Great source of healthy glucose. Wrong source of leadership.

Your home instance (feddit.de, if I am not wrong) should add a mastodon instance to federating list before this can happen. This is your current list - https://feddit.de/instances

I have never bought even for a minute these categorizations like countries x are authoritarian and these ones are ‘democratic’. Instead of categorical reasoning, we can trace what people actually do. It is pragmatic. Shutting down communication lines is not a matter of opinion. That is why this kind of study keeps being relevant despite it being nested in a US-worldview of we-democracy, them-authoritarians.

I wonder if there are any in-person communities that support an instance, and how that fares, compared to loose online connection that is here today, gone tomorrow.

While I am happy about all the publicity federation is getting, it seems this is also the time to reduce over-reliance on one instance (mastodon.social, for example) as it will bring a hangover of the bird-site. Technical federation is one step. Social communities to nurture these instances is a more tasking ask, but far more stronger in fighting against monopoly.

This is beautiful.

Been there during a communication blackout. You feel the weight of the state in a very real (distasteful) way.

My bad on the definitions. I was giving a general observation not precise definitions. My point about pseudo-capitalism is this - these cooperatives are largely about production, not distribution.

weak state – a state eroded by corruption and competing with other sources of authority like the church and the local elders. pesudo-capitalism – they claim it is a cooperative but when you dig deeper, it is a semi-cooperative to create goods for a capital market.

Poverty is the worst form of violence. The cocktail of a weak state + pesudo-capitalism + poverty leads to this kind of shame.

This is such uncharted territory for US media houses. They see the vulnerability of billionaires taking over a key communication platform yet these media folk cannot find the courage to name it: capitalism, centralization, and censorship. Why, that is who they are.

You challenge centralization, they think you are challenging America.

If you excuse the “medium”, this article has interesting milestones: https://medium.com/the-ferenstein-wire/the-birth-and-death-of-privacy-3-000-years-of-history-in-50-images-614c26059e

The Ukrainian foreign policy establishment seems for the most part to confuse humanitarian concerns from everyone with their geopolitical superiority. I saw their South African ambassador talking down on South African folks for refusing to allow her meet the president.

They want to shame countries that refuse the request. Kenya already refused the parliamentary address - https://web.archive.org/web/20220412172626/https://nation.africa/africa/news/nairobi-declines-ukraine-request-to-address-kenyan-parliament--3779598

Yep - they have been threatening people about this switch off since 2010. Of note, this is not a foundational registration. SIM cards by default are registered using a legal ID at point of purchase. This recent statement from the Communication Regulator is an attempt to “audit” the integrity of the database. It is simply a lack of respect for the general population, in imaging they will queue up and re-register as ordered.

The association of SIM cards with legal digital ID (mostly based on biometrics) is quite a power coup. I do not know of a country in 2022 that does not link a SIM card to a form of identity. But what explains the disconnect to a point that they have to interfere with calls?

I am not a designer and I don’t know what it would take to build such a theme. But if there is a designer amongst us who can dedicate time to such a task, all happy to support. @nivenkos@lemmy.ml This might be a better place to start - https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy-ui Found soapbox while roaming around but not sure how it can integrate - https://soapbox.pub/

And this push back from Africa is happening in a context of Western media bombardment and propaganda. It shows how anti-Western thinking is gaining attention in higher levels of politics (but World Bank may crack the whip and tighten purses to align the leaders once again).

Various countries have tried to implement this – or hint at introducing it, for example Canada and UK recently – but there has always been friction in the whole process. It seems to me that proliferation of digital legal ID, especially during the pandemic, has oiled the processed and such a proposal will be easier to implement. Perhaps not even in the way it is described here (akin to checkpoint analogy) but rather as a whole system process (proof once and we will decide what you access, perhaps at the device set up point, using biometric ID linked to government issued legal ID). In the end, therefore, the adult content (in this case), will be filtered even before you get there if you are a minor. An anchoring background process, not necessarily a checkpoint.

Overall an interesting read.

Obama, whose father came from Kenya, saw the United States lose its place as the major trading partner of most African countries, and in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, Western Banks also began to leave the continent in droves.

This is another example of capitalism as blinding structure of what is possible.

This line was weird :) /s

before the Kingdom’s captives departed for the New World to be enslaved (emphasis mine)