The argument about possible threats is good, but why this means we need to increase defense spending is completely unexplained.

Europe already vastly outspends Russia on defense, and for example Spain buying more Leopard 2 tanks just to have them rot in their baracks is not helping at all.

We need to get more efficient in defense spending and we need to invest in defensive weapons that can be easily moved where they are actually needed. Better locally produced anti-air defense, especially ones cheap enough to work against drone swarms are probably also needed.

But none of that needs 5% of GDP. We could probably significantly reduce current defense spending and still end up with an more effective deterrent against Russia.

Our infrastructure and social services are already massively underfunded. More than doubling defense spending will come at a cost to those services, especially with right wing governments in power everywhere. And the result of that is just as much if not more of a threat to our values and the cohesion of the EU than Russia.

Well, if you have read it then your cherry picking of minor ways Bluesky is slighly less closed comes accross as pretty bad faith 🤷

Russia outspends the whole of EU in military built-up

This is blatantly false and it takes a lot of massaging the numbers to reach even parity in spending like the OP article claims (but it uses pre-war PPP figures, which is completely laughable).

Is military spending efficient in the EU? No. Do we spend too much on unreliable US made weapons? Yes!

But Russia is spending a tiny fraction of what the EU+UK does, and its troups are exhausted from a protracted war with Ukraine.

Maybe they will try to poke a sleeping bear to divide us further as a form of asymetric warfare, but in no way (other that nuclear) is Russia an existential threat to Europe right now.

This is just the age old cold war fearmongering back in action. Lots of profits to be made from that…

Before SpaceX, Ariane Space was pretty dominant in the commercial sattelite launch market. But they completely botched the Ariane 6 design and are now likely still decade away from having a reusable first stage, which is required to remain competitive.

They can be lucky that SpaceX is wasting their resources on a reusable second stage, which will likely never be economical.

Please PM me about it.

If I remember correctly this was a scam anyways as it needed a lot of natural gas to pre-heat the central tower in the morning or so. So on less sunny days it was net-negative energy wise. But I might remember wrong.

I think you should find a smaller, well moderated instance and show it to your parents first. If they consent with her signing up to it, it should be fine and generally speaking there is no practical way for instances to check the age of their members anyways.

Tumblr is being reworked to have a Wordpress backend right now, and Wordpress already has well working ActivityPub support, so yes, Tumblr will very likely happen once they made the switch.

I suspect the technical debt in Tumblr was larger than expected when the first announce federation support, and now it became nearly a full rewrite, which takes time.

The most they can do is add a load of more users to the fediverse then take them away again. For them to successfully EEE the fediverse, it would require convincing existing fediverse users to switch to threads. I cannot see that happening on here on any noticeable scale.

Na, they were quite explicit what their plan is: they realized that there are interesting “content creators” on the fediverse, and that many other “content creators” are eying the fediverse and similar platforms as a way to have more control over the platform they use. And ultimately users will follow the creators, once the creators are sufficiently fed up with being taken hostage by facebook etc. So they are willing to let the creators switch to the fediverse, but want to retain the users as ultimatly that is where their revenue is coming from via advertisement and data harvesting.

It’s not any worse than the differen’t feature support levels of different Matrix clients. But especially on Android, XMPP has nice modern clients with all the features you would expect, including a/v calls and reactions/stickers.

The main issue right now are up to date Windows desktop clients, but on Linux desktop there are some good options.

We run the latest beta.7 on https://photon.slrpnk.net/

There is: XMPP 🤷

There is not much they can do about it short of shutting down the entire server. Due to how matrix functions internally any sufficiently large federated homeserver replicates most of the entire network.

It is a bit counter-intuitive but restricting new signups will not help them much. The way the matrix protocol is designed, i.e. replicating everything on every server, means that clients connecting to their server have only a minor impact. As long as most rooms of the entire matrix network are replicated on the matrix.org homeserver their costs will stay high and there isn’t really much they can do about that other than shutting it down entirely.

Deltachat works ok for 1:1 chats and small groups. It is totally unsuitable for large public channels as it doesn’t really have a concept of group chats and just pretends so by (in email parlance) adds every one in ‘CC’. This only works ok for small private groups.

IRC just needs to get it’s shit together and start adopting IRCv3 features on the larger servers. The problem is really only that networks like libera.chat run a feature set that is at least 15 years behind what IRC can actually do.

This article is nonsense. The Foundation was always a front for New Vector and their board is largely made up by New Vector employees. So of course they knew what was going on.

New Vector simply decided that the strategy to make Matrix appear as an open standard was against their business interests and thus left the foundation to fend for itself with obvious consequences.

Search on my Akkoma instance works reasonably well. Of course there is no central index, so it can only find what it has federated before.

That sounds like a plot that could include lemmy.ml somewhere 😅

Well, shit 🤦

Which, you know, is a great deterrance to would be attackers. Nuclear deterrance is 4D chess via game theory. Not being able to slowly escalate a nuclear war is a benefit that makes people think twice about starting one.