flamingos

joined 2 years ago
MODERATOR OF
[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Let’s say tomorrow the feddit.uk team decides to self host a PDS provider.

Is it possible for the feddit.uk team to ban someone, or can that only be done by Bluesky? Would that ban be federated to other PDS providers?

We could stop hosting the account and purge it from our DB, though IRRC the user can migrate to a new host and have Bluesky populate that with their old data, because everything is public on AT and is kept in Bluesky's relay (I think this is a bad thing, just fyi). The user would still be banned from the various labelers as these operate (I presume) on the accounts DID, which should stay the same across migration. PDS providers don't talk to each other, PDS don't do much so don't really need to. They just store data.

Edit: I feel like Bluesky has the same issue than the Fediverse has with federated bans and alts, but because everybody uses Bluesky’s centralized components, nobody notices.

Bluesky does genuinely have some better moderation tools, labelers are something I think even us on Lemmy/PieFed/whatever might want to look at. But these aren't magic and there's plenty of toxicity on Bluesky, Bluesky just gives you some more tools to help manage it. When Mastodon gets the ability to disable replies I think will help a lot.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It was a response to openly mocking people’s choice to raise their children Christian.

It really wasn't: https://p.feddit.uk/post/feddit.uk/31856602?thread=0.18336647#18336647

The premise of the meme is that's it's hypocritical to think that children can't understand the ideas of being gay or trans, but somehow can decide to be Christian. Your response is mostly non sequitur and implies it's actively dangerous to teach kids about gay people.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 3 points 1 week ago (6 children)

Bluesky's network topology doesn't work like APub's, so this question doesn't really make sense. Like, what is the 'instance' here? The relay? The users' PDS? The AppView? I suppose the PDS provider could ban a user and this would then be indexed by the relay(s). We can argue all day about how decentralised the AT Protocol is, but Bluesky the platform makes no effort to be decentralised*.

* By decentralised I mean a platform controlled by multiple independent actors, a multi-stakeholder platform. Even if you use a non-Bluesky the company relay + app view, it's still centralised around whoever is hosting those.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 41 points 1 week ago (2 children)

However, Chris Weston, its chief executive, told MPs that the company needed an exemption from the £1.4 billion in fines he expects the regulators, Ofwat and the Environment Agency, to impose for future breaches of environmental and performance rules.

Won't somebody think of the poor company facing the consequences of its own actions.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (5 children)

Labour really went from repealing Section 28 to introducing a whole new one. How we've let this childish and anti-science notion that 'biological sex' is static become so pervasive is seriously depressing. Claiming someone's 'biological sex' is only ever the same as the one they had at birth is like insisting an adult only weighs 4 KG.

The Guardian in typical fashion quoted two trans hate groups who of course prefers the Tories even more anti-trans guidance.

Then there's this part, from section 68:

Schools should ensure that they cover all the facts about sexual health, including STIs, in a way that is relevant for all pupils, including those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or gender questioning.

So a kid can't be trans, only gender questioning. Thanks Labour, really committing to your manifesto pledge to 'protecting the freedom for people to explore their sexual orientation and gender identity".

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Yeah, this an us thing, not a PieFed bug. We use this nginx bot blocker to help stop AI scrapers from ruining the server, and we have the following IP ranges blocked:

# IP ranges
47.82.0.0/17 1;
47.79.0.0/17 1;
47.251.94.6 1;
2a03:4000::/31 1;
2a0a:4cc0:2000::/48 1;
2a0a:4cc0::/43 1;
2a0a:4cc0:80::/43 1;

# AT&T
99.0.0.0/13 1;
99.64.0.0/13 1;
99.74.0.0/16 1;
99.32.0.0/12 1;
99.96.0.0/13 1;

There's also a whitelist-ips that lets us override the above, and I even had your instance in it with 2a03:4000:2a:305:24dd:dff:fe98:8ce6 1; # https://palaver.p3x.de/, but that 1 needs to be a zero. I've changed it so it should work now, sorry about that.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 2 points 1 week ago

lemmy-meter.info

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 16 points 1 week ago

Inaccurate, it should be return 1 and return 0 for the true 20 years at Blizzard quality.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

We're hosted in Germany, but that doesn't actually matter as the admins are physically in the UK so Ofcom fines are actually a worry. I need to do another review (yay), but I'm pretty sure we don't have to do any age verification. We do have to assume all our users are children though, as we can only say we don't if we do 'highly effective age verification'* of our users, and we do host content that is 'likely to appeal to children', but I don't believe we host anything that would need to be gatekept from children. We actively block NSFW content and as far as I'm aware there isn't a suicide encouragement or terrorist recruitment community on Lemmy. There are maybe some things that I may need to be changed/patch in Lemmy (e.g. letting users lock their own posts), or making some safety tools (one I want to work on is doing perceptual hashing of images embedded in markdown as current tools only work on post links), but I don't think complying is necessary an issue for us. I'm not a lawyer though and that's just my understanding, we could be fucked.

* This entire 'force every website to keep a separate database of users adult status' is so stupid and I swear it only works like this because of lobbying from companies like Yoti. PornHub is right that it should be device based, but these laws are only using children as a crutch. It's implemented like this because certain parts of the British establishment find porn icky and are hoping by making it more invasive to access that you'll stop watching it. Of course, all this is going to do is push people to sites that don't follow the law so host more extreme content.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 10 points 1 week ago (5 children)

Could you change the title to match the actual article title, not all clients show the original and editorialised titles are against the rules.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 5 points 1 week ago

Poorly. I'm currently praying for an army of tigers.

[–] flamingos@feddit.uk 9 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

No paywall

The event was a success; there will be more like it in Ilford and around the country. Britain has become a multi-party system and there is an appetite for a party (or perhaps just candidates) that talks about peace, Palestine and poverty. The launch of Sultana’s new party has been messy and the left beyond Labour is fragmented, with some elements filtering into the Greens and some likely preferring the more decentralised independent model.

This seems unfair to Sultana, her party announcement focused a lot on inequality (two child cap, winter fuel payment, PIP). I get the left spends a lot of time talking about Gaza (justifiably, because genocide), but I don't think that necessarily means a left election campaign will focus this much on foreign policy.

Zack Polanski's Green party leadership bid is probably close to what a left campaign would (or at least should) look like.

 

The Independent has been told that MPs – including ministers – considering rebelling against the government’s welfare reforms on Tuesday next week have been threatened with losing the whip and even, according to two sources, deselection.

The issue came to a head in a fiery meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party addressed by work and pensions secretary Liz Kendall on Monday evening with several MPs privately claiming it could end up with Sir Keir being forced out as leader.

The rebellion became official shortly after with an amendment to the welfare reform bill next week calling for a pause in the reforms, which some believe could be signed by as many as 100 MPs.

The government plans to make £5bn a year in savings on welfare mostly by reducing personal independence payments (PIPs) for those with disabilities by limiting access to them for all apart from the most disabled.

Previously, at least 80 Labour MPs, including 12 ministers, are understood to be considering rebelling against the legislation needed to cut the welfare bill by £5bn a year. But the new amendment, which is understood to be fronted by the Treasury select committee chair Meg Hillier and other committee chairs, may garner even more support.
[…]
[I]t is understood that MPs requesting permission to miss the vote are being denied because the government wants a show of loyalty on the second reading vote on 1 July.

In the PLP meeting on Monday evening, just a week before the vote, Ms Kendall will try to persuade fellow Labour MPs that the government has no choice but to balance the books.

But former Jeremy Corbyn ally Richard Burgon MP has announced that he will be presenting a petition demanding wealth taxes instead of benefits cuts next week just 24 hours before the crucial vote.
[…]
The issue became a subject of tensions in the run-up to last month’s spending review when a leaked memo from Ms Rayner also proposed eight new wealth taxes on the richest individuals and big corporations as an alternative to cuts.

The row played out during work and pensions questions in the Commons with one MP suggesting the benefits cuts will lead to "appalling poverty".

Labour MP Andy McDonald asked for further evidence on how many people will lose out on Personal Independence Payments as a result of the welfare reform bill.

 

Truth is, to get right to the point, the fact that Matrix was accompanied by a for-profit entity, funded by venture capital was the biggest mistake that Matrix as a project has ever made.

 

Archive

Shabana Mahmood will write to constituents saying she has “significant concerns” that a change in the law could give women an incentive to have unsafe abortions at home.

Wes Streeting, the health secretary, is said to be weighing up whether to abstain or vote against amendments being tabled to the Crime and Policing Bill.

Kemi Badenoch and Nigel Farage, the Conservative and Reform UK leaders, are expected to oppose the move.

Two amendments have been tabled by Labour MPs and the Speaker will decide which to select for a vote, likely on Wednesday. Under Tonia Antoniazzi’s amendment, already backed by 168 MPs, women would no longer be breaking the law if they terminated a pregnancy after 24 weeks or without approval from two doctors.
[…]
The Times understands that Mahmood opposes both amendments, although she will be unable to vote against them as she is on ministerial business abroad next week. An ally said Mahmood had “significant concerns” around the growth in the number of women using online services to order abortion pills without a physical consultation.

“She believes that, from a women’s health and safety perspective, there’s such little oversight,” the ally said. “If you do take those pills later on, it can have a really terrible impact on you.”

Senior government figures expect Antoniazzi’s amendment to pass with a large majority. In a survey of more than 100 MPs, about 70 per cent agreed that women should not be liable for prison sentences if they have abortions outside the rules.

 

Two years on and we're still here, go us!

 

The BBC’s Director General Tim Davie and other senior bosses at the corporation have drawn up plans to win over voters of Reform UK, due to a belief that their news and drama output is creating “low trust issues” with supporters of Nigel Farage’s party.

Minutes of a meeting of the BBC’s Editorial Guidelines and Standards Committee in March, seen by Byline Times, show that BBC News CEO Deborah Turness gave a presentation in which she discussed plans to alter “story selection” and “other types of output, such as drama” in order to win the trust of Reform voters.

The committee also identified “the importance of local BBC teams” to their plan to win over supporters of Farage.

Members of the committee, which includes former GB News executive Robbie Gibb, discussed the presentation and agreed to give an “update on progress” towards their aim at a later date.

 

The UK's Equalities and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) recently published interim update to their code of practice that seeks to segregate trans people from wider society and is trying to press this through with an illegally short six week consultation period.

As part of this consultation, the EHRC have to take responses from the public about how these changes will affect them or people in their lives. The people at the Good Law Project have put together a form to make this easy, so if you live in the UK (trans or not) then I kindly ask you to go through and fill it in:

https://action.goodlawproject.org/ehrc

 

The Labour faction influencing Downing Street’s pitch to Reform UK voters has urged ministers to “root out DEI”.

An article from the Blue Labour campaign group, titled What is to be Done, calls for the government to legislate against diversity, equity and inclusion, echoing the rightwing backlash from Donald Trump and Nigel Farage.
[…]
Urging the party to renew its “covenant with the British people”, Blue Labour’s article said: “We are proud of our multiracial democracy and we utterly reject divisive identity politics, which undermines the bonds of solidarity between those of different sexes, races and nationalities.

“We should legislate to root out DEI in hiring practices, sentencing decisions and wherever else we find it in our public bodies.”
[…]
Blue Labour calls for lower migration in the same article in which it takes aim at DEI, saying: “Immigration is not a distraction or a culture war issue; it is the most fundamental of political questions, a cause of social fragmentation, and the basis of our broken political economy.

“We should drastically reduce immigration, reducing low-skill immigration by significantly raising salary thresholds; closing the corrupt student visa mill system; and ending the exploitation of the asylum system, if necessary prioritising domestic democratic politics over the rule of international lawyers.”

In May, it emerged that net migration almost halved in 2024.

 

A Reform UK election candidate standing in the postponed North Northants Council (NNC) election for Higham Ferrers could trigger an immediate by-election if he wins the seat after he moved to China.

Alan Beswick had been on the ballot paper as one of the two Reform UK candidates for the May 1 elections but, due to the death of Liberal Democrat John Ratcliffe just before polling day, the election in the two-seat Higham Ferrers ward was postponed until June 12.

Names of four nominated Reform candidates were submitted to NNC’s election team. A party spokesman says Mr Beswick’s circumstances changed but they were unable to remove his nomination.

 
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