PS: The discussion on this post turned mainly into a (one-sided) debate about whether the content of my contributions passes the Lemmy ideological purity test. So dull, yet so predictable. To be clear: I stand by everything I've written on Lemmy. Efforts at shaming will fall flat, as will pompous denunciations and attempts at dunking based on virtual sleuthing. I'm far too secure in my convictions to be bothered by a brigade of insufferably self-righteous progressives trying to one-up each other in their efforts to root out dissidence. To the (quite numerous) others who offered interesting feedback and kind words, thanks.

Here are some reflections on my personal experience of federated social media.

A bit of background. In the 90-9-1 trichotomy, I am one of the 9%: an occasional active participant. As of 3 years ago I had been dabbling in social media since I was a teenager in the 90s, but never very deeply. Newsgroups and IRC; a bit of invisible blogging; various techie web forums; Twitter from 2008 (hardly any tweets); Facebook in the early 2010s (a post or two per week at the peak); then Reddit. As of 2023 I had been "on" Reddit for nearly a decade and not even written 100 comments. Then I decided on a whim to join Lemmy.

The good

Three years later I have written nearly 100 original posts and over 3000 comments! This is an order of magnitude more than I used social media in the previous 25 years. How to explain it?

A bunch of things. I liked the UX instantly, it's much better than Reddit. No ads, so no nagging feeling that you're bankrolling a corporation. A (slightly) higher level of conversation quality than Reddit.

Probably the single biggest explanation is just that it's quieter. On Reddit I always arrived too late to the party. It's hard to find the motivation to say something when a thread already has 800 comments. On Lemmy, I'd arrive 12 hours after the post and there were only 6 comments. If I take the time to compose my thoughts, somebody might actually see it! I get the paradox here (there are tons more eyes passively looking at Reddit), but the "quiet room" effect is real.

Highlights

Hands down the best community I've found here is (no surprise) a specialized one: [email protected]. Lots of original content and genuine expertise, zero vitriol or toxicity. Perfect. In a similar vein, [email protected], where you can literally post pics of pigeons to an adoring audience.

I've also got some value out of [email protected] and [email protected] for one of those reasons: the ambient expertise. It's not really breaking news: Linux and FOSS and privacy are really the only subjects where the fediverse can go toe-to-toe with the corporates in terms of expertise. IMO that's already an achievement that should not be squandered!

Quite a few of my 96 posts are original content ("OG", ugh). A whole bunch are photos from my bike-touring escapades, which I posted somewhat arbitrarily to [email protected] , [email protected], and [email protected]. I rationalize this as an alternative to blogging: instead of hosting your own invisible vanity website, you can write what you have to say in a place where you have less control but where people may actually read it. It's the logic of social media, basically, but minus the ads and opaque algos and shareholders. As expected, my holiday photos were not viral sensations, but they did attract some love and a few nice comments. Success!

The less good

My experience on Lemmy has taught me something that I knew in theory but (somehow) not quite in practice: Socializing via text on a screen is quite hard to pull off successfully. The lack of physical accountability, the inherent difficulty of text communication (avoiding ambiguity without the help of a face or body language), all this tends to make people into worse versions of themselves. Me included to some extent, I'm sure.

And then there's the echo-chamber problem. It turns out that when people have an option to avoid dealing with ideas they disagree with (even slightly), very many of them choose that option. IMO this is a major (perhaps fatal) problem with social media. The fediverse is not magically immune from it.

Lowlights

The first - and definitely worst - experience I've had was 2 years ago when I got banned from [email protected] for "racism and gaslighting" on the basis of, well, pretty much nothing except the moderator's paranoia. Shut out of the single community that had most drawn me to Lemmy, I tried [email protected] and in short order had a similar experience. I am a European liberal who votes green, and a moderate on social questions, although admittedly I do enjoy debate. To be shut down so brutally for daring to question progressive doxas in the politest terms - for me this was quite a shocking confirmation of the intolerance of a certain section of the (mainly US) left.

On [email protected] I got a virtual slap on the wrist for posting an article offering constructive criticism of degrowth. I'm basically a degrowther myself but I believe it's important to stress-test one's ideas (cf. J S Mill). The moderators politely disagreed. Fair enough. I deleted my post and unsubscribed.

The problem on [email protected], meanwhile was (is) slightly different. It's that the community is swamped by a single hyperactive member who posts relentlessly on exactly the same themes with the same POV, and - the echo chamber, again - responds badly to any pushback. I contacted the moderator in private and received a virtual shrug.

So I decided to ditch all politics and stick to photos and niche subjects. But even here it has not been plain sailing. A (slightly whiny) post I wrote a few months ago about the difficulty of installing Linux on cheap hardware (a pretty niche subject!) received an avalanche of mockery and insults that really took me aback. And then I really stirred up a hornets' nest quite recently in this very community when I proposed a feature which would hugely improve my experience of Lemmy without affecting anyone else. Can't link to that because it got (very belatedly) deleted, ostensibly because offtopic but in reality because the proposal was unpopular. In fact this was my last post on Lemmy to date. Probably not a coincidence.

Conclusions

For me personally, the jury's still out. I'm pretty ambivalent about social media in general. Since The Atlantic introduced a discussion space a few months ago, I admit that I've transferred some of my energy there. And yes, it's been a better experience. But the reason is no indictment of Lemmy: It's that The Atlantic has a paywall, which essentially means I'm talking only to privileged people like myself there. I enjoy Hacker News even more, but that's because it's super specialized (politics is mostly banned), and professionally moderated, and also (attention: wild POV!) because it's full of engineers and other spectrumy types who take a Spock-like approach to communication. The problems I've had on Lemmy are problems of all generalist social media, not specifically of the fediverse.

In my case what remains are the figures. Despite everything, I have contributed more, and more personally, on Lemmy than I ever did on the R-site or anywhere else. That has to count for something. Corporate social media is a manipulative money-driven spyware-fueled nightmare. The federated decentralized type is obviously, plainly, better. That's why it has to succeed.

And very likely not just. Taken this week in Valencia, Spain.

Finding a feral cat among dense subalpine scrub and treacherous cliffs is like a morbidly satisfying treasure hunt.

Another episode in the (sometimes darkly amusing) soap opera of New Zealand's battle to eradicate the feral invasive species that are preventing its native birds from thriving.

This is a consistently excellent blog. Consider subscribing.

PPS: Please at least TRY to read the following (if possible, not just the title) with an open mind and in a spirit of tolerance. It was written in good faith by a Linux user who will be staying on Linux.

PPPS: Among all the mean-spirited downvoting and insults and calumny (hey, this is social media) I actually learned a few useful things from this discussion. Perhaps the highlight was the tip about an obscure crowdfunded project which really fits the bill. Too late this time but I'm hopeful such projects, including Pine and Framework, might be become more available and more affordable in future.

PPPPS: I do not reply to downvoters (after all, you're declaring you don't care what I have to say). Or to people who obviously have not read beyond the title. Sorry. My post is very clear and I cannot express what I wrote better. In summary: There is a worsening problem with Linux compatibility on low-end hardware, due to the decline of desktop computing and in particular to the insurgency of ARM and Mediatek. It may hurt to hear it but it's true and we should care about it. Thanks to those who offered constructive feedback.

I'm frustrated. Once again, I have had to buy a computer I didn't want in order to stay on Linux.

Some background. Compared to most people in this forum, I am a somewhat normal computer user. That is, I have not touched a mouse in decades, I use a small lightweight low-end laptop (which is not slow on Linux), and I do not take anything to pieces. To be clear, I'm a programmer and a massive FOSS idealist. But I've never been interested in hardware, and in this respect I'm a complete normie. Let's not forget that for most ordinary people, a "computer" these days is the tethered corporate toy in their pocket.

For me this slide away from free personal computing is now getting impossible to ignore.

• 20 years ago I could buy a laptop (a Fujitsu) from a major European electronics retailer which came with a Linux CD - a Linux CD! (Kanotix, a Debian variant).
• In the late 2010s, I had a nice choice of cheap Taiwanese Wintel netbooks. So there was a Windows tax to pay but at least the hardware worked fine.
• 4 years ago, the options were getting thin on the ground. For 400€ I could find only one Linux-compatible X86 laptop, made by Acer. And since I didn't have a Linux live USB, I had to (fake-) register the thing with Microsoft in order to get access to the damn web.
• Today, there's almost nothing left. Intel laptops have all but disappeared from the budget aisle, replaced by ARM-powered Chromebooks and, increasingly, big Android tablets with keyboards. Putting non-spyware Linux on these things is often possible, sort of, but it's a nightmare. You're back to the 2010 era of ROM-flashing on Android, using repos from random developers and wading through impenetrable forum discussions. It's a massive PITA. This is not the way computing should be done, and normal users will never do it even if they were capable. It's hardly secure either.

The geeky suggestion which I can hear coming, "buy a secondhand Thinkpad", is not a proper solution. It's a band-aid fix with a timeout (PS: meaning it's on the way to EOL). Hardware from the likes of Tuxedo and Framework is nice but too heavy (PS: correction, Framework is not heavy) and way too expensive for me. The Pinebook Pro is always out of stock.

And anyway, for years I have wanted to move from a laptop to a convertible tablet (like the Surface or Lenovo's Yoga and Duet lines) (PS: meaning the form factor pioneered by those models, the cheap options these days are invariably on ARM). It makes so much sense ergonomically and even in terms of maintenance. (Keyboards have moving parts. I have to change my Acer because it has a faulty keyboard which cannot be fixed except professionally at prohibitive cost. Crazy.) But none of these computers are easily compatible with Linux. It's possible, yes, but hardly simple.

I considered, for a fleeting moment, throwing in the towel. After 20 years.

And then bought yet another laptop, basically the same model as last time except a Chromebook. I know I'll get an OS I control onto it without too much stress. That's a relief. But I'm more worried than ever about how this story is going to end.

PS: I should have predicted the bitterness and negativity and cynicism I would provoke simply by sharing my thoughts and feelings in good faith. Social media is absolutely incorrigible. In the meantime I will of course be staying on Linux, as I thought I described.

Seen yesterday in Teruel, Spain.

This is my second sighting of such a creature. The first time (different city so not the same bird) I didn't get a good look, and suspected the poor pigeon had somehow been, um, artistically vandalized. But this one was clearly natural (PS: or not, see comments), with symmetric coloration merging perfectly into the iridescent breast.

Some cursory research did not turn up clues. Did its domestic ancestor mate with its budgie cagemate? Nah, that can't be right.

Anyway, it seems that polychromatic feral pigeons are a thing.

PS. More angles:

PPS: I was fooled by a pigeon, or rather by a pigeon artist! Well done to the sleuthers here.

Taken yesterday.

The backstory: I have now done over 3000 km of touring on this fat-tire Engwe e-bike since buying it last year.

Engwe's target market for this bike seems to be food-delivery riders and city-tour guides. People constantly tell me that it looks like a motorbike. In fact it's the EU-regs-respecting model (so: power-capped pedelec with no throttle). I have done lots of touring on regular bikes and I can say that riding this thing is more comfortable, but not radically. The suspension and tires help with bumps and the motor takes the edge off hills, basically.

The airport is in fact an airplane-storage park near Teruel, Spain. During international crises it fills up with furloughed jets, so it's currently quite full.

A predictably outstanding selection of very recent birdie pics.

The Atlantic has a metered paywall with one free article.

Seen this weekend in Vallecas, on the southern outskirts of Madrid.

It is hard to find detailed information but this seems to be one of the more important ongoing urban developments in Spain and perhaps Europe too.

The future street layout is already drafted on OpenStreetMap.

Seen in Vallecas, a suburb of Madrid.

A touching portrait of a dirt-poor young female construction worker from Sichuan who became an unintentional celebrity on social media.

Source (Sixth Tone) is a Chinese state-funded soft-power outlet. That should not be relevant to this report, which is simply decent journalism.

If we want to keep our personal computing private (i.e. data, communications, social life, everything), we need to fix this problem.

The web is what makes privacy possible on the desktop, but the desktop platform is slowly becoming irrelevant. IMO our last hope is to make web apps usable and popular on mobile. In theory it's feasible.

Source is free to access (and highly recommended).

This is downer news. But remember that you are not helpless if you live in (for example) the West. We still have lots of political power and individual freedom compared to most other people in the world. If we want to keep it, it's up to us to get involved in politics. At the very least by voting. Cynicism and hopelessness will not solve this.

Looking for some maintenance advice.

I'm about to embark on some touring. I don't have space to take more than one canned product. Is WD-40 what I need?

As I understand it from some research, WD-40 is by some magic both a degreaser and a lubricant. This is mysterious to me. In my mental model of chemistry, you degrease with detergent, not more grease. So now I'm imagining that WD-40 is a sort of "light grease" which dissolves "heavy grease". Is that right?

So if I can only take one product, is WD-40 it? PS: If not, then what? Also, is there a generic name for it, or cheaper similar products to look for which do the same thing?

PPS: The consensus seems to be that WD-40 is not a miracle product, by which really I meant "a single portable product that can somehow de-gunk and lubricate" and is less risky than what I was doing before: using chain oil for the lubrication and dish soap for the cleaning.

PPPS: This question was asked in the best possible faith. I have been a cyclist for decades and always been curious about this product. And yet still I get downvoted. What is about social media that makes people so toxic and mean-spirited? It's almost as mysterious as WD-40.

The European Union is finally on its way to becoming a power in its own right. That’s not because its member countries have suddenly stopped squabbling or its bureaucratic inertia has melted away. It’s because the past four years have produced an unremitting state of crisis. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the beginning. Now the imperative comes from Donald Trump’s repositioning of the United States as something close to an antagonist.

Without the guarantee of American cooperation and NATO protection, the EU is newly vulnerable. And in response, in the past year, it has delivered a series of firsts that amount to a quiet revolution in how it exercises power.

In May, the EU decided, for the first time, to help finance defense spending for its 27 member states by taking on EU-wide debt. This move came from the realization that even serious spending hikes in individual countries—European states have doubled their defense outlays since 2015—would vary widely given the economic disparities. Germany, for instance, plans to invest roughly $77 billion over five years, meaning that by 2030, its defense budget could be the world’s third largest. But that kind of spending is not possible for countries that already carry more debt, and confronting Russian President Vladimir Putin, potentially without U.S. backing, will require the rearmament of all. To this end, the EU has now established an extraordinary instrument, called Security Action for Europe, or SAFE, that is prepared to fund up to $178 billion in upgrades to the continent’s capacity to produce and procure arms.

For the first time, Europe will essentially protect its defense industry. “European preference” was long dismissed as a French fantasy. But that was when buying U.S. weapons was a premium that allies paid for American protection. Now Trump has signaled that the deal is off: He talks with Putin over the heads of the Europeans and has suggested that America’s NATO commitments are a fiction. So European states that use SAFE funding will be required to procure more European-made weapons and parts than not. That priority has also been written into Europe’s recently agreed-on $107 billion debt-financed Ukraine package, which restricts Kyiv to purchasing European-made arms to the extent possible.

[...]

The way that Europe makes decisions is changing to meet the moment, and these changes are perhaps the most crucial of all the “firsts.” In the past, EU members had to unanimously agree before Brussels could adopt policies on matters of particular sensitivity. Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel fiercely defended this rule. But today’s leaders have come to accept that abandoning it is the price of geopolitical relevance. In December, the EU invoked an emergency legal provision to bypass the unanimity requirement in order to freeze Russian assets indefinitely. That same month, the EU approved its debt-financed Ukraine package, also without unanimous approval: Hungary, Slovakia, and Czechia were pushed to opt out rather than veto it.

Europe is not yet a fully autonomous power, and it won’t become one tomorrow. But thanks to Trump, a transformation is under way. With each new first, others become thinkable. The decisive question is whether Europe can stay this course. A super-election year looms in 2027, when France, Italy, Spain, and Poland will all hold votes. Victories by the far right—especially in France and Poland—could derail the current trajectory.

Or not: EU approval is at 74 percent, a record high. Young far-right politicians may well understand that returning to the nation-state means choosing powerlessness.

This may be the outcome that leaders in Washington, Moscow, and Beijing prefer. But in their effort to fragment Europe into pliable nation-states, they are instead galvanizing its slow-motion march toward self-determination.

A very complete article with useful route map.

The latest in transit technology, with automated trains capable of arriving every two-and-a-half minutes and platform screen doors that protect waiting passengers from falling into the tracks

This will read like parody to Europeans and Asians who discovered such crazy novelties decades ago.

Seems to me this was always a crucial question. Would the Greenlanders actually fight? Really? Turns out there's an answer.

A cathartic read, but it's also good news. Deterrence is the only way with the thugs currently running Washington. This should help.

Greenlanders own a lot of guns: more than 35,000 long rifles, on an island of 56,000 people. Everyone I met there in January knew how to hunt. And more than one person made clear to me that they were ready to stand their ground against a possible American invasion.

“I have 10 hunting rifles,” Finn told me when I visited his home in Nuuk. (He asked me to withhold his full name because “taking credit for things is not the Greenland way.”) “I am a decent shot,” he added, “but not as good as my friends, who can hit a seal in the water at 200 meters, from a moving boat.”

Nuuk, a city of no more than 20,000 people, is serviced by one of very few runways in a wilderness more than three times the size of Texas. Finn was born there, to a Danish father and an Inuit mother. “You must know,” he told me—after we’d sat for an hour or so over tea and salted musk ox, and he had come to trust that I was not one of the “other” Americans—“that I will defend my home.”

[...]

Throughout the settlement, I noticed animal carcasses nailed to the sides of homes. Most were small game—birds and hares—but I also saw a quartered reindeer. This was the local method of refrigeration, and the villagers survived on subsistence hunting. I found myself thinking about the gun culture back home—performative, based on a myth of self-sufficiency. In this Greenlandic village, gun ownership was rooted in the requirements of an unforgiving environment. Walking back to the boat, I saw a blood trail that led up from the dock. The hunting party had been successful.

In Nuuk, stores were running low on ammunition, not because people were afraid of one another, nor because they needed that much ammo to hunt. “The bullets are for the Americans,” one local told me, “if they come.” He assured me that the government was working to replenish the depleted ammunition supply.

The Greenlanders I met were warm and welcoming, but not without a fierce pride. Their ancestors had carved a civilization out of the ice with tools made from whalebone and meteorite fragments. They’d hewn garments from cured whale intestine, sealskin, and thick polar-bear fur—still the warmest insulation on Earth. Today’s Greenlanders are prepared to defend what they have built here.

“If we are pushed,” Finn told me, “we are ready to die.”

That’s a fight America has no reason to pick. It’s also one that America could lose.

A vertigo-inducing essay by the great Robert Kagan. It lays out what the coming world of "spheres of influence", which is arriving very fast as the American empire commits seppuku, will actually mean. It's not attractive.

What does Europe do, for instance, now that it faces hostile and aggressive great powers on both its eastern and western flanks? Not only Russia, but now the United States, too, threaten the security and territorial integrity of European states and work to undermine their liberal governments. A passive Europe could become a collection of fiefdoms—some under Russian influence, some under American influence, some perhaps under Chinese influence—­its states’ sovereignty curtailed and its economies plundered by one or more of the three empires. Will the once-great European nations surrender to this fate?

Hopeful spoiler: he says we may not.

An argument the handful of Europhiles here will surely applaud, but particularly well expressed here.

Source is highly recommended in general. Subscribe and follow.

This after several weeks of bikepacking (literally: see photo), roughly following the coast from Alicante to Gibraltar, with a couple of short legs by train.

Surprise: it turns out that cycle touring in winter is generally more pleasant than in summer, at least in southern Europe. No need to organize the day around avoiding the midday sun and heat, and accommodation is (slightly) more affordable.

The pedelec motor helps with hills (very welcome when there are cars around). On the flat it changes precisely nothing from traditional touring. The dual suspension made the seat miraculously comfortable from day one, which was a genuine surprise and revelation.

Now in Morocco, accessible in 1 hour by a ferry which takes bikes for free.

First time I've seen this. On an intercity train in Andalusia, Spain.

Doubly useful because they also serve to hold the bike in place. In France some trains have (lockless) racks with bungees which you pull over the bike.

Both ideas seem to be experimental replacements for the more common hanger racks (where you hang the bike by the wheel). Those were never great for tourists with paniers and they're becoming untenable in the era of weird-geometry bikes and, um, fat lazy electric ones like the one you see there.