The European Commission president hinted Wednesday she would be open, after the European election in June, to working with some politicians in the European Conservatives and Reformists grouping

“The cut-off line is ‘do you stand for democracy?’, ‘do you defend our values?’, ‘are you very firm in the rule of law?’, ‘are you supporting Ukraine’ and ‘are you fighting against Putin’s attempt to weaken and divide Europe?’And these answers have to be very clear”

With the projected increase in seats from ECR and ID, this shouldn't be surprising to anyone, however EPP getting closer to ECR isn't exactly the best of looks.
To me, this sends a clear message that, as Renew falls off due to Macron's impopularity, the EPP is trying to gain more right wing seats by disregarding integration further down the line and possibly adopting more populistic policies.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/10937558

This group of Americans is less likely to have a license than its older counterparts at the same age. McKinsey points out that in 1997, 43 percent of 16-year-olds and 62 percent of 17-year-olds held a license. But those numbers have dropped substantially, and by 2020, only 25 percent of 16-year-olds and 45 percent of 17-year-olds have a driver's license, the consulting firm said citing data from the U.S. Federal Highway Administration.

Rare Gen Z W (as a Gen Z).

I thought this was mainly an European movement, but looking at this it appears that the USA too, despite being a mostly car oriented country, is following suit. Nice.

The article also mentions how having a car might have become too expensive for many, which isn't something to party about, but I am mostly concerned with young people no longer rushing to grab a licence the second they turn 18 (or earlier, depending on local country laws). Hopefully this will help shaping urban planning in a more sensible and humane direction.

A few months ago I released the Defederation Investigator, a tool to verify the federation status of Lemmy instances. With this new update, I've expanded it to support multiple Fediverse softwares, including:

• Mastodon
• Misskey
• Mbin
• Pleroma & Akkoma
• Friendica

This works both ways: you can verify which Mastodon (et al) instances have defederated your Lemmy instance, as well as check the federation status of an instance running any of the supported softwares.

Like most of my works, this tool is FOSS and available on my team's GitHub.

Limitations

Many microblogging platforms, Mastodon included, offer admins the possibility of hiding their blocklists from the public. As it turns out many instances have chosen this approach, so the available information can be pretty limited at times.

Also, this update has increased the pool of instances from a couple hundred to over 2 thousand, so query times have increased significantly. You can reduce them by deselecting some softwares from the query page (hint: most fedi instances are Mastodon ones, so by deselcting them you'll cut out over half of the pool).

What about Kbin?

To my knowledge, Kbin doesn't share its federation status through an API like most softwares do. Furthermore, given recent events, I have little faith in the Kbin project. Instead, I chose to support its community driven fork: Mbin.

What about Peertube and Pixelfed?

I tried looking through their API docs and wasn't able to find any endpoints sharing either federation or defederation statuses. If anyone is familiar with any of these softwares and has any ideas on what to do to retrieve such information feel free to contact me, I'd love to add support for both.

What about ...?

Want more softwares? Feel free to propose them. I'd like for this tool to support as many projects as possible.

There are a few topics about which the Based Count admin team would like to hear your thoughts as our community, before we take action. Instad of making various different posts we decided to condensate them into a single big announcement, feel free to speak your mind on any of the following topics. We encourage all Based Count users to participate, but we also welcome feedback from users of other instances.

Lemmy update

Earlier today we have updated our instance to the new 0.19.0 version, recently released by the lemmy developers.

Because of a previously undetected bug in the code of Kaleidoscope, our custom frontend, we had to temporarily disable user flairs and replace our user interface with the latest version of the legacy lemmy-ui. Kaleidoscope and user flairs will be re-activated in the next few days, as soon as we can solve the current problem.

Furthermore, according to some feedback we have received from administrators of other instances, there might still be some bugs in the new Lemmy release and it's possible that the server will feel a bit slower, due to some changes with how federation is handled. If you encounter any errors or issues, please use this thread to report them.

Threads.net

A few days ago, Meta's threads.net app launched in the European Union. Simultaneously, they also started testing integration with the Fediverse through ActivityPub. This reignited old talks about whether smaller instances like ours should federate with them or not. It should be noted that threads is pursuing a closer integration with microblogging platforms like Mastodon, rather than link aggregators like Lemmy. Also, it appears that Threads posts will at first be read only to federated servers. In other words, the Fediverse will be able to read content from Threads, but not the other way around.

Arguments FOR federation

• More content

Arguments AGAINST federation

• Privacy NIGHTMARE (it's literally Meta)
• Possible increased storage costs due to having to host additional content
• Risk of Meta pursuing an Embrace, Extend and Extinguish strategy, despite having denied such plans in the past.

We are currently defederated from threads.net due to privacy concerns, but we'd be open to reconsider this stance depending on community feedback.

Reddit reposting bots and alien.top

Another hot topic in the last few weeks was the alien.top instance and the Fediverser project. Its aim is pretty simple: creating digital bridges between Lemmy and Reddit to favour a migration of Reddit users to the Fediverse. This is mostly done by reposting Reddit posts to Lemmy lemmy communities through bots. An examples of this would be a bot reposting all content from r/PCM to our !pcm community.

Advantages

• This would solve the content drought that has caused many users to give up on Lemmy and move back to Reddit

Disadvantages

• Some percieve this as bot spam and have lamented the excessive amounts of bot posts in their feeds

Various instances have already defederated alien.top, including big players such as lemmy.world and feddit.de. What should our stance be? Would you like to see more posts in !pcm even if those posts were made by bots?

Example

Alternative frontends

We would like to enrich our instance by adding support for different user interfaces. Because our current UI features some changes from the OG Lemmy UI, adopting new frontends would require quite a lot of work on our end, to ensure features such as our very own user flairs work seamlessly on the new design.

Because of this, for the time being only one other client would support our custom features. Vote to decide your favourite

• Photon or its improved Tesseract variant (these are the two most complete UIs out there)
• An old Reddit-like design
• Alexandrite
• The Apple-like Voyager

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/696926

Israeli officials are facing backlash after years of Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu quietly allowing Hamas to remain in power.

But reporting in the New York Times has revealed that Netanyahu's government was more hands-on about helping Hamas: they helped a Qatari diplomat bring suitcases of cash into Gaza, indirectly boosting the militant organization, according to the report.

The calculus — the Times reported on Sunday, citing Israeli officials, Netanyahu's critics, and the man's own reported statements — was to keep Hamas strong enough to counteract the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, allowing Netanyahu to avoid a two-state peace solution and keep both sides weak.

Israeli security officials got it wrong; they didn't think Hamas was capable, or even interested, in launching a large attack against the Jewish state.

Like some of you have already noticed, the instance has been down for the last week and a half. I documented the problem and the process of bringing it back online in a thread on our Discord, so if you are curious about that I'll redirect you there.

The TL;DR is that the instance ran out of disk space, so the database crashed. No database, no Lemmy.

I solved it by moving our 30GB of images to a separate, much cheaper storage (we moved from 3,00€ / month down to just 0,02€ / month for the image storage!), freeing up a bunch of space for the database. This should keep us going for a while and allow us to scale much better in the future.

The new host

The new image host we are using, is an object storage located on a separate machnie from the Lemmy server (while previously images resided on the same server as the database and the instance). Because of this, you are likely to experience some milliseconds of delay with the loading of new images, because some back and forth between Lemmy and the image server needs to happen before you can see it (Lemmy downloads the image, sends it to the image storage, image storage returns a link to the image to Lemmy, THEN you can see the image. It takes a while).

Next moves

While I'm on a roll with the Lemmy updates, later today I plan on updating our instance to version 0.18.5 of Lemmy. This should give us even more stability and better uptime in the future, but might temporarily break user flairs in [email protected].

I am terribly sorry for the prolonged downtimes and I really appreciated all the people who joined our Discord server asking if they could somehow help or simply showing care for our work on the instance.
Please remember that this is mostly a solo project of mine, where I am left handling both the server admin side as well as the community facing one. It's a lot for one guy to deal with, I'm sure you'll understand.

EDIT: I've succefully updated the instance, everything seems to be working fine. Let me know if something feels odd or buggy.

As you might have noticed, we've been experiencing repeated crashes and downtimes for the last 12 hours or so. This was because, after four long and tireless months, our storage drive had finally filled its 50GB capacity.

I noticed this today, at around 9:00 UTC and quickly took action. Fortunately we had already prepared a different partition with an additional 15GB ready for situations of this kind. It took me some additional 40 minutes of tinkering to move the database to said partition, but after that the instance was back online without any majour issues.

This is our current storage breakdown:

• Secondary partition (currently: 10 GB; max capacity: 15GB)

  • Database (postgres): 10GB

• Main partition (currently: 38GB; max capacity: 50GB)

  • Image hosting (pict-rs): 23GB
  • Lemmy executables, other services (Kaleidoscope, AutoMod, Flair) and operating system: 15GB

Of these, the only ones expected to grow are the database and the image hosting, with the latter being by far the fastest growing.

In the future we are considering moving pict-rs to a separate, more cost effective storage, however for the time being this should hold. We apologize for the disservice in the last hours.

Cheers and stay Based!

This is an update on the "Why is feddit.nl defederated" post by @[email protected] in [email protected].

Some time has passed and the admin appear to have gotten back control of his instance. Furthermore, I just noticed that AvaddonLFC (very active lemmy.world admin) has joined their admin team. This is more than enough for our criteria.
I have also withdrawn our censure against their instance on the Fediseer.

Here's hoping we'll be able to welcome many based Dutch people!

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.basedcount.com/post/475954

As anticipated a few days ago in our last announcement post, we are now rolling out user flairs for our instance.

At the moment they are only active in [email protected] , however they can also be enabled in other communities if the moderators desire it. Of course flairs aren't necessarily limited to the Political Compass. Mods (looking at you @[email protected] and @[email protected] ) can use them however they see fit.

For the next few days the only way to add, delete or modify them will be by kindly asking me (I need to manually edit the database), however I plan on bringing those features to the UI as soon as possible.

A couple more notes:

• flairs are only available and visible to users of this instance. Users from federated instances will look unflaired, you will look unflaired to them. It's just the way it goes, this service isn't part of the Lemmy server and thus doesn't federate.
• flairs are only available on the website. If you browse through an app you won't be able to see them either. Same reason as above.

Roadmap

There are some more updates to be made before we can say we are done with flairs:

• Adding mod tools to the UI (mod only window to create, edit and delete flairs in a community they moderate
• Adding limited support for other instances through a browser extension
• Porting flairchange_bot and basedcount_bot to [email protected] . Possibly other communities as well.

We don't have any plans for adding flairs support to mobile applications.

Hi everyone, sorry if the instance has been a bit dead lately. We've been hard at work on some new features! This is a small announcement post to bring you up to speed on what we've built thus far, as well as what's coming in the near future. Feel free to share your feedback!

NOTE: the following changes only apply to you if you view our instance from your web browser. If you usually browse from an app then this doesn't impact you.

TL;DR: we have published an update to the site which lays the groundwork for adding user flairs. Flairs will come in a few weeks.

While we are not quite yet ready to bring online our custom user flairs microservice (which is still in the final phases of its development), today I present to you Kaleidoscope, our very own fork of the lemmy-ui. It might not be very different from the previous UI at first glance, but it adds supports for the flairs microservice (meaning it will integrate and display user flairs seamlessly as soon as we add support for them), integrates various Fediseer features, includes an opt-in content filter to remove content posted by bad or untrusted actors from your feed and has a few other minor tweaks and fixes to things that bothered me in the legacy lemmy-ui.

But when are we getting flairs?

As I said the flairs backend is mostly done. It still needs some polish, which is why we aren't rolling it out today. We expect it to be ready and operational in a few weeks.

At first flairs will only be available to users from our instance and only through the website. We also have plans to add flair support to third party instances, through the download of a browser extension, but that will come at a later date. Our local users remain our top prioirty.

At the moment we don't plan on adding flairs support to any mobile app.

Is there anything bigger going on?

Yes! This is all in preparation to our official launch, which will feature multiple announcements on r/PCM and hopefully some people moving in from Reddit. Because of a deal we've made with the [email protected] mods and in particular @[email protected], the two conditions for this were:

• better mod tools (namely the AutoMod I built a short while ago)
• user flairs

After we are done with the flairs we'll start working on porting our two main bots, namely basedcount_bot and flairchange_bot.
We are also considering porting the long gone and dearly missed ChadGPT_bot, who had a very short lifespan of a few hours because of Reddit's patented literally 1984 moderation policy. Over here we'd be able to run it in a bit more relaxed environment, without having to worry about the thought police.

Some images

Content filter

Instance ratings

Flairs (coming soon)

Hear ye hear ye, Based Count folks, the @AutoMod bot developed by yours truly is now active on the instance!

Before you ask: no, it has no bullshit rules to discriminate users based on their account age, karma or anything like that. This bot moderates content, not people. While it has multiple features, the main one is the automated removal of posts and comments according to custom rules set by community moderators.

If you're a user this doesn't really affect you, I just wanted to put a PSA out there. If you're a mod in one of our communities and want me to add the AutoMod to yours, feel free to ask.

Here are the repository and documentation for the nerds out there that do care about this.

And of course if you are not a moderator but would like to create a community on our instance you can head over to our pinned thread in the [email protected] community and submit your proposal.