Nah it should not. It would hurt decentralization and small instances. We already have a tool for curbing spam, it’s called the Fediseer. You may or may not have heard about it, but most admins have.

I see. Well, I for one, think TikTok is definitely worse than Twitter because of its addictive nature, little user agency (you have almost no freedom of picking your own content, you are basically in the algorithm’s hands) and serious privacy concerns.

Twitter is by no means a great platform, it’s just that TikTok is SO BAD that it’s actually hard to beat it in terms of shittiness.

Why would that be weird? Which platform would you have preferred (other than Mastodon, I guess)?

I have read about this procedure yesterday and it was also on twitter, from the account of the Commission.

Correct, but that review process won’t have any votes on it, meaning it also won’t be possible for Hungary (or anyone else) to veto it. Doesn’t seem like that great of an accomplishment on Hungary’s side.

Possible. I’d love it if they actually went through with the article 7 threats, but until then using said threat to have Orban sit down is the next best thing.

News outlet are being extremely vague about Orban’s motives, but it’s clear that no funds have been unfrozen. By the looks of it, it seems Hungary received no grants at all and just changed its mind out of the goodness of her heart, which is weird.

From DW

“From what we are hearing from our sources, they made it very clear to Viktor Orban that he is standing all alone in the EU, blocking this essential aid for Ukraine,” she said, adding that following the message it became clear Orban would finally say yes and so the EU leaders sat together to finalize the deal.

This makes me wonder if anything went on behind those closed doors. We know that yesterday Orban met with Meloni, who according to euronews

[Meloni] has fashioned herself as the most dexterous mediator between Budapest and Brussels. Meloni and Orbán held bilateral talks on Wednesday evening in anticipation of the high-stakes meeting.

All that’s left to hope is that Meloni and other EU leaders succesfully managed to scare off Hungary and that no backroom deals went on.

Exciting stuff! In particual I really like how neatly organized the project roadmap is, with a quick glance at the project GitHub page I can tell what you guys are working on and how development is proceding.

Also, props for using a widely established language like Java. I know Rust has lots of advantages and is all in all an awesome language, but having to learn a new language just to be able to contribute and submit PRs to your favourite open source project kinda kills the hype (and takes away a bunch of time).

How is being more virtuous shooting ourselves in the foot, exactly?

Let me clarify. It’s great on an environmental standpoint, it’s quite terrible on an industrial and commercial one. If we are the only ones imposing climate regulation, businesses and industries will move abroad where it’s cheaper to operate. I’m not saying scrapping the green deal laws is a good thing, but I am saying that I can see the logic behind it. And it’s not because of the evil capitalism either, it’s a desperate attempt for European industry to stay relevant on the global stage.

30+ year approach? Where is that coming from? The median construction time for a nuclear reactor is 89 months, or 7,5 years. And it’s not like we are only going to need it now either, our civilization is going to need reliable power sources for the foreseeable future, so why settle with alternatives that can only barely cover our needs now and need to be replaced with fossil fuels when not available, when a much cleaner option (that being nuclear) remains a possibility?

The wind always blows somewhere. Diversification of locations across a country or ideally across Europe minimizes reliability issues.

That somewhere will also need power, though. Not to mention, building interconnections across nations is an arduous task that requires time and financing on its own. According to the European Commission the current objective is reaching a 15% interconnection capacity by 2030 (meaning every member state should be able to export up to 15% of its capacity). And only 16 of 27 countries are on track with that objective. Sure, going forward with this will be great and very much necessary, but we cannot rely solely on interconnections, even when thinking 10 years from now.

Let’s take last night as an example: here are the electricity map data for Germany. At midnight, despite having an enormous renewable capacity installed, the wind was evidently pretty low and of course solar was of little use, so they still had to fire up their coal, gas and biomass generators.

As this was going on, neighbouring Austria and Netherlands were doing great, with respectively 85% and 71% of their grids being powered by renewables, but unfortunately this wasn’t nearly enough for power hungry Germany.
In the meantime, France, despite only using 24% of renewables in its mix, managed to get the 4th lowest carbon intensity on our continent and the 7th worldwide, with a carbon intensity over 10 times better than that of Germany.

The rest can be covered by investment in storage technologies.

Some day, sure. But we need reliable and clean energy now, not in the distant future. So the first step is improving our grids today, then when the technology allows it we can phase out nuclear too, and move to a fully renewable grid. But that simply cannot happen right now.

I am really conflicted about this. On one hand I get that green policies are instrumental in stopping climate change before it’s too late. On the other I know some people who work in the automotive industry and they all agree that we shot ourselves in the foot with this regulation. We ended up being the only committed nation block (whatever) while anyone else (namely China, India and the USA) kept doing little or nothing, token contributions if any, but few long run plans like we did.

Surely there is lots of lobbying from the car industry behind this EPP decision, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was also the genuine intention of many voters. Our industry is already falling behind, being the only ones concerned with green policies isn’t helpful at all, it just allows everyone else to outcompete us.

While renewable sources are awesome, they are still not as reliable as the other solutions. You still need a baseline to keep your grid up at night, when the wind wanes or during droughts (depending on your renewable source of choice). Nuclear is the next best thing. Low CO2, safe and cheap in the long run. If everyone in the EU was as commited to nuclear as countries like France, Finland and Belgium are we could get reliably cheap power everywhere, which would be an amazing asset for our future industrial growth!

YES! That was one of my favourite subs back on Reddit, glad to see it reborn.

Oh do they? Never heard about that. Guess I’ve learnt something new. I wonder if it would be different for us, given how fewer big companies the EU has compared to the US.

I’m not familiar with the Delaware situation. Is it similar to Ireland’s, then?

Foreign-owned multinationals continue to contribute significantly to Ireland’s economy, making up 14 of the top 20 Irish firms (by turnover), employing 23% of the private sector labour-force, and paying 80% of the collected corporation tax.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Republic_of_Ireland

I agree, it would be great! Also definitely more efficient than the 24 official languages we currently have, lol.

I guess Hungarians and Finns wouldn’t be too pleased by this division though. Hehe.

I don’t think the language barrier is that big of a deal. And more importantly I think the cultural value it provides us vastly outweights the economic benefit of a shared tongue.

I think one of the more urgent reforms that could help the EU prosper would be a common fiscal policy. We have the same tarifs on goods coming from abroad and most of us share the same currency, but countries are still offering varying tax rates. I think having an EU wide tax policy would help spreading the European branches of foreign companies more evenly. Though I reckon not everyone would like this (wink wink, Ireland).

EDIT: oh and also. I agree with your overall point, but using Lemmy as an example for “great innovation coming from the EU”…

I love Interlingua, as a Romance speaker I find it awesome, but after having consulted with some Germanic and Slavic friends it seems pretty unintelligible to them. Unfortunate, cause it’s so easy and effective for us.

I didn’t, up until yesterday night when you mentioned it. Had a quick Google search and read the wikipedia page, holy fuck there’s some sick people out there. But I still fail to see how defed.xyz could help them doxx or otherwise harass people.

I don’t want to be the author of software used for harassment, obviously, but I don’t think you could use my tool for that, even if you wanted to.

Well of course I can’t guarantee that I would be convinced, even after hearing that but explanation aside

Just because data is publicly scrape-able doesn’t mean it’s acceptable to do so.

Isn’t it? If, an instance admin, has the possibility of hiding some data to the public and refuses to do so, it’s either:

1. Because they are fine with the public accessing it
2. Because they are ignorant and unaware of such a feature, which I honestly don’t think is an acceptable excuse (after all users have entrusted this person with their data, ffs)

At the end of the day what I am doing is nothing more than what any user could do by checking the “Moderated servers” section of the about page of any Mastodon instance.

I’m sorry but I’m really am not seeing the logic behind your point.

I’m sorry could you please elaborate on why the rest of the Fediverse would be enraged, or how this could be used for harassment? I don’t think I follow. I’ll admit, I only interact with the Fediverse through Lemmy so maybe there’s some dynamics of the Masto-sphere I’m not picking up.

My understanding is that Mastodon admins can choose to hide their /domain_blocks endpoint to either outside users or even to all non admins. (source), and as a matter of fact almost a thousand of the 1700 Mastodon instances I’m querying already do so, so really I can only get the federation status of the few hundred that remain.

I think the admins that prefer not to show their defeds, in fear of harassment, are already hiding them, so it should be ok for me to query the remaining ones.

Nice! Glad you were able to find and fix an issue with your instance.