The new term is broligarch.

Facebook, Instagram and Threads are easy, I was never on Threads and largely used the others for following people and groups rather than actively posting.

WhatsApp is the tricky one as all my friends and family are on there and it is pretty important. I could get some people to move to Matrix but not everyone. Luckily, it’s the one that is the most difficult to enshittify. Still…

That’s just misdirection for all the other policy changes:

Meta on Tuesday announced sweeping changes to how it moderates content that will roll out in the coming months, including doing away with professional fact checking. But the company also quietly updated its hateful conduct policy, adding new types of content users can post on the platform, effective immediately.

Users are now allowed to, for example, refer to “women as household objects or property” or “transgender or non-binary people as ‘it,’” according to a section of the policy prohibiting such speech that was crossed out. A new section of the policy notes Meta will allow “allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality.”

Reminder to get off Facebook and Instagram

Most of us are already out or lurking because of family or some specific group they can’t do without.

The trick will be getting those people off the platform so we can cut all cords.

That’s where things get even more worrying.

As it stands, he still has to abide by EU and British laws but then there’s this:

That suggests that social media laws could be part of the negotiation with other countries who don’t want to get wrecked by tariffs.

As weakening those laws will lead to an increase in unchallenged far right posts, they could have knock on effects in elections. Trump will have seen how effective the changes at Xitter were for him, so spreading that to other social media platforms is already a win for him but being able to impact the political landscape elsewhere would be a bonus - France and German are having problems fending off the far right and if they gained control they’d be a lot more compliant to his demands which has knock-on effects for the EU and NATO.

A fuck of a lot of people and that’s a worry.

You could try by suggesting that religious people are.delusional and see how it goes.

The mask has slipped because they know they can get away with it.

After all,this isn’t anything forced on Meta, they are taking advantage of the incoming president being all for this and binning policies they clearly only follower reluctantly (and poorly).

It feels like the statements about the removal of fact-checking (which is all I heard about on the news) is misdirection, so the changes made deep in their policy documents get less attention than they deserve.

Also:

under the leadership of Donald Trump, Elon Musk and Bobby Kennedy Jr.

You can’t have both.

That’s a real mess they’ve made there. Personally a sad day as I peer-reviewed a paper for the JHE once.

At least it means that we are moving to more open journals and away from this weird exploitative model:

Nature published an article back in March raising questions about the efficacy of mass resignations as an emerging form of protest after all the editors of the Wiley-published linguistics journal Syntax resigned in February. (Several of their concerns mirror those of the JHE editorial board.) Such moves certainly garner attention, but even former Syntax editor Klaus Abels of University College London told Nature that the objective of such mass resignations should be on moving beyond mere protest, focusing instead on establishing new independent nonprofit journals for the academic community that are open access and have high academic standards.

Abels and his former Syntax colleagues are in the process of doing just that, following the example of the former editors of Critical Public Health and another Elsevier journal, NeuroImage, last year.

I wonder if there is a place for the Fediverse there, perhaps with each journal/publisher being an instance.

Turkey is explicitly backing the Syrian Natonal Army (not the actual Syrian Army or the Free Syrian Army - splitters!) but it’s understood that they were also backing HTS to some extent (although not openly as they are still a proscribed organisation in a lot of western countries) and it was Turkey that greenlit the recent big push as their negotiations with Assad were going nowhere. So, while the West have been scrambling for some influence in Syria (and Russia and Iran have lost their’s), Turkey has been left as the main puller of strings in Syria. Their main concern is the Kurds and they were attacking them within a day or two of Assad falling.

Man-Thing!

Depends on if the despot is one of ours or not.

Usually if they aren’t then the West is backing the overthrowers. The tricky thing here is we weren’t backing any side so there will be a bit of a diplomatic scramble to figure out where the land lies.

Ultimately as we’ve happily worked with terrorists and despots in the past, we’ll have no issues bending our “morals” to accommodate another one.

The real test will be the Kurds. Turkey couldn’t openly support HTS but it’s thought that they have al-Golani the green light as they were making no progress with Assad. Turkey won’t want Syria to break up as that would be the start of a new Kurdistan so how will they deal with what comes next.

It’ll also be interesting to see what the West do as he and HTS are currently designated terrorists.

A lot of instances are hosted by Hetzner which has servers in Germany and Finland. Although that might not be what they mean by “legal presence”.

With no safeguards the users won’t know it’s a trap until it’s sprung.

I think if more people took on tasks like running the communities while educating people the benefits of the fediverse, then we can see a bit more growth.

This is the way - be the change you want to see in the world.

Lemmy isn’t the size of Reddit, so it isn’t at a place where the vast majority of users can just passively consume content.

If there’s a niche for a community then start it. If you want more Mods, keep an eye out for active posters and ask if they want to help. If you are unsure about starting a community or want help from the start (as it might be popular) then start a thread on !fedigrow@lemm.ee. The more active communities, the more likely it is for the next wave of users to stick around and some of them might start new communities.

If you build it they will indeed come and stay.

I wish I was that young!

Yeah, that’s tricky - I have Italian DNA matches (although they go back to the late Bronze Age) and my cousin married an Italian woman, so have had a nose around some Italian family trees and they seem to have solid records. I don’t know about Spanish or South American records.

Going by this discussion (warning: it’s on The Bad Place) (see also this discussion), there are good Spanish records but you’d need to talk to someone with expertise on where to look for the specific records you need. It may be worth tracking down Spanish language genealogy sites or try general ones and see who you can find - I have great luck with RootsChat who have a Europe board on their forum (although I was mainly after British help).