A quick communication to our wonderful friends in #Gaza. A few of you may have experienced limitations/suspensions on your accounts, especially on the main instance. First of all, I want to reiterate that this isn’t anything personal against you or a sign that `@staff` is not sympathetic with the #GazaVerified initiative - they’ve shown quite the opposite so far. Actions against accounts are only taken when several reports (usually for spam) are received and the moderation team is left with no choice. However, these restrictions are usually lifted when we talk to instance admins and explain them the situation, and those of you who are impacted pledge to use mentions more responsibly. Mastodon is still a platform that welcomes you, and we’ll make sure that this will keep being the case. Second, a common message I’ve heard in your appeals is “but we only tagged our friends and people sympathetic with our cause“. After so many reports, I started finding it increasingly unlikely that any of us would ever report you for spam - and repeatedly. So I’ve taken a closer look at some of the lists of users that some of you commonly tag and I’ve started to notice some patterns that may explain the reports (or at least some of them). Unlike centralized platforms like X or Instagram (or even Bluesky, where most of the people are on the main server), instances matter here. So my username (`@Fabio Manganiello`) is different from `@fabio`, or any `@fabio@something.com`. Those are different people with accounts on different servers. I’m bringing mine as an example, but I have noticed several occurrences where some of you probably tagged people by typing `@username`, saw a couple of options in the dropdown, and unsure on who is the right one you included a few of them. When you send that message, those people will get a notification - and they may not be me nor any of your friends. If someone keeps getting notifications from strangers to donate to an initiative they’ve never heard of, and without any way to tell if you’re genuine or not, after a few times they may simply report you for spam. And that explains limitations and suspensions. So please, when you send messages that include many mentions, always make sure that the handles you have included match those on our profiles. That may prevent a lot of unsolicited notifications to people who may not be very sensitive with your calls for help. Finally, we do our best to boost your voices, and we’ll keep doing so. But we also want you to have your own voice heard on a social media platform that is actually open to listen to you, with no need for our boosts. If you build your own following then you won’t need a few of us to boost your posts - people will follow you because of what you say or show to them. I built the @gaza_verified_accounts bot exactly to boost your voices, so anyone who follows that bot sees all of your posts, even if they don’t follow each of you individually. If you post your genuine stories that actually move people, then that bot is likely to be followed by many - and your own voices heard by many. One last thing, you don't have to tag @gaza_verified_accounts@mastodon.social or @gaza_verified_campaigns@mastodon.social explicitly. Those are automated accounts and I never check their notifications. It isn’t easy for me to deliver these messages by the way. I can only imagine in a remote corner of my mind how tough things must be for you. I can only imagine how I would behave on the Internet if it was my own life to be in peril, and if I had to fight for basic necessities on a daily basis. I feel like I shouldn’t be here preaching technical details about social media or netiquette to people literally going through hell. But I’m here to make sure that your voices are heard, that they touch as many people as possible, and that they keep being heard. Stay strong, we’re on your side ♥️ @Aral Balkan @Gaza Verified
Rock on #Iran 🤘 May 7 Nation Army be the sound of your liberation and may you sprawl a lot of new metal bands, as we in the West have a bit run out of ideas of what to do with a distorted guitar.
Those who call for the end of #NATO amid US threats against #Greenland are wrong. NATO must still exist, and America, being a hostile power that resorts to military threats against its own allies, must no longer a part of it, and all of its military bases in Europe must be immediately dismantled or repurposed. Europe must speed up its process towards a federal political union, or be ready to be a bunch of meaningless States split between American, Russian and Chinese influence. Europe must invest in its own military, technological and economic independence now, and start behaving like the super power that it is rather than a bunch of litigious neighbours. If it means to expel hostile parasites like Hungary in order to work better together, so let it be. The world is turning into the robber's den where a few strongmen think that they can grab whatever they want, and the robbers want all of their perceived enemies to be divided so that they can be more easily conquered. Just like they are trying to saw divisions along partisan lines, so we must draw a clear separation along the only partisan line that matters. Motherfucking imperialist fascists on one side, civilized society on the other. There's little doubt on which one eventually ends up hung upside down. The civilized society may disagree on a lot of things, but now it's time for all of us to agree that the only good fascist is a dead one, that no dialogue is possible with them, and that the time to pick up the rifles that our grandparents hung to the wall after WWII is now. Make fascists afraid again.
the Guardian
French president condemns US for ‘turning away from allies’
Emmanuel Macron’s comments come as Germany’s president, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, warns against turning world into ‘robber’s den’
In a moment when #democracy and self-determination are attacked from so many sides, and authoritarianism and imperialism are again on the rise, I would expect unity among all those who may disagree on many things, but still agree on some basic axioms of civilization: - That a democratic framework and the respect of sovereignty and human dignity should not be negotiable. - That nobody should be subject to prejudice. - That nobody should aggressively grab someone else's lands or resources, no matter how powerful they are. - That #fascism is always a cancer to eradicate. Instead, I am seeing divisions along partisan lines. "Why Ukraine and not Gaza?" "Why Gaza and not Ukraine?" "Why Gaza and not Venezuela?" "Why Greenland but not Iran?" And so on, for all the possible combinations of whataboutism. I would have never thought to write a post to state the obvious and call out partisan whataboutism, but here I am. So before anyone writes another "_but why does Fabio or <put-the-name-of-a-woke-leftist-liberal-here> support X and doesn't say anything about Y_?", read these lines and think twice: - What #Israel has done and keeps doing in #Gaza is an inexcusable genocide. Its perpetrators must be called accountable, Israel must rebuild what it has destroyed no matter the costs, maximum external pressure through boycotts must be applied to all the productive sectors of Israel's economy, settlers must evacuate all the occupied territories, buffer zones must be set up to prevent any further aggression from either side, and the UN is the only entity legally allowed to control those buffer zones. And all the conditions that have led to such an apartheid State must be dismantled one by one. - #Hamas is a terrorist group. They must be called accountable for two decades of terror and restrictions imposed to Gazans, they must go and new elections must be held as soon as it's feasible. But they must not go through a permanent military occupation, and not by murdering, displacing and/or starving 2M people. #Palestine has its right to flourish. Without Hamas, and without Israeli colonizers. - What #Russia has done to #Ukraine is an inexcusable imperialist invasion. It must release all territories invaded since 2014, pay for reconstruction, #Putin must be arrested as soon as he sets his foot in any country that recognizes the authority of the ICJ, maximum pressure through sanctions and boycotts must be applied to everything Russia touches, and buffer zones controlled by the UN must be prepared in order to prevent any further aggression. - What #Trump is doing to #Venezuela is a grave imperialist attack motivated by nothing else but personal greed and geopolitical games. He must be called accountable for this (and for hundreds of other crimes against his citizens and humanity), all free nations have a civic duty of decoupling themselves from such a rogue actor and isolate #America, and Trump's life must end in a jail. - What #Maduro has done to #Venezuela and to its people is outrageous. Very few leaders in the past 50 years have been as corrupt, inept and arrogant as him. He literally sits on a mine of easily reachable oil, and yet he couldn't even make a coherent plan to dig it that wasn't rotten in cronyism and corruption from its very start. He has cheated so badly at the latest elections that it was one of the few cases where a simple analysis of the probability of the results could mathematically prove that they were faked. He must go, but not through Uncle Sam suddenly bombing his city, kidnapping him like a thug, jailing him in a country that has no legal jurisdiction over him, and installing whatever puppet could hand him all the oil instead. If you are outraged at Putin for repeatedly trying to install friendly puppets in all former Soviet territories, then you ought to also be outraged at America for repeatedly trying to install friendly puppets in Central and South America. - What #China threatens to do against #Taiwan is outrageous and the world must firmly condemn it, recognize Taiwan's legitimacy as an independent sovereign country that should develop without the constant threat of Chinese unilateral aggression, and world leaders should provide support to it by explicitly threatening military action against China if it decides to violate Taiwan's sovereignty. - What Iranian citizens are doing against their decrepit regime is an act of bravery that must be fully supported. The Iranian regime has brought nothing upon its wonderful and smart people but misery, restrictions, bigotry, terror and isolation, and it must go. If its own citizens protest, we must throw our full support at them, until the regime falls. But you don't make the regime fall by simply bombing Teheran. The only thing you achieve by doing that is uniting both the regime and its citizens in their rage against your bombs - which is exactly the opposite of what you want to achieve. Westerners should already have learned in 1979 that any attempts to meddle with the will of #Iran and its people backfires very badly. - #Greenland is a sovereign territory that is still in the course of building its own autonomy from Denmark. Asking (or even worse threatening) its people to jump from one colonizer to another is as vulgar as publicly asking a woman coming out of an abusive relationship to have sex with you. But of course this is exactly the kind of vulgarity that you'd expect from an unhinged moral pervert like Trump. The world should not give a single fuck about America's security needs, whether real or fictional, when the price for them is colonialist expansion. You can't buy territories at the supermarket. You can't coerce them into selling themselves to you. This is not RisiKo. Self-determination must always be respected. If you're worried about your security, try to behave less like a sociopath jerk and have less enemies. Try to embrace multilateralism and dialogue rather than coercion and authoritarianism. It helps, you'll see. Let me know if I missed anything from this list. I hope that the stance is clear and whataboutism is neutralized. Defending the oppressed and condeming the oppressors is not a partisan political game. It's not a question of being pro or against Israel, America, Russia, Venezuela, China, Taiwan, Ukraine, Iran, Hamas or whatever. Geopolitical narratives may put the oppressed on opposite sides of partisan lines. International law and the philosophical framework that underpins our civilization since the Enlightenment, instead, put them exactly on the same side. When you throw whataboutism at someone who is enraged about someone bullied by an imperialist fascist, just because that episode of bullyism isn't something that you're particularly sensitive on, and you want to draw the spotlight on someone else you're more sympathetic with, then you're a filthy imperialist fascist too.
[Developing a new Web browser](
The reckless, infinite scope of web browsers
) is by now an endevour comparable to the Apollo missions - and probably even more complex. There are [1191 W3C specifications and recommendations](
W3C
W3C standards and drafts
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is an international community where Member organizations, a full-time staff, and the public work together to de...
) out there right now (actually a bit less than the time when that article was written in 2020). That’s about ~110M words. Put togeter the C11, C++17, UEFI, USB 3.2, and POSIX specifications, [all 9580 published RFCs](
List of RFCs - Wikipedia
), and the combined word counts of the [10 longest novels](https://www.britannica.com/topic/Massive-Tomes-10-of-the-Worlds-Longest-Novels), and you still won’t reach that many words. Even building a fully POSIX-compliant operating system is by now 1-2 orders of magnitude less demanding than building a fully W3C-compliant #browser. I guess that's probably why both #Google and #Mozilla feel free of enshittifying as much as they like and get away with it.
[_Tools for Conviviality_](https://www.kobo.com/us/en/ebook/tools-for-conviviality-2) by Ivan Illich is an essay that anyone who wants to better understand economic and societal trends in tech should probably read. Written in 1972, it analyzes technological revolutions such as the sewing machine and the car, but it's surprising how the same patterns can also be applied to the era of late-capitalist tech enshittification. The car is taken as the perfect example of early enshittification cycle. Its introduction was welcome as a revolution for mobility and personal liberty. It allowed people to travel farther and get more done in a day. Yet, as its production became standardized and in the hands of a few producers, while its penetration of the market increased, its marginal utility diminished - the industry started to offer fewer benefits and take more in exchange. What was initially hailed as a _personal freedom_ (you _can_ take the car if your workplace is far, you _can_ take it if you want to go shopping) became an imperative - especially in places like North America. At some point the _can_ became a _must_. The industry started lobbying for more infrastructure to be built to accommodate a new car-centric world where people _must_ use the new technology if they want to go anywhere. And that infrastructure was paid by taxpayers money - including those who didn't use a car, and had to rely on underfunded public transport while subsidizing others' personal luxury. And those who owned a car had to pay subscription costs to the industry in the form of fuel and maintenance (and, nowadays, even actual direct subscription costs). There's an "industrialization" phase in the development of disruptive technology that flips the purpose of a product on its head - from building tools to serve society, to reshape societies to serve the tool. At that point adoption is no longer optional, and those who don't embrace the product of industrialization face exclusion (the concept of _radical monopoly_). Most of the technological developments since the textile revolution can be mapped in a precise framework: a net lift, followed by a push to extract value, and finally an insistence upon the technology's ubiquity. Illich's solution to the _industrial tool_ (the "_convivial tool_") is remarkably similar to the "small tech" that many of us are building or hosting nowadays. Convivial tools are defined as sustainable small-scale local-first solutions, designed primarily to enhance the autonomy and creativity of their users.