Share bud, there’s ladies living in tents in hotel rooms. I’m considering it.

Thanks for spelling out how to get started for me. I’ll give this a try later!

Thanks everyone for the responses!

Question: I do remember the days of those RSS buttons everywhere. But I never managed to see the value in it.

Can anyone share their experience with following feeds, and how they consume this content? Is there some kind of spam/tracker free functionality that people enjoy? Are there apps out there that organize this in a way that changes the game?

I’d like to give it another shot, sorry for all the questions.

I’m in the US as a failed state camp. Once the Americans can accept that position, there can be a proper rebuild.

I’d consider the label “competitive authoritarianism” as rather generous, and narrowly focused on just the internal processes of the US. I also believe that the current state of the US can be more defined once we expand the view to include the Americans have yet to fully explore the scope and extent of the Epstein files, along with the full collapse of the Supreme Court of the United States to corruption.

I have similar concerns for Canada: the lack of any check on the political party system itself. For the US, with only two functional political parties, the need for some checks is even more desperate. Originally I think the concern is that politicians are always the target of lobbying and potential bribery. They are technically the most fluid agents in the political system, and therefore one of the weakest points.

Perhaps what surprised both the Americans, and others abroad, is how there’s no check on SCOTUS Justices for what essentially amounts to the appearance of outright bribery and corruption. At that point, I would have expected a full audit of the suspect Justices cases should have been done and essentially a complete review of every case should have been committed. Maybe a temporary expansion of the number of Justices to include members of the American Bar Association and other Justice system participants should have been done to basically re-hear the compromised cases.

In any event, the damage to American institutions is far reaching, and deep. I don’t think the American public fully appreciates that even with the “frame” of what once was a democracy, the damage will probably take decades to recover from.

For those thinking about the switch, and happen to game, I understand that plenty of users are going to CachyOS or Bazzite as well.

If this were a terrible cake of mixed motives, one would be to throw out or damage the Epstein files in such a way that no one involved with those allegations can be tried.

Second, obtain war funding (Venezeula) to secure a coup, or to at least hold a significant portion of the the US indefinitely.

Third, in the event of complete failure, extort and move as much money out of the country that can resist tracing or recovery. Exit planning to leave the US on emergency basis.

I keep these three points in mind while looking at the Trump Administration.

From what I understand, Venezuela, Canada, and Russia are the primary suppliers of heavy crude. Even after so-called embargoes against Russia for the Ukraine-Russia conflict, ghost ships are still able to get product to market.

As for Iran, I’m not sure the US can even hold Iran, given their track record in Afghanistan and elsewhere. As it turns out, occupying another country requires huge troop deployments over decades.

Also, China’s built out relations through the Belts and Roads Initiative, meaning they’ve diversified the markets they can access.

One alternative plan, from an outsider’s point of view, is that the US has engaged in a long standing strategy of wealth transfer from its middle classes to its wealthy upper classes over decades. They’re in the process of breaking down their country for sale to its billionaire classes. While on paper it looks like a coup, the structure of the US suggests that the whole thing comes down with a whimper instead of a bang.

I suspect the billionaires are just waiting to see if they can get away with stealing the US, without the American people rising up and charging them for treason.

After reading some more experiences, and watching a few more videos, I’ll be trying a WisMesh Tag with Meshcore.

If I slip into the rabbit trail, maybe I’ll build a repeater for fun. lol

Anyone have any experience with that meshtastic idea? Issues and hype?

Israel owes the people of the United States answers for what exactly Epstein was doing on their behest, and if their government was involved in human trafficking and the targeting of American government officials and socialites.

Purchases by federal agencies are generally exempt from tariffs.

US Tariffs - just on the stuff normal people have to live on.

I still say this is part of the larger American scam for AI. AI’s just a tool, and certainly not autonomous as the stuff of movies. US companies are just using the concept of AI to layoff workers, and they’re trying to lock in their AI services contracts before the bubble bursts.

This article falls into the scam pile for me.

Plus I’m fairly certain Zuckerberg should be charged for Crimes Against Humanity, but that seems to be an issue for another day.

I think ActivityPub, a driver of the Fediverse, already serves as the mainstream protocol to enable these “platforms” to deliver content in the different ways that people have come to enjoy: such as Friendica, Mastodon, and so on.

Regardless of the front facing platform, I think what I want to see is deeper integration. Users from Mastodon or Friendica be more able to see posts and comments here on PieFed or Lemmy, and vice versa, as if we’re a single universe delivered in different ways. I even want to see users of PieFed be able to one day transfer their data and posts seamlessly over to say Lemmy, or Friendica.

I want to see an ActivityPub where we can resist censorship by standing alone on single instances, but in the event of an attack, we can move to new ones or bigger ones for strength in numbers. If we want the right to disappear, great, no one should get in the way. But if we want to be seen or heard in the face of violence and oppression, there should be more options in place for instances to operate in blocs, and to allow servers to cache and preserve content under attack.

In recent days, Youtube was seen taking down hundreds of videos of content documenting what many legal experts conclude is genocide carried out by Israel. Regardless of where one stands on that, the idea that a single entity can erase the collective documented experience of humanity is too much power.

I want to see an ActivityPub that can let people share their cat photos, and enjoy their moments; and I also want it to allow people to resist in credible ways if they choose to document their lives. I also want a Fediverse, that can allow even the lowly single instance server to serve with a bloc to shield even a single user’s content that might be forced down by violence.

I would swap for that Fediverse.

I’m not convinced that “AI” is even what it’s meant to be. Worse, I think scenarios of success are already drawn up in stories and science fiction - and 2025 AI suggests we’re not even close.

Now that more information is available concerning the US governments private recollections and thoughts surrounding their military activities in Afghanistan, I’m suspicious that this AI is a “campaign”. It’s simply another game of sleight of hand or pump and dump maneuver. The US remains a major currency reserve, but successive governments over the last 20 years have been incompetent, and the country has been mismanaged for far longer than anyone expected.

With the US signalling strongly that they are giving up competing with China on advanced technologies like renewables and batteries, there’s little else left besides the promise that AI will somehow swoop in and fix it all. But as netizens already point out, capitalist corporations cannot “benefit” from AI without taking advantage of its promise - taking jobs away from humans.

Sadly “AI”, or whatever you want to call it, is an interesting tool, but that still requires supervision or human oversight. AI is not the magic promised for all the countless billions spent, water burned, and energy depleted. I think the world is starting to grow suspicious, and the US faces a market correction due to fears of the AI bubble.

Perhaps AI’s promise remains, but how its pursued gives the impression of another American scam.

I get a sense that people aren’t against easy to understand ads - as in, one company produces a concept, markets, publishes the ad, and delivers it to you on behalf of their client.

But people are not going to agree to reading that article, and consenting to 500 advertising partners to track you indefinitely to sell your data points.

All this technology, energy, and money that’s behind the surveillance economy, is the cost of turning you into the product.

What we the privacy concerned public would like to say is go make real products to help the world instead.