Blaze

Active = 1 post in the last seven days

Hello everyone,

I hope this is the good place to ask this question, if not, mods, feel free to remove it.

So as you may know, some LW mods on [email protected] and [email protected] have been denying that the US government is supporting Israel in their attacks against Palestine.

In summary, their stance is

That is NOT why Biden is sending arms to Israel. Biden is rightly sending arms to Israel for the "Iron Dome" protection from outside aggression.

Israel misappropriates that support for use in the genocide. That is NOT on Biden. That's on Bibi and the IDF.

Biden is not complicit in any genocide. Full stop. Never has been.

For some detailed posts

• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/27598404
• https://lemmy.world/post/18857058

Disclaimer:

• I live in Europe and am not a US citizen, so I might not know enough about the power split between the US President and other representative structures like the Senate and the House of Representatives.
• Linkerbaan, the other of the posts above, is usually suspected to be a Trump supporter or a Russian troll. That may be true or not, and they tend to be quite aggressive in the way they convey their message, but they still seem to make a few points.

The US President impact on providing weapons to Israel

A few recent articles about the US President responsibility about providing the arms to Israel

Do you think that Kamala Harris is likely to agree with the calls for an arms embargo on Israel?

I do not think she will agree with those calling for an arms embargo on Israel.

For one thing, as vice president and before that as a senator, Kamala Harris has consistently supported providing U.S. military aid to Israel. This position is typical of most Democratic Party members, as well as most Republicans.

Opponents of U.S. military aid to Israel often argue that this help is solely a function of domestic politics and reflects the power of the pro-Israel lobby, particularly AIPAC. I think that this view is myopic and exaggerates the power of the pro-Israel lobby. It ignores the fact that the U.S. has its own economic and strategic reasons for supplying that military aid. It is a U.S. national interest, not simply a favor for Israel, and that’s why there is broad, bipartisan support for continuing this military aid.

https://theconversation.com/us-is-unlikely-to-stop-giving-military-aid-to-israel-because-it-benefits-from-it-237290

The Biden administration has been doing contortions to provide military support to Israel without reference to U.S. or international law. It paused a shipment of 2,000-pound bombs in May, citing concerns about civilian harm, and even admitted in a report to Congress that month that U.S. weapons had likely been used in ways inconsistent with the law. But the White House said it didn’t have enough evidence to prove that specific violations had occurred, which would have triggered a suspension of further weapons shipments.

The evidence the Biden administration says it doesn’t have is everywhere. Careful investigations by the United Nations and organizations like mine have been documenting and reporting alleged violations since hostilities started in October, including Israeli forces’ unlawful airstrikes, the use of starvation as a method of warfare and torture of Palestinian detainees. The International Court of Justice has called on Israel three times to open Gaza’s crossings for aid shipments.

https://www.hrw.org/news/2024/09/10/debate-tip-candidates-theres-correct-answer-weapons-israel

The fear of Trump

The main argument usually used against people who point that the US President has an impact on the weapons supply to Israel is that

• the Democrats are the lesser evil
• Trump must not pass

While it is generally admitted that indeed Trump was a bad president and should indeed not pass, why do people go all the way to deny the impact of the US President on that matter?

Wouldn't it possible to both say that Kamala should pass, but at the same time condemn the actions of the US government on that matter?

Genuinely curious, as in Europe is it quite established that the US government chooses to keep providing weapons to Israel.

• https://www.rfi.fr/fr/moyen-orient/20240814-les-%C3%A9tats-unis-%C3%A9trillent-isra%C3%ABl-tout-en-approuvant-la-vente-de-20-milliards-de-dollars-d-armement
• https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-67192779

Active - 1 post last week

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/27579423

This is my first try at creating a map of lemmy. I based it on the overlap of commentors that visited certain communities.

I only used communities that were on the top 35 active instances for the past month and limited the comments to go back to a maximum of August 1 2024 (sometimes shorter if I got an invalid response.)

I scaled it so it was based on percentage of comments made by a commentor in that community.

Here is the code for the crawler and data that was used to make the map:

https://codeberg.org/danterious/Lemmy_map

Active = at least 1 post last week

Hello everyone,

As you may know, recently I started a few threads on specific categories of communities

• manual hobbies
• video games
• music
• animals
• art
• fandoms
• casual conversations
• etc.

Feel free to have a look at the recent threads in this community, most of them are there.

We might restart that cycle at some point (maybe next week). In the meantime, do you think there is any topic which should have their own thread that we haven't covered yet?

Trying to figure this out as in the recent threads a few people said that Bluesky was federated, but it didn't seem to actually be the case.

https://bsky.social/about/blog/02-22-2024-open-social-web in February announced that Bluesky would allow federated servers

The Bluesky documentation on the topic isn't very clear. They mention Bluesky.social a lot, as if it's supposed to be the one central server other PDS need to federate with:

Bluesky runs many PDSs. Each PDS runs as a completely separate service in the network with its own identity. They federate with the rest of the network in the exact same manner that a non-Bluesky PDS would. These PDSs have hostnames such as morel.us-east.host.bsky.network.

However, the user-facing concept for Bluesky's "PDS Service" is simply bsky.social. This is reflected in the provided subdomain that users on a Bluesky PDS have access to (i.e. their default handle suffix), as well as the hostname that they may provide at login in order to route their login request to the correct service. A user should not be expected to understand or remember the specific host that their account is on.

To enable this, we introduced a PDS Entryway service. This service is used to orchestrate account management across Bluesky PDSs and to provide an interface for interacting with bsky.social accounts.

https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/entryway#account-management

Self-hosting a Bluesky PDS means running your own Personal Data Server that is capable of federating with the wider Bluesky social network.

https://github.com/bluesky-social/pds?tab=readme-ov-file#what-is-the-current-status-of-federation

The custom domain name is still something else, and does not seem to require a PDS: https://bsky.social/about/blog/4-28-2023-domain-handle-tutorial

So, to come back to the title question, do people know of an example of PDS that can be used to access Bluesky without being on the main server?

Following up on this post: https://feddit.org/post/2379333/1762691

An list of potential memes: https://feddit.org/post/2379333/1722394

A meme posted to [email protected] : https://feddit.org/post/2421485

@[email protected] already expressed interest.

For me, there are a few pros and cons.

Pros:

• Memes are an easy way to convey a message
• Fediverse-specific content is always nice

Cons

• Memes communities tend to be very popular
• Due to the topic of the community, there might be some heated debates and discussions in the comments (the example above with the vegan cat food is a good example). That might be quite time-consuming to follow and moderate

Based on this, I think we would need probably at least 5 mods to make sure the community stays sufficiently moderated.

Are any of you interested?

Question triggered by the other post about instances shutting down due to costs

Summary of the answers:

• lowest number so far: lemmy.ml with 0.03€ per user per month
• a few others (feddit.uk, lemmy.zip) have around 0.11$ per user per month
• obviously single user instance have higher costs

Active = 1 post in the last seven days