Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Thousands of river pollution tests cancelled because of staff shortages - https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx24xy8zgp4o the UK EnvironmentAgency remains rubbish; shut it down and start again...

Since Microsoft is organising a European Sovereign Tech Fund, we should ask Lockheed Martin to put together a European Sovereign Defense Fund. There’s probably also opportunity here to bring Amazon in to advise on EU labour standards and have McDonald’s take the lead on food safety policy in the EU.

CC @EUCommission

#EU #USA #corporateCapture #europeanSovereignTechFund #microsoft #github #openSource #freeSoftware #tech #freedom #humanRights #democracy

I'll be on a panel titled "Comics Your Way" at San Diego Comic-Con at 1pm Thursday: https://sched.co/26wgZ

Merz says he won't put pride flags on Bundestag for pride. So BVG (the Berlin public transportation company) put pride flags all over the Bundestag station 😂

“It should be terrifying to every person that the U.S., which has long held political prisoners, is ramping up its oppressive tactics.” https://theintercept.com/2025/07/23/feds-criminalize-protests-masked-ice/

Based on my experience making a “Made in USA electronics” phone, I would be very surprised if someone could pull off a true Made in USA laptop (not just assembled in the USA) with only a 20% markup. At least for the first model.

It’s not just that the BoM is more expensive (20% may cover that?), but all of the up front costs to set up manufacturing lines, molds, testing, NRE fees, etc.

That said, I’d love to see it, especially with Framework repairability.

https://www.tomshardware.com/laptops/palmer-luckey-considering-entering-laptop-market-with-fully-us-made-model-wants-to-know-if-youd-spend-20-percent-more-for-an-american-made-pc

Trump regime knows perfectly well that it was sending innocent people to the El Salvador concentration camp where they would be tortured and, in some cases, murdered in collusion with that country's evil government.

https://archive.ph/TWiAs

Fascism is American policy. Don't pretend otherwise.

Buried in Proton's AI announcement today is a pretty shocking detail about their service 👀

Because of legal uncertainty around Swiss government proposals to introduce mass surveillance — proposals that have been outlawed in the EU — Proton is moving most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland. Lumo will be the first product to move.

#Proton #Switzerland #Privacy #EuroStack #ProtonMail

🚀 OFE Publishes Landmark Study Calling on Funding Europe’s Open Digital Infrastructure through an EU Sovereign Tech Fund (EU-STF)

Our new report urges creation of an EU Sovereign Tech Fund (EU-STF) to fix chronic underfunding of open source technologies – the backbone of Europe’s digital sovereignty, cybersecurity, and competitiveness.

🔗 Check it out: eu-stf.openforumeurope.org

🔗 Check out our summary: https://openforumeurope.org/ofe-launches-landmark-study-calling-for-an-eu-sovereign-tech-fund-to-secure-europes-digital-future/

#OpenSource #DigitalSovereignty #EU

Free software is critical infrastructure, yet its upkeep falls on volunteers while giants like Microsoft or Google profit. As with other public goods, they should fund it via a dedicated tax feeding (like roads) a European fund (EU-STF) to ensure security and digital sovereignty. Europeans shouldn’t pay so Amazon can remain a free rider.

#OpenSource #TaxTheTechGiants #DigitalCommons #EUSTF #PublicGoods #FLOSS #CyberResilience #linux #kde #fsfe #gnome #FOSS #EU

‘We faced hunger before, but never like this’: skeletal children fill hospital wards as starvation grips Gaza - https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jul/23/we-faced-hunger-before-but-never-like-this-skeletal-children-fill-hospital-wards-as-starvation-grips-gaza "For months Israel kept food shipments to Gaza far below starvation rations. Now the death toll is rising rapidly" pure sadism by #israel #gazagenocide

Catalyst Cooperative is a tech worker co-op that curates the free, open-source Public Utilities Data Liberation project (PUDL). Listen to @ZaneSelvans and three of his co-owners talk about the whys and wherefores or being a worker cooperative in the tech sector.
#Cooperatives #WorkerCoops #OpenData

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBjjAyeEEvU

this video has gained a total of -1 subscribers on the YewChewb

absolutely incredible performance

🔴 Brand new comic now up on Boing Boing
—
“MAGA GOGGLES”
—
https://boingboing.net/2025/07/23/tom-the-dancing-bug-maga-goggles.html

‼️ANNOUNCING two new Tom the Dancing Bug books:
👾 Tom the Dancing Bug: Secret Origins; and
🎸 Sex, Tom the Dancing Bug, & Rock 'n' Roll!
Sign up on the Kickstarter launch page to be informed when they can be purchased!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cloverpress/tom-the-dancing-bug-pulitzer-nomed-strip-by-ruben-bolling?ref=c26o5g

The official US econ statistics were already a methodological sh*tshow, but that doesn't mean they can't get worse.

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2025/07/how-much-longer-can-we-trust-our-economic-statistics.html

A recent report about the Trump administration abusing its surveillance powers to spy on James Comey’s cellphone location data raises red flags for journalists and sources.

https://freedom.press/issues/emergency-tracking-of-comey-cellphone-location-points-to-privacy-erosion/

More than 100 aid organisations warn of 'mass #starvation' in #Gaza - https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/jul/23/israel-gaza-war-aid-benjamin-netanyahu-hamas-middle-east-latest-news-updates?page=with%3Ablock-688084458f086020c423e7fa#block-688084458f086020c423e7fa "Israeli forces had killed more than 1,000 Palestinians trying to get food aid since the US- and #Israel-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation started operations in late May"

Fediverse Report – #126

The News

Bandwagon is a fediverse platform for artists to share their music, similar to platforms like Bandcamp. Artists can now use Bandwagon to sell their music albums with the latest update. Bandwagon has added support for Stripe, and does not charge a payment fee for albums sold via the platform. Selling albums via Bandwagon will not be completely free however: once Bandwagon Premier launches at the end of the year, selling albums will only be available for this premium subscription tier of $10/month. Bandwagon promises the platform will always be available for free for artists to upload and share their albums. Another new feature for Bandwagon is Circles, which allows users to share content with specific people. When you add accounts to a circle, you can create content that will only be visible to people within that circle, similar to how Bonfire’s boundaries system works. What is different about Bandwagon’s circles is that access to a circle can be put behind a paywall, where people can pay a monthly subscription fee for continued inclusion in that circle and to see exclusive content by the artist.

The upcoming premium subscription will give paying members the ability to sell albums, sell access to circles/memberships, and get higher quality streaming. Some further thoughts:

With circles, Bandwagon is placing itself in competition with Patreon. It is not the first project to try to put fediverse content behind a paywall: sub.club tried to make this work last year and had to shut down due to a limited uptake. Sub.club focused on microblogging and Mastodon, will targeting the music sector make a difference for Bandwagon?
Platforms on the fediverse has historically struggled with becoming financially sustainable, with most relying on donations, grants and volunteer labour. Bandwagon has a clear story on how it plans to become a financially sustainable platform. The big question is: can they pull it off?
One of the major challenges in building a new social network is in getting critical mass on the community size to made sure there is enough interesting content to keep users interested in visiting. Projects like Radio Free Fedi show that the fediverse has a dedicated community of musicians and other artists on the fediverse. Bandwagon also already has over 200 artists who are sharing their music on the platform. It indicates that music and artists might be a worthwhile direction to look for when building critical mass in communities.
How much will the connection to the fediverse matter for artists on Bandwagon? Bandwagon is open-source and encourages self-hosting, and that it uses ActivityPub provides clear value for creating a network of interoperable Bandwagon servers. But will people use the native connections with the rest of the fediverse as well? For artists, having a wider reach is beneficial, especially if they are selling albums. But will people use the interoperability of microblogging platforms like Mastodon to follow artists on Bandcamp, or will these interoperable networks stay mostly separate in practice?

Bonfire is an upcoming modular social networking platofrm that the team is working on getting ready for an official release. In the launch version (‘Bonfire Social’) the platform focuses on features that are more familiar to microblogging and long-form writing, but the platform is highly extendable and customisable: Bonfire is also experimenting with adding geodata and Mosaic, a bridge to connect other datasets to the platform. Bonfire also reported that they have their first organisation that will build their community on Bonfire: CrowdInBlue is a platform that wants to “connect water projects with funding sources”, and they will build this platform using Bonfire.

The Links

“The upside is that moderation gives me some control. Watching a fascist autocracy unfold before your eyes is terrifying. Everything is collapsing on a massive scale in myriad ways. It’s enough to make a person feel helpless. While it’s not monumental, I do get to curb some of that fascism through moderation. I get to push buttons with labels that read “delete post” and “suspend.” When some ignorant sociopath is harassing people, I get to wave a magic wand and make them disappear. At least from our corner of Mastodon. That’s empowering. And meaningful. It does make a difference because I get to silence them. I can’t begin to describe how good that feels. Just a little tiny bit of justice.”

An excellent writeup of what it’s like to be a moderator for Mastodon. It explains what the day-to-day experience of being a moderator on Mastodon is like, and what some of the main challenges are, such as dealing with targeted harassment and getting exposed to traumatic content. The quote above highlights why people put up with these challenges, and indicates the value of a social network that gives people agency.

Being a Mastodon Moderator – Mark Writes

“I don’t know how to run a community forum in this future. I do not have the time or emotional energy to screen out regular attacks by Large Language Models, with the knowledge that making the wrong decision costs a real human being their connection to a niche community. I do not know how to determine whether someone’s post about their new bicycle is genuine enthusiasm or automated astroturf. I don’t know how to foster trust and genuine interaction in a world of widespread text and image synthesis—in a world where, as one friend related this week, newbies can ask an LLM for advice on exploring their kinks, and the machine tells them to try solo breath play. In this world I think woof.group, and many forums like it, will collapse.“

A worrying account of how LLMs make the current systems of keeping spam out of closed social networks unfeasible. There are communities who need some form of anonymity of their members to function, such as the queer kink community woof.group. These communities ask for some form of applications by new members. The ability of LLMs to cheaply generate bullshit on a grand scale is being used spammers to join these private communities and use it for spam. There is a clear need for new ways to build and maintain communities while keeping spammers out, and it is currently unclear how such a system would look like.

The Future of Forums is Lies, I Guess – Aphyr

“My goals now are more modest: planting seeds in people’s minds that another way to interact online is possible. And when people ARE READY and willing, help them set up an account on the Fediverse software best suited for their needs, helping them out and acclimatizing them to the culture of this place.“

Elena Rossini writes about how her thoughts on the fediverse and growth have shifted, and her plans for the next year of her blog. It echoes a trend I wrote recently about as well: the previous conceptualisation of growth for the new social networks does not hold up anymore, and we need new stories on how these networks can be used to build new communication structures.

The Future is Federated: Year 2 – Elena Rossini

And some more links:

Trunk & Tidbits, June 2025 – Mastodon
Community Spotlight: Mastodon – Geeks for Social Change Community
Privacy and Security on Mastodon – Privacyguides.org
How to Install and Set Up Castopod for Your Podcast – Randy Black
This week’s fediverse software updates.
ActivityPub Explorer is a tool that takes any ActivityPub content like a profile or post, and shows the entire underlying ActivityPub structure.

https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fediverse-report-126/

Last year I got officially reprimanded for posting a link to an article on the Greyzone, because a lot of liberals don't like leftists calling them out, and some liberal blacklist site accused GZ of publishing "misinformation". At the time I pointed out that 1) the story I linked to was factual; and 2) the NYT prints a ton of misinfo, but no one will ever get a finger-wag for posting a link to an NYT piece. More evidence for my assertion:

https://archive.is/nPY9m