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from https://systemli.social/@anneroth/117228668085415636

“20,000 mail accounts. 20,000 blogs. 5,000 mailing lists. 1,500 websites.

In Europe.

Run by volunteers of @cavallette, perfectly legal, and decidedly antifascist, feminist, queer.

Destroyed and shut down by Trump's administration, extra legally.”

It has always been disturbing that to search for EU gov/public resources, we face licking the boots of Microsoft, Google, Cloudflare, etc.

Since 2024, a half-baked shitshow has been under development. It’s unclear when this shitshow will hit the fan. It starts as a join venture between #Ecosia and #Qwant. Yikes indeed. This façade ensures that the EU is very unlikely to give us a properly public resource that is independent from the US now.

Qwant and Ecosia have always been Microsoft syndicates who work in contradiction to their claimed values and purpose (privacy and environment, respectively). They have added Google syndication, because why not? Considering their patrons weren’t wise enough to condemn Microsoft.

Qwant and Ecosia both lack respect for privacy and treat the Tor community with hostility. Amazon-hosted Ecosia fails to grasp how working with Amazon and Microsoft contradicts the environmental cause.

Ecosia used to use Cloudflare (the top web enshitifier in the world, US-based). That may have changed, but they picked up Google.

The contradictions:

Microsoft (US): partners with the worst oil companies, uses AI to help them find oil digging sites. Notorious privacy abuser.

Amazon (US) and Google (US) both: partner with oil companies and uses AI to help them find oil, just like MS. Both are notorious privacy abusers.

Will the EU endorse this garbage? Likely. The general public is mostly naive about the false positioning of Qwant and Ecosia.

Looks like a bit of bullshit in Wikipedia:

“L'entreprise a pour objectif le développement d'un index de moteur de moteur de recherche souverain permettant à Qwant et Ecosia de devenir indépendant de Microsoft Bing et Google[1],[2].”

Oh great, Big Tech is now in prime position to decide which messages get through

WhatsApp is rolling out its interoperability features. There are three providers that are actually interoperable in the EU today: BirdyChat, Haiket, and Arnacon. None of them offers group chats with WhatsApp contacts as of now, which is a major obstacle for adoption, but at least there is something happening.

However, under DMA, Messenger is required to do the same. And yet there is nothing. Is there any reason no one is trying to launch a Messenger interoperable app? Lack of monetization incentives? More technical obstacles than with WhatsApp?

cross-posted from: https://crazypeople.online/post/23992245

The CoE whose job it is to protect peoples’ human rights under the Social Charter of Council of Europa has hired an exclusive US tech giant to confine their website to Cloudflare’s walled-garden.

This means several demographics of people are excluded from being informed about their rights. Anyone not in Cloudflare’s preferred demographics of people (such as the Tor community) are blocked from access. Even the world’s ubiquitous public library (archive.org) is blocked from making copies of the website for public consumption.

Exceptionally, this link works where at one moment archive.org was able to visit CoE: https://web.archive.org/web/20260219202536/https://www.coe.int/en/web/conventions/full-list?module=treaty-detail&treatynum=035

But it’s enshitified to the point of just rendering a blank page, at least in my case, after refusing some shitty popup about cookies or some shit. That page is likely the page that attempts to publish the “European Social Charter (ETS №35)”.

Update: Ireland shares

I could only dig up a 1961 version of the European Social Charter from the CoE’s minefield of broken pages within archive.org. If anyone wants a recent version (1996), Ireland is sharing it openly:

http://hria.equalit.ie/pdf/en/10/europe/European%20social%20charter_English.pdf

cross-posted from: https://belgae.social/post/2039832

I need a round nose/cove or ball router bit, ø22mm with 8mm shank. I have checked these places:

• CIPAC (only has CMT Orange tools). Over €60 to order a single CMT bit.
• Lecot (only has CMT Orange tools and a Bosch kit). Over €60 to order a single CMT bit.
• Clabots Tools (only has CMT Orange tools and a Bosch kit).
• BMK (only has ENT bits and some Bosch kits). Over €60 to order a single ENT bit.
• Djoser: (only has a Dewalt kit)

Indeed there is a pattern. The kits never include this bit. And the diy shops are useless:

• Brico: even the big ones have only a tiny selection of router bits. A kit by Base and another small kit.
• Hubo: small kit by Kreator (IIRC)

Klein and Fraiser also make bits of the same geometry bit but no shop in Brussels seems to carry it.

Amazon has the bit I need and it’s /cheap/. A kit of 4-9 bits goes for 20-30. But if we boycott US tech giants like Amazon and Clouldflare, we are fucked.

Or am I missing something?

[our statement of intent]( MINDS. Our Statement of Intent)

The rumor is that domainepublic.net treats Microsoft’s mail server with the same reciprocity of Microsoft’s treatment of other mail servers and thus blocks MS.

IIRC, small email services are forced to solve a CAPTCHA to prove to MS that their server has a human administrator before the server can connect to MS’s server. Is that true?

Can anyone confirm or deny the rumor as well as whether MS forces other ESPs to solve CAPTCHAs? I would be quite interested in having an email account that blocks MS until an MS admin solves a CAPTCHA (which I assume would not happen).

The rumor is that domainepublic.net treats Microsoft’s mail server with the same reciprocity of Microsoft’s treatment of other mail servers and thus effectively blocks MS.

IIRC, small email services are forced to solve a CAPTCHA to prove to MS that their server has a human administrator before the server can connect to MS’s server. Is that true?

Can anyone confirm or deny the rumor as well as whether MS forces other ESPs to solve CAPTCHAs? I would be quite interested in having an email account that blocks MS until an MS admin solves a CAPTCHA (which I assume would not happen).

It’s sickening enough that they use Twitter without so much as a free-world mirror. Even more in our faces when the DG MOVE (the commission’s transport branch) repeatedly references Twitter in their biennial report (linked). Note as well that the report itself is exclusively reachable only to clearnet users. Everyone else must rely on archive.org for a copy.

Sample paragraph:

“All of these key developments were accompanied by external communication activities, in particular via DG MOVE’s X account, newsletter and website, with the aim to reach relevant stakeholders and multipliers. Under objective 3, these activities focused in particular on the revised TEN-T regulation, which reached a very high number of stakeholders and citizens on social media (274900 impressions on DG MOVE’s social media alone), the Passenger Mobility Package and its new online communication campaign for 2023-2024, to raise awareness of about EU passenger rights.”

In other words, if you want to be kept informed about your EU passenger rights, then lick Elon’s boots. We need to get to a point where licking Elon’s boots is an embarrassment. They are proudly counting the numbers of people they reach. We need to get them to count people who are excluded (as Mastodon excludes no one).

The EU has an unmonitored non-interactive Mastodon account, but that only mirrors general EU content, not DG NOVE specifically.

Also w.r.t. transparency, there is this:

“Digital Culture, and in particular Collaboration and communication was further improved by the migration to SharePoint online.”

Sharepoint is Microsoft garbage that is not open to public access.

Regarding the question of legality-- the EU has open data laws, which IIUC entails making publications accessible to everyone. I suppose I need to get to the bottom of that but my suspicion is that publishing something exclusively on Twitter and thus blocking all who don’t lick Elon’s boots is illegal. Otherwise, it certainly should be illegal.

Although I applaud efforts like this to regulate the technofeudal fiefdoms, it’s disturbing how that movement has so much attention in comparison to the fact that Tesla’s cars impose surveillance on everyone who travels outside of their home.

I can escape Facebook to a sufficiently good enough extent by not creating an account. The fact that FB tries to track non-users is minor in the big scheme of things.

Where I have zero control is when I am out on the street, and a Tesla or Google car intersects my path. The robocams take a pic of me, likely performs facial recognition (I assume), and then my realtime location and face are captured by Tesla or Google without my knowledge or consent. Then if I want to send them a GDPR right to be forgotten request everytime their car passes me, I have to send them a copy of my ID to prove my identity, as well as my address so I can receive my reply.

This situation is fucked up in so many ways. There is no personal action I can take to protect myself other than to not leave my home. This is where regulation is most needed.

(edit) Well, I suppose I could wear a ski mask everywhere. But I don’t suppose the police would leave me alone in that case -- considering the burqua is banned in Belgium due to police being unable to ID someone whose face is covered.

Crossposted to !exclusive_public_resources.

The French federal website www.economie.gouv.fr should be public access. But they allow US tech giant Cloudflare to restrict access and then snoop on people who manage to get access.

The most recent cached version on archive.org is also useless because archive.org was also presented with Cloudflare’s blockade.

The only openly accessible content is old versions of archive.org snapshots, from the time before CF became archive-hostile.

Obviously it’s not smart to switch to a Cloudflare-plagued network like that of Matrix if your goal is to escape US tech giants. For strictly internal use on self-hosted instances, sure. But as soon as a matrix room becomes open public Cloudflare rears its ugly head.

Zulip and SimpleX are probably better options. Certainly IRC is a better option so long as the channel has no Matrix gateway. SimpleX is also free of Cloudflare.

The commission is asking for your feedback on open source. Help them to understand the importance!

European companies ARE ready to help people and organizations with DigitalSovereignty. Here 2 great examples:

1. The French Ministry of Education provides cloud storage for 1.2 million employees using Nextcloud architecture: https://www.cio-online.com/actualites/lire-l-education-nationale-offre-le-stockage-cloud-a-ses-1-2-million-d-agents-sans-gafam-16726.html

2. Airbus is 80% certain they can find a European supplier to provide in their complex needs for a cloud: https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/19/airbus_sovereign_cloud/

If even Airbus and ministries are migrating to European solutions, then smaller businesses, non-profits, governments, people and families certainly can!

@murena@lemmy.world @murena@mastodon.social

(crossposted from !exclusive_public_resources)

Musk’s changes to Twitter:

• must register as a member to get read access to content
• members no longer see a non-biased chronological linear timeline; an opaque algorithm decides what to prioritise on the timelines, subject to Elon’s hard-right manipulation

It’s perhaps fair enough that boot-licking pawns decide to subject themselves to quasi-brainwashing manipulation. But when GOVERNMENTS use Twitter, people with a legitimate interest in gov communication are forced to register on an exclusive walled garden where they will come under influence of the extreme right (and thus climate denial among other garbage; hence the crosspost to !climate_action_individual).

How to fix this using open data laws:

Public content published on Twitter legally must be openly accessible to all people. Perhaps not by default but certainly by request. This means individuals can submit an open data request to gov agencies who use Twitter, requesting a copy of all content they publish on Twitter. The gov legally must satisfy the request. All tweets must be in an open machine-readable format (csv, json, or xml).

The dataset is “dynamic”, so I believe future updates must be added to the open data. But what I’ve seen in practice is the gov is not diligent about pushing the updates. They may need to be nagged. If they are nagged enough, perhaps they will decide Twitter is not worth it.

BTW, all of this applies to Facebook as well, noting that Cambridge Analytica is why Trump took power in 2016.

Viktor Lofgren self hosts his own search engine "Marginalia" in europe.

If anyone could help me improve my script, it could be a way to get more posting action in Europe, instead of Cloudflare (US). What I need most is an open dataset of communities other than #Lemmyverse, which is incomplete.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/24512484

(The pic is sample output for an arbitrary query on “vegan vege pesc”. Irrelevant side note: there is no free-world venue for pescatarians.. just one in L/W that scrolled off the screen)

CF

The federation is not wholly decentralised, obviously, when giant centralised fiefdoms like Facebook “Threads”™ and Cloudflare hook in their technofeudal variety of oppressive infra and abuse their power.

Each post submission begins with finding a relevant venue for the content and it must be consistent with my sense of ethics. Cloudflare is automatically nixed because it’s inherently centralised in a walled garden (regardless of the user count for any given node). CF is a non-starter for an open, free, and fair society (fair implying power balance, equality, transparency, etc).

My script queries the catalog of communities for relevant venues. It still prints the Cloudflare walled garden because it’s useful to see what names match my regex queries, which sometimes helps form a better query. It’s the only thing #LemmyWorld is good for (a shit-ton of community names with redundant variations of the same subject matter). Those results are in red, tagged with a thundercloud (🌩 ), and printed first (because when they scroll off the terminal I don’t typically care to scroll up to see them).

non-CF

CF is not the only issue. Some non-CF nodes are centralized due to uncontrolled growth to disproportionately large sizes. I don’t cancel them hard-and-fast like CF nodes, but they get treated with low “last resort” favorability. They have the warning symbol (⚠) and are in yellow.

Is my math decent?

My script began by filtering on total user count. Then I realised dead or dormant users probably should not count because such users don’t really contribute to a node’s disproportionate power over a population. It’s active users that matter. But if the number of active users in a day are filtered on, that’s too dynamic for deciding where my post can live for a month or however long it is relevant. So I took the users_active_half_year count. Is that sensible?

What constitutes an “active” user, simply logging in, or commenting?

The line is drawn at 2 standard deviations above the average -- after tossing outliers. Nodes with less than 5 active users in ½ a year are likely 1-person nodes which do not influence the average. The average is around 320 active ½yr users per node. The standard deviation is ~702 users. My statistical competence is rusty for sure, but I’m a bit bothered by a standard deviation that’s more than double the mean. Seems like a variation so wild it should perhaps be disregarded. Nonetheless, I opted to flag nodes that exceed ~1724 users_active_half_year.

The pseudocode looks like this:

avg=$(sqlite3 "$db" 'select round(avg([counts.users_active_half_year])) from node_tbl where tags not like "%cloudflare%" and [counts.users_active_half_year] > 4')
variance=$(sqlite3 "$db" 'select avg(([counts.users_active_half_year] - subtbl.aua) * ([counts.users_active_half_year] - subtbl.aua)) as var from node_tbl, (select avg([counts.users_active_half_year]) as aua from node_tbl where tags not like "%cloudflare%" and [counts.users_active_half_year] > 4) as subtbl where tags not like "%cloudflare%" and [counts.users_active_half_year] > 4;')

sqlite3 "$db" "select case when baseurl in (select baseurl from node_tbl where [counts.users_active_half_year] > $avg+sqrt($variance)*2) then '$yellow⚠' else '$cyan' end||baseurl||'$reset',name from community_tbl where (name like '%${1}%' or desc like '%${1}%') and baseurl not in (select baseurl from node_tbl where tags like '%cloudflare%') order by baseurl,name"

Code is ugly because sqlite does not have a stdev builtin function.

My other thought is to cut slack for closed nodes because at least they are expected to shrink. To list the possible figures to filter on, this is a record for lemmy.ml (the biggest non-Cloudflare node):

record for lemmy.ml

url = https://lemmy.ml/ baseurl = lemmy.ml name = Lemmy desc = A community of privacy and FOSS enthusiasts, run by Lemmy’s developers downvotes = 1 nsfw = 1 create_admin = 0 private = 0 fed = 1 version = 0.19.12 open = 1 usage.users.total = 54790 usage.users.activeHalfyear = 4201 usage.users.activeMonth = 2125 usage.localPosts = 167331 usage.localComments = 818559 counts.site_id = 1 counts.users = 54790 counts.posts = 167331 counts.comments = 818559 counts.communities = 4608 counts.users_active_day = 947 counts.users_active_week = 1496 counts.users_active_month = 2125 counts.users_active_half_year = 4201 icon = https://lemmy.ml/pictrs/image/fa6d9660-4f1f-4e90-ac73-b897216db6f3.png banner = langs = ["all"] date = 2019-04-20T18:53:54.608882Z published = 1555786434000 time = 1751974533970 score = uptime.domain = lemmy.ml uptime.latency = 0.034 uptime.countryname = France uptime.uptime_alltime = 99.04 uptime.date_created = uptime.date_updated = 2021-10-29 15:09:21 uptime.date_laststats = 2025-04-11 21:03:25 uptime.score = 100 uptime.status = 1 isSuspicious = 0 metrics.usersTotal = 54790 metrics.usersMonth = 2125 metrics.usersWeek = 1496 metrics.totalActivity = 985890 metrics.localPosts = 167331 metrics.localComments = 818559 metrics.averageUsers = 50720.8825256975 metrics.biggestJump = 225 metrics.averagePerMinute = 0.02475 metrics.userActivityScore = 0.055574151274483 metrics.activityUserScore = 17.9939770031028 metrics.userActiveMonthScore = 25.7835294117647 tags = [] susReason = [] trust.lastCrawled = 1751974533970 trust.baseurl = lemmy.ml trust.metrics.usersTotal = 54790 trust.metrics.usersMonth = 2125 trust.metrics.usersWeek = 1496 trust.metrics.totalActivity = 985890 trust.metrics.localPosts = 167331 trust.metrics.localComments = 818559 trust.metrics.averageUsers = 50720.8825256975 trust.metrics.biggestJump = 225 trust.metrics.averagePerMinute = 0.02475 trust.metrics.userActivityScore = 0.055574151274483 trust.metrics.activityUserScore = 17.9939770031028 trust.metrics.userActiveMonthScore = 25.7835294117647 trust.users = 54790 trust.name = Lemmy trust.base = lemmy.ml trust.actor_id = https://lemmy.ml/ trust.tags = [] trust.guarantor = fediseer.com trust.endorsements = 17 trust.score = 598.1875 trust.reasons = [] blocks.incoming = 0 blocks.outgoing = 0 blocked = []

## Some communities missing from the Lemmyverse DB - why? Anyone know why some slrpnk.net communities are in the Lemmyverse DB, and some are not? E.g. why is !nolawns@slrpnk.net missing, despite many others from the same node that are included?

More importantly, what’s the fix apart from crawling all the nodes (which would probably be unwelcome)? Is there another open DB apart from Lemmyverse? There is fediverse.space and fediverse.observer, but they don’t appear to be sharing their data.

(edit) Lemmyverse missing communities was a bug that has been fixed.

Say something nice? At least France has nuclear power, though its grid needs work

i searched for https://eu-os.eu/ EU-OS and clicked on the search results that came up. there is a spanish article about this koncept https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/EU_OS here. in there i found this other article. that was funny because these two are nice but i didnt even look for them and just found them. and i dont habla espanol! :)

We have extensive discussions about our enormous dependence on American clouds, but what exactly are we talking about? And is Europe equally dependent on all types of cloud? This article is aimed at policy makers, but it may also provide some clarity about the broader landscape to actual cloud users.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-european-cloud-ladder/