Bug in the English language. 🤣

Or maybe “yeah, right”

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

people can only see or click on that if they look at the source code because you posted it with an empty link text

I think there is a fundamental division between services for following people and services for participating in groups.

You are right that some of it is a UI consideration, but not all of it.

You can just ssh to the machine you want to run things on I think?

Is there a translation of https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence into Nepali yet, I wonder.

yup, that is why (if memory serves) the chat control proposal has rules in it that look like they were specifically written for messengers, the authors seem to have no clue that encryption can, you know, just be run on any device using publicly available algorithms…

The Internet has become popular enough that governments care about what happens on it. And it’s not just European countries, US states too (at least for age verification).

More specifically for your two points:

Encryption

It used to be that very little Internet traffic was encrypted, much less end-to-end encrypted. After 2013 (Snowden revelations), this changed, e.g. messengers started to E2EE, many more websites than previously started to use HTTPS. So all we are seeing now is the reaction to those positive changes…

Age verification

This has to do with mobile devices more than anything else. I think a lot of parents now just hand their children smartphones or tablets and may then be surprised that their children can then access things they don’t want their children to access. This was less of a thing in the desktop era because it was easier to see what children were doing online if it was happening on a huge computer in the living room…

Now personally I don’t think anyone (including young people) should ever be prohibited from watching or reading anything they actively want to see. For preventing young people from accidentally accessing porn, an “are you over 18” banner ought to be enough… I don’t think people who want to prevent that kind of access want anything legitimate. But you asked about why it’s happening now and not at another time and I think this is the answer.

Sidenote: I remember reading that when television was newly introduced in East Germany, it was still able to be somewhat critical of the regime; after some years, this stopped because a lot more citizens were able to watch it. The equivalent of that is currently happening to the Internet.

MS already doesn’t have a monopoly in any meaningful sense anymore.

• https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-200901-202507 - in early 2009, almost 95% of web usage was from Windows, by now it is at around 28%, no longer even the most popular OS, which is now Android around 42%
• https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200901-202507 - even looking only at the desktop and ignoring the shift to mobile devices, Windows fell from ~95% to ~72% during the same time period, mostly losing to macOS but more recently also Linux

Windows isn’t the main way Microsoft makes money anymore anyway…

Microsoft, if anything, has become more decent (releasing at least some of their stuff as free and open source software) since the 1990s.

I would have thought that by now, enough voting adults would have grown up also having watched online pornography when they were underage and realizing it didn’t harm them.

I have yet to read any coherent argument why any kind of media that young people actively choose to watch, actively seek out, would ever be harmful to them.

They come from completely different heritages.

GNU/Linux is a reimplementation of Unix, an operating system that was originally designed mainly for universities, but also mainframes.

Windows is descended from DOS, an operating system intended for home computers.

Nowadays Windows is the only widely used non-Unix-like OS; GNU/Linux, Android, macOS and iOS are all Unix-like.

If Windows became FOSS, I at least would likely switch to it. It’s really the FOSS philosophy more than anything else that makes me want to use GNU/Linux.

For example here is a Lemmy thread: https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/41964952?scrollToComments=true

Here is the same thread on Mastodon: https://floss.social/@kde/114960515064007515

So it is possible if it has been federated to both. There are different reasons why that might happen, in this case it is because that thread’s OP posted it on Mastodon but mentioned a Lemmy community.

Another reason why it might happen is that a Mastodon user is following a Lemmy community or user.

Absolute trash article.

like most things on techrights.org; every time I read almost anything on that website, I agree with a lot of the substance and then wonder why it has to make that substance look so bad by adding inaccuracies and/or conspiracy theories into it.

annnnnd it’s bipartisan

The worst bills in the US Congress are always supported by both parties, I suspect so there is no way to vote against them.

I have brought this up before with my instance admins, that there were communities in the search results whose hosting instances were no longer up. They told me that there was no good way to do anything about this, the only thing they could do is defederate from those instances but that would delete old threads.

https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/35829576

If an instance (= a topic group, e. g. “memes”,“World news” or “MapPorn” in the example picture) is moving from one server to another (= the name and/or ending changes), how to properly follow the move?

You find out about it the way you did, then follow the new one. I don’t think there’s a mechanism to do that automatically.

And what happens to the “old” instances, that are discontinued? Should I keep the following?

In this particular case, you can see in the sidebar that the community is locked, i.e. there will not be any new posts, i.e. there is no point in keeping the subscription. It also doesn’t hurt anything though.

so which is it, are you asking for a friend or for help improving this? :D