Even if you disagree with my assessment of Russia’s annexation, isn’t an international body ( that Russia itself has membership) working with your people, with guarantees for self rule and an end to the war better than status quo?

If you’ve supported Donbas independence, with wishes for greater ties to Russia instead of Europe, you still get that in this agreement. Donbas can still legitimately join Russia in a few decades, and still trade with them now.

I get that you’re making some weird comparison to Iraq and Afghanistan, but who besides the world itself would be the colonizer in my recommended arrangement? The world itself in my recommended United Nation governance followed by a local government chosen by their own legitimate referendums with international observers and gun free polls? Is that not better than Russia just claiming them with no say by the people (unless you believe the sham referendums under armed watch in a war zone as legitimate)?

Putin should offer the following as a peace deal:

• Russia not blocking Ukraine NATO and EU membership
• a true independent Donbas and Crimea administered by the UN for 2 years, followed by UN observed free elections resulting in self government while retaining UN security presence. After an additional 8 years, UN will allow membership, withdrawl its security forces (unless asked to stay by the host nation), and each nation can freely apply for EU, BRICS, or other associations as their people desire. Ukraine and Russia agree to not accept either as provinces for 30 years.
• a full Russian military withdrawl and demilitarization of both Donbas and Crimea
• return of Ukraine held Russian territory and Ukrainian withdrawal from the Donbas
• agreement to build a new NATO / Russia arms reduction treaty within 2 years with teeth for withdrawling.
• Russia agrees to not annex territory for 20 years.
• Putin stepping down as President.

While both sides would lose a lot form their goals of the war, it could be potentially acceptable to both sides. Otherwise I just see this continuing to escalate until Moscow falls or nukes are dropped.

In addition to Joplin, Logseq is really great too, though with more of a text-first, outline based, zettle approach.

If public transport mapping is your goal, it might make sense to try out the MapComplete Train Station https://mapcomplete.org/stations and Bus Routes https://mapcomplete.org/transit themes which give an easier, more focused, mapping interface. Quest apps like Street Complete can also make getting into OSM a bit easier, though OSM Beginners Guise is great too. https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Beginners'_guide

Yes! https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Public_transport though it is a bit complex to fully add routes, adding stops is super easy!

Ready Player One

On the microblogging side of the fedi, “fedihire” and “jobalert” hashtags seem to be frequently used for job postings, and “getfedihired” and “jobsearch” for those posting that they are looking.

I’ve never heard if it either but I too am not on TikTok and I use ad-blockers nearly everywhere.

OpenStreetMap’s platform is the only real way to compete against Google and Apple and it’s why Microsoft even though it has Bing Maps, has licenced to them resources like satellite imagery for mapping. It’s awesome in bigger population areas but there’s still a lot to map in rural places outside the EU.

Review is harder. Right now the leading open platform afaik is Open Reviews (aka Mangrove Reviews) which has tie-ins to OSM projects like MapComplete. OsmAnd and OrganicMaps have open tickets to hook into that ecosystem. You’re right about the userbase problem though, I think it (or a successor) needs AP federation to really take off. That being said there’s several active non-Google nonfree alternatives like Yelp and TripAdvisor as well as niche sites for things like camping, parks, and schools.

Neocities is trying to be a modern reincarnation https://neocities.org/

Man I feel old, back in my day we weren’t allowed to use anything more powerful than a TI83 on most exams and the answers were on scantrons or paper due to fears of using the internet to cheat. These days with GPT I’m surprised that’s not even more of a concern.

Open source software might not directly be used in the workplace but if someone can’t adapt from LibreOffice to MS Office they won’t be able to adapt to MS Office updates either. It’s been decades since productivity software had significantly different feature sets for most users. That weird legacy Excel formula the Finance Department uses will need training no matter how many years of Office experience a new hire has.

Those still there don’t know better (lots of millenials, and older, folks and those barely online), like Elon’s changes, or are there passively (syndicating other feeds).

Not single for long, but they do exist. Also far more people are open to experiencing Linux and Star Trek than have experienced either, so you might want to look for more root indicators like curiosity, enjoying tinkering / learning, likes fiction, etc.

You really should. https://indieweb.org has a lot of resources.

Tilvids.com, maketube.net, urbanists.video, spectra.video are a few

Thanks for posting this, really highlights all the hard work, and congrats @nutomic!

Great points!

YouTube still pays creators pretty high comparatively (55% of ad revenue according to https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-influencers-get-paid-on-instagram-tiktok-youtube). You are simply getting a service (hosted, searchable, collection of the largest collection of web videos in an extremely nice interface) that costs money even outside of the creator’s cost. For creators they are allowing that 45% cut of ad revenue to get access to the YouTube audience, paid hosting that simply works, nice creator tools, etc.

You can state that it’s a valueless thing that anyone could replicate, but the evidence is that there aren’t many alternatives that do better. Today we do have things like PeerTube (which I think all creators should consider selfhosting with ads/subscriptions and federating the free stuff after a delay) and joining creator owned video services like Nebula (which could be made even better with federation). Unfortunately, with both you run into the discoverability problem, something creators and their audiences are paying to solve when you are hosting on YouTube.

I’d take your argument further back on the sourcing of getting content to you - why should you pay for internet service when it’s the content of the videos you watch not the wires that deliver it that have value? If you hacked around your neighbors WIFI to get some free network access, you could zero-cost get something you might not necessarily want to budget for, and you get quite a nice service out of it. Why shouldn’t that be okay when you still Patreon the creators of your videos given your reasoning about YouTube providing no value?