Notices by txtx 🇪🇺 (txtx@mastodon.social)

@kravietz It's hard to decipher what Budanov is saying here. It's all sort of cryptic.

De-escalation would be a good thing. But neither side seems to be particularly interested in it.

Will NATO allies come in and try to mend things? I think it's past time, but, unfortunately, nobody seems interested.

@kravietz The way I see it, Ukraine can be given a bit of slack — they are in the middle of a war with Russia.

Poland is at peace. WW2 is over. Ukraine isn't going to start attacking Poland. WW2 is not a pressing issue the way that Russia killing Ukrainians every single day, right now, is.

IMO the least Poland can do is take a deep breath and work things out asap. But they're not doing this either. This is a type of escalation under the current circumstances.

@aho @kravietz Yep. This is the problem in Central/Eastern Europe. It's an onion of grievances and all of us want to show we cry the hardest.

The problem is that none of us can bring back the dead. But each of us wants someone else to "do something". And that's not wrong, in principle.

Yes, build a monument, create a museum. Be proud of the past, be aware of the good and the bad. That said, I really wish we could move on. It's tiring. Europe can't be a giant WW2 museum forever.

@Infoseepage All the architecture all at once.

@thomasfuchs I've brought back to life a couple of old Google Pixel phones by installing LineageOS. The batteries were pretending they were dying — turns out they're totally fine.

I had good results with an old & slow 2008 Windows laptop converted to Linux. It blew me away — it's more responsive than my much newer MacBook.

Just an option if someone can't go out and buy a computer now.

@dalias The reason I say it's being brushed off is because anytime I bring it up, either someone I follow has never heard of it (meaning nobody thinks it's worth mentioning) or it's ignored.

Or I often hear "what about disadvantaged and persecuted minorities?" And I point to the ones kidnapped in slave camps and it's just crickets.

If the billionaires are the reason for slave camps, why is almost nobody in tech calling for a ban on X or Instagram?

@hipsterelectron @sunguramy

@hipsterelectron It is human trafficking on a mass scale, with international kidnappings, torture, everything.

Anonymity and lack of verification regulation is a primary reason the scams can exist.

The tech community is leaving these people out to dry by brushing off this issue.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-66655047

@sunguramy @dalias

@sunguramy My three years living in a refugee camp is the very reason I have sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of slaves held and tortured today by criminals who abuse anonymity and lack of verification.

IMO it's a moral failing that the tech community brushes off the issue.

@dalias

@dalias With those bans in place, I'm left with smaller local social network alternatives and I don't want those to be overrun by disinformation agents and scammers either.

So, how can it be done? I don't want to take away anonymity, nor do I want the state to know which citizen is using which account. And this, in a functioning democracy (not Iran, not Russia) should be possible with an independent government institution to act as an in-between.

@dalias I'd even be satisfied with a compromise, say, if getting verified is opt-in. But it needs to be open to every citizen in compliant countries so it's not just for rich celebrities and selected authorities as it was on twitter pre-Musk.

But it'd only work if foreign corporate social media platforms are mostly banned.

@dalias I'm for the total bam of X/Facebook/TikTok so I wouldn't call that doing the work of billionaires. They need to be treated the same way we treat television media ownership: only allow a minority of the market to be foreign owned as it has been in France, Germany and elsewhere for decades.

Factories in Cambodia/Myanmar/Russia are often either state run or state adjacent, so we're talking about invasion here and I don't believe that'd even work anyway.

@dalias There are hundreds of thousands of people in slave camps in SE Asia, kidnapped and abused by criminals who take advantage of Europe and other places which treat any Internet account as if it was a real person.

There are unknown numbers of state employees in Russia, steering disinformation campaigns against us.

No person will be safe once they finish their job.

Westerns don't understand how bad it's going to be if we continue to promote their behavior.

@dalias Not always. If this isn't a real cop or doesn't have a judge's warrant then it's authentication of people to people. If they have no authority then I'm going to call someone who does to stop them.

@dalias I agree! It is different, and that difference is the core of what we're talking about here IMO.

The Internet is infested with government agents propagandists bots and criminals posing as real people. I'm saying no, I don't want them.

@violetmadder

@dalias If a police officer comes to my home and demands a search, and I respond with "papers please" — is my position fascist?

@violetmadder

@violetmadder

"How do you regulate the internet
[...] How does that actually work??

These are excellent questions, exactly the kind we should be asking IMO. Some ideas: ban oligarch social platforms completely. Ban foreign platforms when they go over a certain market share. Ban platforms that don't adhere to local law.

I thought this was a niche idea but it turns out that, according to recent polls, some of these are very popular positions here in Europe — including age restrictions.

@dalias It looks like none of that is working. ICE is rounding up anyone they want in the US. Iran is crushing protests. Syria? Egypt? China? Russia? Where has social media helped society in public discourse? It's leading to death everywhere. It's a complete failure in every way possible.

So I can't support the status quo.

@dalias @mhoye Facebook & X are anarchist/anti fascist? I don't agree.

@mhoye Unpopular opinion:

Identity verification isn't so unattractive in 2026 — social media is destroying democracies via anonymous armies of bot people steered by aggressive foreign actors like Putin and Musk.

The libertarian model that the Internet was built on is failing societies.

@evan Zero to ~150 hours.

Beyond 150ish hours is of course possible, but I believe adequate sleep and rest should be had for obvious reasons.