Ben Matthews

It’s good they exposed this network of websites - now what is going to be done to prevent them using it as intended (casual users on phones promoting soundbites to friends are not going to be checking the list in such articles…)?
Having said that, the anglosphere experienced this already in 2016 with Brexit and Trump, and such networks also promoted anti-french coups in Africa, so to ‘uncover’ this now seems rather behind the wave. A specific issue among francophone elite was their concept that to make french great again they had to focus on resisting “anglo-saxons”, so were naïvely tempted by russian narratives about a “multi-polar world”. Russia wants to divide europeans, we need to cooperate better.

Hmm, surprised it’s that much lower - wonder why? Maybe 1% in .be hide wealth in .lu , and fgov is not good at tracing it. Also chateaux in the south of belgium seem relatively cheap (wrt elsewhere).

Does ‘foreign funding’ include from within EU? If so, doesn’t that break the concept of the Single European Market for services (as well as democracy and human rights etc.)?

Indeed, and it’s good you clarify this. Handy to have a crazier fringe party to publicly open such topics.

Orban also made it obvious, walking about with a t-shirt showing a map of ‘make hungary great again’. On that map, Zakarpatia is small compared to Transylvania, and the whole of Slovakia, however EU membership kills such dreams, so… Beautiful green mountains by the way, very peaceful area.

Well, for example if I could reply to a mastodon post from my lemmy account - the poster would see that there (not here - but could show up on my profile page), and might follow it, so it could gain followers. To write such a reply, I’d need to somehow view the original post while logged into lemmy. My comments here do federate to mastodon, and if somebody searched for related words (at least from the instance from which I followed my #lemmy account) they should find this. Your “virtual community” seems like a mastodon list (I have a dozen such topic lists, that system could be better, but is improving), indeed it would be helpful to consider that alongside a lemmy community for similar topic.

the Lemmy devs tell you to use Kbin or Mastodon or anything else

So to reply to Nutomic’s closing remark on github:

I dont see why Lemmy should also implement that.

Because - if I could post to Mdon or reply to a Mdon post from my Lemmy account, some Mdon users (more numerous) might think - hey that’s interesting, I’ll follow that guy, then see my other posts to Lemmy, click and open up the whole thread (yes that works), and so eventually come to contribute to Lemmy too.

I don’t find that - using Mastodon (4.2) I can see threaded discussion in Lemmy - each comment as a post - but have to start somewhere.

I succeed to follow my own Lemmy account from my Mastodon account, it works (initially seems empty, but new posts/replies show up later). From there I could potentially boost or reply. If somebody clicks on my comment in Mastodon, they’ll find the whole Lemmy thread. This should help (more numerous) Mastodon users to discover Lemmy.

I discovered Lemmy via links from Mastodon, and so found i prefer these threaded communities. Nevertheless individual “status” posts have a purpose too, we need both topic-focused and people-focused structures, these should overlap and connect better.
As my Mastodon account follows my Lemmy account, my posts/replies get into that system, more might be discovered if I included hashtags here. However I can’t do the reverse - follow a Mastodon account, or reply to or boost a post, from Lemmy. Communities might grow more if we could enable such interaction.

So, can Mastodon 4.2 full-text search now see Lemmy posts and replies, even without hashtags? You can follow Lemmy communities and accounts from a Mdon account, that way the info is in the Mdon instance databases, but as the new search is “opt-in” only, do Lemmy communities or users have to set some flag to agree that our posts and replies are searchable ? This might help discoverability of Lemmy.

I’m here only a week or so, subscribed to about 100 communities that look interesting, but most have enough good posts yet very little discussion. Yet the top ‘world news’ and foss/fedi/prog topics get all the attention, it’s not balanced. I hope the new ‘scaled/best’ ranking algorithm will help, if I understand correctly this is ready but not yet released? People should make more effort to find, upvote, comment on smaller communities (note- to find communities I recommend search-lemmy.com - you find more than from own instance).

Regarding Mastodon - as there are many more users there, it could be a gateway to Lemmy (that’s how I got here). Now Mastodon 4.2 has better search, if you follow a lemmy community or account from mastodon, it may show up in such search. However Mastodon new search is opt-in for non-hashtag text, so I suppose Lemmy has to specify whether our posts / replies are searchable - anybody know how this works ?