Yesterday I signed up for yet another server, this time KNThost, because they have a managed service for Hubzilla (also Streams). At this stage I really think I need to have some help with running Hubzilla instances. The one that I hosted on an unmanaged VPS has gone bad, and no longer shares posts. It's a one way hub, with a growing queue and database problem.

So, on KNThost, for a small monthly fee, they install and offer assistance with the service. It's a bit like Mastohost in that way, and the subscription is cheaper than my other VPS. The only thing I don't like about it is the US server location but, these days, it's a bit hard to decide on a good location in any case. The EU is beefing up its internet laws and privacy is threatened there. Israel, where my current servers are located, is also a questionable location. I think that if one posts to, or uses the web in 2023, one must automatically assume that there is surveillance.

I find myself scratching my head with regard to where to post my content. From my Epicyon Activity Pub server I am doubtful that the posts actually reach anywhere, since I rarely get a response. On Hubzilla, I no longer subscribe to anyone on Mastodon (or Pleroma or Akkoma, etc.). Perhaps this was a mistake? It may also have been a mistake to remove myself from Fe.disroot, from the point of view of reach. If you want to be a first class citizen of the Fediverse, it's best to be on a large instance like mastodon.social. But, from the perspective of what's good for the Fediverse, small instances are better; individual instances are best.

Rather than focusing on social media to publish my posts, and favouring one place over another, I am thinking to embrace more fully the POSSE system (see below).

POSSE is a term invented by the IndieWeb people

POSSE is an abbreviation for Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties (like social media silos) with original post links to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with your content.. Why. Let your friends read your posts, their way.

In my case, I will be publishing some individual items first on epicyon and my hubzilla channel, and then collating these back into a daily blog post that contains all the significant items, reflections and links from the same day. This itself can be posted and,if I like, be sent further, such as Tumblr. I've done this before, and found it to be a satisfying practice. It is similar to the practice adopted by Cory Doctorow in his Pluralistic blog.

Ultimately, everything is ephemeral. What matters is our current interactions, rather than trying to preserve everything for eternity. But it's also important to be in control of the medium, to the degree possible.

A friend asked in Epicyon's Matrix room about search, since he is interested in finding his old posts and interactions. It turns out that Epicyon has quite a good search mechanism built in.

As a columnist I have learned that honesty is timeless and self-importance gets you nowhere

I really liked this article by a Guardian columnist. It seems to be relevant for any kind of public writing, including social network / blog posts.

Against the future

This person has various strategies to rebel against the AI onslaught

Les bonnes pratiques d'écoconception pour WordPress

Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation

"Words are events, they do things, change things. They transform both speaker and hearer; they feed energy back and forth and amplify it. They feed understanding or emotion back and forth and amplify it."

What is the small web, by Aral Balkan "The Small Web is the Single Tenant Web Small Web applications and sites are single tenant. That means that one server hosts one application that serves just one person: you. On the Small Web, we do not have the concept of 'users'. When we refer to people, we call them people."

But he also raised a concern today that seems to be valid: that on the Fediverse, it is quite likely that, as with email, there will be a tendency by large servers to block small instances. With email, this is due to the prevalence of spam. With the Fediverse, it would be due to the challenges of moderation. It's easy to block right-wing white supremicists, for example when they are all on a couple of large servers, which can easily be blocked. It would be much harder to accomplish if they were on single or small instances, with just a few users. So one could imagine a situation where an instance could decide to block everyone who isn't on a few well-known, well-moderated instances.

We're just at the beginning of popular mainstream adoption of the Fediverse. It's an exciting time, but it's still very unclear how its future will evolve.

Now's the time when lists are being made of popular books and popular TV shows, movies etc., so it's a good time to make wish lists. Maria Popova has a book list with many promising titles.

The biodiversity crisis in numbers - a visual guide | Cop15 | The Guardian

Rising temperatures causing distress to foetuses, study reveals | Climate crisis | The Guardian

Shireen Abu Akleh: Al Jazeera submits new evidence to ICC | Israel | The Guardian

Dutch government may quit Facebook - Techzine Europe

The Europeans are getting serious. See also Cory Doctorow's article, EU to Facebook: Drop Dead

The Truth Is Paywalled But The Lies Are Free ❧ Current Affairs

Not a new article, but very good - referenced in Cory Doctorow's article, above.

Say No to "Fedified" in Fediverse #SNFF — #SNFF

No to centralization in a decentralized network.

Aral Balkan — The nature of the self in the digital age

Finally understood why Aral B calls himself a cyborg :-) - a good article.

Mastodon, Nonprofits, and the need for some kind of basic analytics to help justify spending time and resources - Disruptive Conversations

I have no doubt that despite all the interest around Mastodon, the communities built upon the Zot networks are more friendly and durable. The tools are somehow more conducive to community-building: the mentioned groups; the cloning of channels upon each other's servers, etc. make for a more connected group of people, though it is small. I would stay there, but seem to have jettisoned myself from the community by stops and starts, fickle changes of mind, as well as server troubles.

So for now I will stay with Epicyon. Its technological simplicity is attractive. Today I was experimenting with the Lynx terminal browser. Epicyon works very well with it. What websites, let alone other fediverse sites, work well with a terminal browser these days? Only the ones that do not depend upon Javascript and a lot of CSS styling. Bob Mottram is building something very nice here. I wonder how well it will be appreciated by those who he sees as its primary usership: small groups of community activists, neighbours and volunteers?

I'm not a very social person, but I have always believed in the value of community, indeed have lived all of my adult life in communities. Perhaps I should do more to help the community in which I live use free open source software; in that I have not succeeded. Everyone around me wants to use the conventional commercial products of the big companies.

Went with Y and D to see Cinema Sabaya, which is amazing. I didn't feel like making the effort to see it and D almost had to drag me along - it would have been insulting as Y had already bought us the tickets. But I was immediately caught up in the film, because it's simply so well done. A mixed group of Arab and Jewish women take part in a video-photography course. From class to class and exercise to exercise they learn about each other and themselves; where they can relate to one another as sisters and where they cannot agree; where they can support one another and where they shouldn't press too hard. There are layers on layers of complexity. The film is utterly engaging and unfailingly authentic.

I decided to support Epicyon with a modest monthly donation on Patreon, because I like how this software is developing - and developers, especially those who do not have a big support base, deserve to be supported.

I still find lots of problems there, which will need to be ironed out; however, it's working for me, and I do enjoy its simplicity. The UI looks better on the phone than on the computer.

That said, there seems to be a worse problem with federation itself. I don't think this is unique to Epicyon, but may be more prevalent the further you move outside the Mastodon scene. I noticed also with Hubzilla that some posts do not seem to federate well, and I'm seeing it now with Epicyon, because I have duplicated my follow lists from fe.disroot to my epicyon instance. When I examine the timeline I see that my posts on Epicyon rarely reach my account on fe.disroot. I also see that not all of the posts from the people I follow on fe.disroot reach my instance on Epicyon. In other words, I cannot depend upon Epicyon (and probably not on fe.disroot) to see everything that someone has posted.

That's a problem that does not exist in RSS, for example, which works mostly flawlessly.

My interim conclusion is that (a.) If I really want to know what someone is saying, I need either to subscribe to their RSS feed, or to look directly at their instance. (b.) My instance on Epicyon is still a valuable source - I find many interesting posts there. It's just that I cannot depend upon it as a single news source.

I have yet to try using RSS feeds on Epicyon itself (which seems to be one of its features). That will be my next experiment.

It's funny that Israeli journalists are shocked by the way they are being shunned by the people they try to interview during the World Cup in Doha. And it's good to see that Palestine still finds lots of support in the Arab world. If not from the leaders, then from the man in the street.

I don't think that these journalists should be shunned: it would be better to use the opportunity to speak directly to Israelis. A message like "Please tell the people in your country that I will be happy to speak to you once Palestinians can enjoy freedom and dignity in their own country. We Arabs are waiting for you to stop the oppression, the apartheid and the occupation of Palestinian lands. When Israelis learn to treat Palestinians as equals, we will welcome you in our countries as brothers." Something like that. You can't just boycott people - you have to adopt a carrot and a stick approach and state the conditions under which the boycott can one day be lifted.

‘Extinction is on the table’: Jaron Lanier warns of tech’s existential threat to humanity | Technology | The Guardian

“If you make a dismal prediction and it comes true, it means you’ve failed to have utility. I don’t claim to have all the answers but I do believe that our survival depends on modifying the internet – to create a structure that is friendlier to human cognition and to the ways people really are.”

‘Publishing is not a crime’: media groups urge US to drop Julian Assange charges | Julian Assange | The Guardian

Israeli Filmmaker’s Critique of ‘The Kashmir Files’ Draws Fierce Backlash - The New York Times

This is marvelous. One guy had the courage to tell the truth*, unlike all the fawning diplomats who were left trying to clean up the mess.

• (I haven't seen the film so I should say his truth.)

I made a new fedi personal instance using epicyon. It took hours, and wasn't even my first choice. I rented the new server under the assumption I'd be using Streams. See the post I wrote on epicyon itself here. It's actually a temptation to continue using epicyon's blogging feature. But org-static-blog gives me better possibilities for presentation.

I love this system, though I do not know yet how well it works. I've used a couple of former instances I made in the fediverse, to follow the new instance, and see how well it managing to send and receive posts, and it seems to be performing all right, though with mixed results. From one connection, I was unable to send a connection request; another said that a connection had yet to be confirmed. But these particular instances exist on the periphery of the fediverse.

There are differences between the presentation of the the different fediverse flavors. Mastodon most closely resembles Twitter and is similarly suitable for fast-paced ongoing conversations. Those become annoying on software with a more spacious presentation, like Epicyon, and tend to result in slightly disjointed conversations: it's easier to follow those by following their link back to Mastodon. I've unfollowed some of the chattiest people, even though they have something interesting to say. I'll catch up with them elsewhere. And, as with Twitter, I often find an easier way to follow people is to browser-bookmark them and go directly to their personal profiles, checking in just occasionally.

In my timeline I like to see more substantive posts - either directly or through links - and that is what I try to post too. After unfollowing, my timeline is closer to what I want to see.

I rewatched the first episode with D, and since then we managed another couple of episodes. It captures well the spirit of the book - I think Roberts will be very happy with it. One thing that comes across very much is the writer's emotional warmth and humanism. The characters are all 3-dimensional; even the minor parts.

I ordered 2 new computers last week for Einat at the spiritual center and all this week the delivery company has been calling to say they will be arriving. On Thursday they called to say that they would deliver by 8 PM. But nada. Today, I was skeptical that anything would come because Fridays here are a bit like Saturdays elsewhere; it's a day when fewer people are at work and you don't expect much to happen: out here in the boondocks, even the post doesn't come.

But at around 6 PM I got a call to say the delivery man was on his way. I met him outside and all my annoyance with the company dissipated. As often happens in Israel, the delivery van was his ordinary car - with packages crammed into the back seats, the front passenger seat and the trunk. It took him several minutes to locate the package in the dark, with the flashlight of his phone.

He told me the story of why he happened to be arriving at dinner time on a Friday: the previous guy in charge of deliveries to our area had quit earlier in the week, and he was the new guy - just 2 days on the job and struggling to deal with a backlog that was especially big due to Black Friday sales. Looking at the number of remaining packages in his car, he obviously had another couple of hours work, and had been at it since the morning.

How can you give a delivery company a poor rating when the guys themselves are working so hard? - being sent out in their own cars, missing dinner with their families in order to bring well-to-do scumbags their new toys. It's the same as with other forms of exploitation.

I unloaded the computers at the spiritual center and met Einat there. She was super-happy with the new laptop, a feather-weight Asus Zen Book with a reversible oled touch-screen. She too was pretty busy: a group coming to rent the halls at 8 PM, and tomorrow a special program for the UN's day for the elimination of violence against women.

I really like the TROM people.

TROM is a project that aims to showcase in detail the root cause of most of today’s problems and proposes realistic solutions to solve those problems. But it is also about challenging people’s values, explaining in simple language how the world works, and providing free and good quality educational materials/tools for everyone.

I haven't got into TROM as such yet, but I think there's lots of potential there. They have a really cool peertube channel. And the people involved are really interesting - Tio, Sasha and Aaron are the ones I've encountered. Sasha has a great website of her own, "Big World Small Sasha".

My cold has lasted over a week, and it's run through 3 packs of tissues + hankies. The span of time is in excess of my usual winter colds and I think this is partly due to a potato. I was spooning a vegetable soup a few days ago when the onset of a sneeze caused me somehow to inhale. I immediately had a burning sensation at the top of the nose and a slightly painful feeling there for the rest of the evening, but then it passed. Two or three days later I started to develop a bad smell in my nose - a smell similar to that of a potato that is rotting at the bottom of a basket of vegies.

An altered sense of smell sometimes result from nasal infections. But I discovered today that this one was for real, when a sneeze suddenly ejected a large piece of potato skin. It had probably been irritating my nose all the while, and keeping my cold alive in the process.

When G was here a week ago, back from Mumbai, I was asking him how he found the worsening political reality there - which seems almost as bad in India as here, and in quite a similar way. He said that one thing he found is that it changes the way people behave. I asked him if he could give an example. He said that there is a Muslim tailor who has a shop in the apartment building of his wife's family's Mumbai home. A Muslim tailor in a building with no other Muslims, in a political climate that is worsening for Muslims. Nowadays, whenever he is there he makes a point of consciously going to sit and spend time with him, because he knows that nobody else will. So what might be a normal human response becomes a political act. That's how bad it's getting there.

Here in our village the connections between the different identities are much more normal. The conscious act is to keep alive connections with Palestinians in the West Bank.

Netanyahu to Agree to 'Soft Annexation' of West Bank, In Breach of 'Abraham Accords' - Palestine Chronicle

It ain't lookin' good around here. A "soft" annexation. Also Yuval Noah Harari is saying that Israelis are replacing the vision of the "two state solution" with the vision of a land with three classes of people: Jews with all the rights; Palestinian citizens of Israel with some rights; and other Palestinians with very few rights. Full-on apartheid, in other words. My wife thinks maybe that's not a bad thing, as eventually it will force change. Unlike the current stasis, which leads nowhere, a civil rights struggle. But 21st century realities are unlike those that preceded them. States are much savvier about quelling or subverting phenomena like nonviolent activism, and Israel is extremely sophisticated about managing reactions in the international press.

Germany Forces a Microsoft 365 Ban Due to Privacy Concerns – Best of Privacy

Europe may yet keep the world sane, at least they have a healthier understanding of the dangers of tech imperialism. They are pushing back in a similar way to which Americans push back against China.

The 1.5C climate target is dead – to prevent total catastrophe, Cop27 must admit it | Bill McGuire | The Guardian

Israel will not cooperate with FBI inquiry into killing of Palestinian American journalist | Israel | The Guardian

Israel is therefore kindly saving the FBI the trouble of conducting an inquiry and confirming what has been obvious from the start. The only question is whether this was an act of an individual soldier or whether he was obeying orders.

I was making Earl Grey with the quantity needed for milk tea, so it came out too bitter. Just a flat teaspoon, then three or four minutes brewing time, is enough. I still add half a teaspoon of sugar. But I'm happy to get rid of the milk (anyway it's always milk substitute in our case).

Is the fediverse about to get Fryed? (Or, “Why every toot is also a potential denial of service attack”) – Aral Balkan

" decentralisation begins at decentring yourself"

A good article, though it doesn't touch on the fact that concentrating so much of Mastodon in the servers of Masto.host, which hosts Balkan's (and this) instance, is also a danger to the decentralization of the Fediverse.

It also doesn't mention the energy that all this distribution must require. This could be an issue with decentralization, as it is with blockchain technology (though to a much lesser extent).

While it is evident that part of the problem is a result of the way the protocols work and interact with servers, it doesn't suggest a solution.

From the perspective of resource and energy usage, I have no doubt that the old methods of blogging + RSS news feed make more sense, though I tend to be more attentive to my Fediverse timeline than to my newsfeed subscriptions.

Exodus continues at Twitter as Elon Musk hints at possible bankruptcy | Twitter | The Guardian

“Messages seeking comment were left with Twitter, but it is unlikely someone will respond as the communications department has been laid off.”

A person in my time-line had tried to estimate the cost of running a Raspberry server from his home. It came out to something like €1.10 per month. Running a server from an old laptop, as I was doing till recently, must cost quite a bit more; maybe as much as the VPS I now pay for.

Since some hosting companies use renewable energy, maybe it makes greater sense to use one of those. But there too there is a calculation involved. For example, if the VPS server with the green energy is at a location that is geographically distant from oneself or one's potential audience, is it more energy efficient to use such a server? Does it depend upon whether CDNs are employed by the hosting company?

At a certain level, without lots of research, the way the internet works and its environmental costs are still very opaque for most of us.

Indian police investigating film that portrays Kerala as Islamic terrorism hub | India | The Guardian

There's apparently zero evidence. But it's not surprising that the film industry would seek to ride the wave of right-wing populism sweeping the country.

Was reading about what happened when Stephen Fry offended Poland, and it made me think that there's an advantage to being a nobody - with few followers you can be yourself and say whatever you want, at least more so than when you are a celebrity figure.

“Telegram has launched the ability to buy and sell short recognizable @ usernames for personal accounts, public groups and channels.” I need to get rid of this centralized service, but a messaging platform, even more than a social networking service, depends upon obtaining a critical mass of people that use it. Some of my contacts don't even have Telegram or, if they do, use it only in order to send messages. They can't be depended upon to see mine.

At the office, I saw Avigail was back at her desk.

"You were on vacation - did you have a good time?"

"Sure, how else could it be - Thailand!"

"No idea. I've never been; For me it's either Europe or India."

"There were lots of Indians there in Thailand - they had some kind of a holiday I think."

"That would be Diwali; but I didn't know Thailand was popular with Indians."

"Well it's nearby for them after all."

"That's true."

Yesterday was the first time I thought that the Fediverse might actually become mainstream. I watched as Greta Thunberg came on board, and saw her follower count go up to around 15,000 within the space of a few hours. On the other hand, she has 5,000,000 followers on Twitter, so I realized that I should calm down. Numbers are hard. Will the sea rise 30 meters by the end of the century or 2 meters over the space of the next 5,000 years? Will the Twitter permafrost really melt and mastodon clones roam the earth? I'll leave it to the experts. Anyway, in my excitement, I wrote the following.

I think we will all want to thank Elon Musk, whatever we think about him, for what he has accomplished.

Masses of people are finally beginning to turn their back on one of the big commercial social networks while simultaneously joining a non-commercial federated one. I really hope that Mastodon and ActivityPub can hold together through this crush of new users and not piss them off too much, because the world really does need a safe, viable protocol for social media connection, and it also needs social media to be interoperable - regardless of whether we prefer commercial or non-commercial variants.

If a critical mass join Mastodon, and they and are happy with it, three things may eventually happen.

First, it could bring a chain reaction, causing people to discover the other ActivityPub flavours that offer alternatives to Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Reddit, etc - and possibly new ones that compete with other commercial social media providers.

Second, when, as we see already beginning to happen, the European Union becomes invested in the Fediverse, it may begin to legislate for interoperability, forcing the commercial social networks to open their walled gardens and allowing, for example, people on Mastodon to follow people on Twitter or Facebook and for people on Twitter to follow people on Facebook or the fediverse, all without leaving their chosen social media provider.

Third, the same rules regarding the limits of "free speech" will be enforced across the Fediverse, requiring Fediverse instance operators to moderate content. This is a huge problem because operators of large instances do not have the means to employ workers to moderate content. As far as I know, the Fediverse lacks even the ability to conduct AI assisted moderation.

Small instances have less of a problem because they are easier to moderate. Governments may not even enforce their laws over small instances with few users. (If so, there's the question of the break-off point between "small" and "large" - a few hundred users?, a few thousand?, a million? Twitter has over 200 million active users, by comparison with which the whole of Mastodon is tiny.)

In any case, the necessity to moderate and block content could have implications for both large and small instances.

First, moderation is reported to be difficult by the maintainers of Mastodon's larger instances. As instances grow, and especially if they need to comply with state-imposed moderation rules, they would need to employ workers to moderate content. This cost would need to be covered - probably by user subscriptions, though possibly (cringe) by the introduction of ads.

Second, we could imagine a scenario similar to what has happened with email: large instances could block small instances by default. With email, the big email servers like Gmail routinely discriminate against small and independent email servers in order to prevent the proliferation of spam.

With the Fediverse, it could happen that large instances would eventually block small instances by default, due to the headache and expense of moderation.

The Fediverse is still taking its first baby steps. We have no idea how it will be as a teenager or as an adult.

What is Mastodon, the social network users are leaving Twitter for? Everything you need to know | Twitter | The Guardian

I am gradually picking up many of the connections I previously had, just because someone ends up boosting posts by one of them, here and there. As a result, my timeline is growing more interesting by the day.

My strategy of interacting very little, posting only sparingly, keeping my follows off-record and, in my bio, discouraging people from following, seems to be working quite well :-)

I get that Mastohost (which is hosting my new instance) is a poor model for the Fediverse: too much concentration of instances on a single server. Personal instances, such as on Mastohost, is still much better than for everyone to join a few big instances, which then eventually go down, just as the mastodon.technology instance is about to do. The owner/developer of Mastohost has committed not to hosting more than 25% of all Mastodon instances. I think a better plan would be consider not the the total number of instances, but the total number of users. A quarter of all instances already sounds like a large amount, but if those instances are large, it could translate to the majority of users on the Fediverse. It's also true that lowering the bar (of technical know-how and expense) is what will get more people to run their own instances, which is what the Fediverse needs. Whereas the administrators of large instances can be expected to have greater technical know-how.

The first preference should be to get individuals to run personal instances from home. But the second preference should be to encourage the creation of many small instances. A way to achieve that could be the model of small co-ops renting space on green VPSs. There would be sharing of ownership, administration, costs and maintenance, together with restriction to a handful of users. That way, there is not too great a concentration of instances on one server, and if an administrator quits, the instance can still continue.

We download and stream a lot of video content, but personally I can never watch more than a couple of movies or TV shows per week. Beyond than that just feels like overload. Even if I'm bored I won't watch more any more. I read, surf the web, listen to podcasts or listen to music. So I haven't watched anything new in the last few days. I tried watching "The Worst Person in the World", but it didn't hold my interest. I watched the latest episode in "The House of Dragon". But without great enthusiasm.

I am still really enjoying SoundCloud. In Israel/Palestine it isn't possible to pay for a SoundCloud subscription, which means that much of the mainstream content isn't available, but, on the other hand, I noticed while in Portugal and Spain that it wasn't possible to listen to my usual content without taking out a paid subsciption. So this works very well for me, because I practically never listen to mainstream western music, and I'm amazed by the almost infinite supply of free content. I would never be able to discover so much wonderful music without a service like SoundCloud. It's like entering a secret world with musicians that few people have ever heard of.

Currently listening to the station of Kinan Azmeh, a Syrian musician. Beautiful tracks from musicians from the Middle East and around the world.

I'm reading Ville Triste by Patrick Modiano. I'm reading in French on the Kobo. It's helpful to be able to click on an unknown word and get the translation. Modiano's books are fairly short, which also suits me, as I'm a slow reader (even in English). I love Modiano's prose and the atmosphere that he is able to establish. This book departs a little from the kind of story that he usually tells, but the familiar elements are there. Did he deserve his Nobel? Sure, why not.

The stories that most interested me were:

The revelation of Liz Truss's influences though I haven't been able to verify the facts of that story.

Greenwashing a police state: the truth behind Egypt’s Cop27 masquerade

Although the venue is much less important than the success of the meeting.

Pesticide use around world almost doubles since 1990, report finds

It isn't a pretty picture. Not getting better. The EU is not living up to its commitments to limit dangerous pesticides either.

Saudi Arabia sentences US citizen to 16 years over tweets critical of regime

When you take an average modern nation-state, which is already embarassed and touchy about the exposure of its dirty laundry (see under Assange) and you add to that an autocratic leader who, either for political expediency or due to severe psychological issues, is wary of the least opposition, you get a mixture that guarantees that virtually every citizen lives in fear of criticizing the regime, or maybe even thinking bad thoughts about it.

I think I'm spending too much time again reading the news. Mostly I'm reading stories that have, strictly speaking, no actual bearing on my life, so I grow agitated about matters that needn't concern me. This is a phenomenon of the news media, though the psychological effect is similar to that of fiction: we read or watch something that is contrived in the mind of a writer or filmmaker, and our emotional reaction is almost as deep as if it were real and affected us personally. So we return to the theme of the interconnectedness of reality and fiction. On the TV news, particularly in featured stories, and in documentaries, there is the conscious effort to emulate what we are used to in watching our favourite TV series. The addition of background music, close-ups portraying the expression of emotions and other tricks of the film-trade all duplicate the experience of watching a TV drama. It's one reason that I prefer to read the news rather than watch it.

Welcome to the freeport, where turbocapitalism tramples over British democracy | George Monbiot | The Guardian Wow, another evil scheme I didn't know about. How do they get away with things like this?

Uproar after Mahmoud Abbas in Berlin accuses Israel of ’50 Holocausts’ | Mahmoud Abbas | The Guardian Words are wind. It's doubtful whether any Israeli decision-maker actually cares what he says as long as he continues to do Israel's bidding - they are not going to find a more moderate or pliable Palestinian leader. For ordinary Israeli citizens Abu Mazen just reinforces their negative stereotype of Palestinians. What Germans may be thinking is hard to guess. However in modern diplomacy outrage is usually staged. Even genuinely sickening and egregious episodes like the Khashoggi murder can be swept under the rug, if not today, then tomorrow. Israel can continue its brutal occupation without fearing reprisals. Russia can look forward to being welcomed back into the community of nations and Ukraine forgotten, as soon as it becomes economically or politically expedient.

In the course of my search for a good Activity Pub server, I found that there are a number of options in development. Here's a curated list. I was specifically looking for an option that expressed the KISS principle (was simple to install, use, maintain) and geared towards single users.

Among the options that I'm looking at are:

Meanwhile, while doing a search for fediverse servers, I found more resources on digial gardens:

• "Everything I know" - https://wiki.nikiv.dev
• "My blog is a digital garden, not a blog" https://joelhooks.com/digital-garden
• A Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/DigitalGardens/
• curated list of digital gardens: https://github.com/lyz-code/best-of-digital-gardens

I have figured out a way, I think, of using Org-Static-Blog to differentiate between regular articles and blog-style chronological posts: The blog-style posts will begin with a date. The articles will have a proper title and be assigned a tag or tags. That way, I can create links in the menu to that tag. At a later stage, when I become more proficient with Lisp, I could process the articles separately, and create an alphateical listing for them.