The letter made four demands: that a full debate is held in parliament; that proper consultation take place with the Chagossians, who have so far been ignored; that alignment is reached with the US; and that a detailed and transparent breakdown of costs is provided.

Involving the Chagossians and wanting a cost breakdown honestly doesn’t seem that unreasonable. They’re obviously being opportunistic here, the Tories are the ones who’ve been negotiating this deal over the past few years and chose not to involve the Chagossians.

It is unthinkable to alienate our closest ally by finalising this deal without their support.

Glad to see the Brexit party Reform want to take full advantage of our regained sovereignty.

Yeah, I do think Doctorow has missed the mark here. @tante put it better than I could:

It’s trying to raise money (at least 4 Mio and up to 30 Mio USD) for ATProto (the protocol at the core of Bluesky) so “the community” can standardize the thing and “build stuff”. Plus the project wants to run a second “Relay” (which is the chokepoint that centralizes Bluesky at the moment). Edit/Addition: The fact that just running another Relay leads to costs in the millions should make people wonder if this is the right approach for a better social media infrastructure that does not rely on big organizations.

Okay, but isn’t that what the Bluesky Public Benefit Corporation (the corporation that owns Bluesky and employs the people working on the ATproto protocol) wanted to enable/do? They already got millions in funding (some from sketchy Blockchain companies). Now some diffuse external entity collects more from random people, from “the community”. And not a bit but a lot more. What do the people donating money get for their investment? Stake in the Bluesky corporation? [Checks notes] Nope. Nothing.

The 9 custodians consist of a whole bunch of AI people, some Mozilla folks (same thing) and the director of the Social Web foundation. […]

It’s just presented in a weird way with a whole lot of “give us a lot of money and we’ll make amazing stuff happen” and in the end a bunch of AI grifters get some startups “that build upon AT proto” funded.

Seaford, I’d recommend just blocking badger and moving on. Hexbearers don’t really respect the concept of civility and have much more patience for this inane nattering than you ever will.

In the ActivityPub JSON for this post, there is no indication that this field contains MarkDown. If anything, it says the opposite, it says it contains HTML. It’s therefore not unreasonable for other platforms to render it as such.

Actually, the name property is explicitly plain text, it shouldn’t contain any type of markup, whether that be markdown or HTML.

I’m sorry, but I fail to see the relevance of this not-for-profit vs for-profit diatribe. If you mean that things like culture and structures matter more than the a project’s legal status, then I agree, but unless you’re going to point to particular issues you have with Mastodon’s then, again, I fail to see the relevance. The things Mastodon (the company) is seeking to improve are highly technical and specialised, where people working on them need good cross-disciplinary knowledge and experience, and understandably demand a high wage.

Did you mean to link to this BBC article?

Science and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle told the BBC there was no reason why the UK could not create tech companies on the same scale as Google, Amazon, and Apple.

‘It’s a shame that the torment nexus isn’t British.’ We should be talking about breaking these companies up, not putting a Rule Britannia spin on cyberpunk.

Surprised to see you of all people question why a project needs money to pay for things.

What for?

They said what for in the previous section, improving Mastodon’s “usability, discoverability, and trust & safety”. They tried to fundraise for a head of trust and safety last month, but failed. My impression is this is them trying to raise general donations to the project to pay for things like this, instead of individual campaigns for individual things.

Is the infrastructure being provided by the companies counted as part of this budget?

I thinks so, given the previous paragraph links to their sponsor page and says as such.

IFTAS has a list of resources, with a compliance template for fediverse software being worked on. https://onlinesafetyact.co.uk/ is run by Neil Brown, who’s been following the OSA over the years. There’s also this newsletter by Rachel Coldicutt.

The very same.

That’s just how Mastodon tags work, they get turned into HTML <a> tag with the href pointing to the local instance’s view of that tag. Lemmy then turns that HTML into markdown, hence all the links to poster’s instance.

Why does this article embed a random Tweet from some fascist trying to link this to a positive thing Ivor said about pride in that past?

Ethnicity*

Jewish isn’t a nationality.

“As a result of [the latter], several of these ‘councillors’ are illegitimate and new elections must be held. Reform stands for the highest standards in public life, and those who commit fraud will always be expelled.”

Do these ‘high standards in public life’ include using donor cash to influence foreign elections, collecting user data without consent and inciting pogroms?

accusing Starmer of harming her reputation and contributing to her losing her South West Norfolk seat in the general election.

I too hate it when I’m faced with the consequences of my actions.

https://fedipact.veganism.social/ has a search feature.

[Lemmy has] no mechanism for a community owner to communicate a challenge to post to his community, so impossible to prevent spam.

Hey mods, you can do the funniest thing right now:

His party’s ‘charter’ is such a joke. A national Bitcoin reserve, blockchain direct democracy, getting rid of ‘LGBTQ+ propaganda’ from schools so ‘classrooms will no longer be battlegrounds for ideological warfare’, but best of all is:

Replace modern “art” with statues and monuments honouring British heroes.

While the charter is full of AI ‘art’. Suppose it’s hard to pay for real artists when all your assets are being seized on account of being a sex trafficker.

Isn’t Le Pen dead? Edit: Wrong Le Pen

It was added in 0.19.6, so older instances won’t have it. Edit: read the rest of the thread and you already pointed this out, d’oh.

One thing that would immediately kill the people smuggling industry is allowing people to claim asylum in Calias, but they’ll never do that.

Interior Minister Yvette Cooper

She’s home secretary, Britain doesn’t have an interior minister?