people can only see or click on that if they look at the source code because you posted it with an empty link text

Parties choose whom to nominate as ministers.

I’m not a voter in Denmark and not familiar with Danish politics; this kind of thing would certainly cause me to vote for a different party.

apparently nominally a member of a social-democratic party

When I was younger, I believed that social-democratic parties were better than conservative ones on matters of civil liberties. I stand corrected on that.

I’m not sure I understand your substantive question very well.

There already is a bridge from RSS feeds to ActivityPub: https://rss-parrot.net/ (there are plenty of sources I follow through that).

The clue of what ActivityPub is for is in the name: it is for publishing one’s activities. For example “I’ve written a new blog post”, “I’ve commented on someone else’s activity”, “I’ve upvoted someone else’s comment”.

RSS is really just a structured format to describe the content of a website in simpler terms. It doesn’t ever send any information to anyone, it doesn’t have any mechanism for anyone else to interact.

I used to follow news sites directly through an RSS reader. But I would need to set that up separately on each device, including after reinstalling, which I just can’t be bothered to do. I know there are things like Feedly, but not everyone likes proprietary services and software that much. I like the fact that on Mastodon nowadays, I can follow both microbloggers and RSS feeds.

I prefer to think in these terms: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/moderation-is-different-from-censorship

Without exception? No, I don’t think that’s true, it’s just the loudest ones, unfortunately.

For genuine free speech supporters like me, this is a problem because it makes the phrase “free speech” look bad and thereby contributes to a decline in it.

I notice there is no mention of a license, so this is not actually open source.

Switzerland has a comparable number of guns as we do, and the last mass shooting they had was 23 years ago

so does he believe that Swiss people do not play video games, or what

I had a phase in my teenage years when I tried to do as much as I could with the keyboard. Nowadays I use too many different pieces of software for me to be able to remember all key combinations everywhere, so I’ve grown out of that.

You can just ssh to the machine you want to run things on I think?

Is there a translation of https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence into Nepali yet, I wonder.

Yeah I mean why would you let young people have fun or anything like that? If they are constantly bored, they will certainly be happier. Or something…

yup, that is why (if memory serves) the chat control proposal has rules in it that look like they were specifically written for messengers, the authors seem to have no clue that encryption can, you know, just be run on any device using publicly available algorithms…

The Internet has become popular enough that governments care about what happens on it. And it’s not just European countries, US states too (at least for age verification).

More specifically for your two points:

Encryption

It used to be that very little Internet traffic was encrypted, much less end-to-end encrypted. After 2013 (Snowden revelations), this changed, e.g. messengers started to E2EE, many more websites than previously started to use HTTPS. So all we are seeing now is the reaction to those positive changes…

Age verification

This has to do with mobile devices more than anything else. I think a lot of parents now just hand their children smartphones or tablets and may then be surprised that their children can then access things they don’t want their children to access. This was less of a thing in the desktop era because it was easier to see what children were doing online if it was happening on a huge computer in the living room…

Now personally I don’t think anyone (including young people) should ever be prohibited from watching or reading anything they actively want to see. For preventing young people from accidentally accessing porn, an “are you over 18” banner ought to be enough… I don’t think people who want to prevent that kind of access want anything legitimate. But you asked about why it’s happening now and not at another time and I think this is the answer.

Sidenote: I remember reading that when television was newly introduced in East Germany, it was still able to be somewhat critical of the regime; after some years, this stopped because a lot more citizens were able to watch it. The equivalent of that is currently happening to the Internet.

MS already doesn’t have a monopoly in any meaningful sense anymore.

• https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-200901-202507 - in early 2009, almost 95% of web usage was from Windows, by now it is at around 28%, no longer even the most popular OS, which is now Android around 42%
• https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/desktop/worldwide/#monthly-200901-202507 - even looking only at the desktop and ignoring the shift to mobile devices, Windows fell from ~95% to ~72% during the same time period, mostly losing to macOS but more recently also Linux

Windows isn’t the main way Microsoft makes money anymore anyway…

That is not excessively unusual; legal documents contain all kinds of vulgar things that people say to each other (maybe before or after a crime) all the time.

My favorite from my country is (translating approximately, original is in heavy dialect): “The statement ‘piss off, ya dogs, so I don’t hafta see ya anymore, and I’m shittin’ into your wage bags’ has the objective declaratory value of an immediate termination of employment.”

mainly they are a lot less relevant nowadays than they used to be, it used to be (late 2000s, early 2010s) that a lot of Internet culture came originally from 4chan memes, no longer the case

Yes, you can do anything you want.

Is it a good idea? No. LLMs are bullshit generators, they spit out something someone might plausibly answer but have no real understanding of anything. You might get ideas from them that you wouldn’t have thought of yourself, but shouldn’t blindly trust LLM output.

I don’t know of any servers that have started to verify ages, but some have started to geoblock countries whose laws require it.

Microsoft, if anything, has become more decent (releasing at least some of their stuff as free and open source software) since the 1990s.