need to bother with content filters :) You also aren’t really forced to follow the communities that are about US politics.
- The multiple instances.
You only use one. You don’t need to care too much about this.
- Multiple communities that are the same name.
This one can be confusing indeed. I hope they will ask if they encounter this. Then you tell them they’re on a different Lemmy, and that the two are interconnected. And that’ll help them understand a bit about federating.
- What is exactly decentralization.
Not really important for using Lemmy. Nice to know, if you like being tech-savvy, but not necessary for using.
- Federation
This was already mentioned as “2.” You can read and write posts without understanding this. You’ll get the point of federation at some point.
- Difference instances can give different results
Different groups have different rules anyway. Some of them are derived from the instance’s rules, but whatever. Same end result. Not necessary to understand for basic usage.
- How Moderation works is different than the usual platforms.
How is it different, actually?
- Community discovery is different. Searching for something can be quite difficult on Lemmy.
I’ve never had trouble searching for something. Maybe that’s because before Lemmy I basically used only Facebook and there you cannot really find anything by searching anyway. For me Lemmy’s search works just fine for searching for what communities exist. Haven’t felt a need for something more.
- Lemmy’s community has a lot of tech-jargon which non-tech savvy people might find difficult to wrap their head around.
You don’t need to understand everything on this planet. If you cannot wrap your head around something, then don’t. You don’t need to participate in every conversation.
- How the banning system works on Lemmy is different than the usual platforms as well.
They’ll figure this one out if they ever get banned. Otherwise, it’s irrelevant for reading and writing.
All in all… Understanding federating isn’t strictly necessary for reading and writing in communities, but yeah, it is good to understand at some point. Everything else… Meh. Things that are nice to know, but you are able to follow communities and write in them just fine also without understanding those things.
How?
You don’t need to be tech-savvy to use a social media.
I’m a big fan of Shattered Pixel Dungeon!