I heard that the reason why no one uses the ID card option is that the privatized post office lobbied the government to make it so expensive as not to compete with their service.

That may be part of the reason they are doing this. There’s a noticeable push for more regulation and enforcement.

A number of writers and political commentators considered Berlusconi’s political success a precedent for the 2016 United States presidential election of real estate tycoon Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States,[250][251][252] with most citing Berlusconi’s panned prime ministerial tenure and therefore making the comparison in dismay. Roger Cohen of The New York Times wrote: “Widely ridiculed, endlessly written about, long unscathed by his evident misogyny and diverse legal travails, Berlusconi proved a Teflon politician … Nobody who knows Berlusconi and has watched the rise and rise of Donald Trump can fail to be struck by the parallels.”[253] In The Daily Beast, Barbie Latza Nadeau wrote: “If Americans are wondering just what a Trump presidency would look like, they only need to look at the traumatized remains of Italy after Berlusconi had his way.”[254] During the 2016 United States election, Politico described Berlusconi as the closest parallel to Trump in a historical world leader.[255] In a piece written for Slate and published in April 2017, Lorenzo Newman noted the similarities in the career trajectories between the two.[256]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvio_Berlusconi#Comparisons_to_other_leaders

It’s what Silvio Berlusconi’s sex parties with underage prostitutes were called.

He was a media billionaire who used his control of the media to get elected prime minister and evade prosecution for various crimes.

Bunga bunga parties seem a more internationally popular Italian political custom.

You never want to know how the sausage is made.

When I saw a model trained on DOOM 1-2 years ago, I didn’t think this would be going anywhere. I have to admit, I was wrong. Now, the amazing potential is obvious.

Genie, quit livin’ on dreams

Genie, life is not what it seems

Genie!

Is this a joke about the EU’s desire to curb misinformation? Like, I’m 90% sure that you can’t be serious.

Everything you wrote is factually wrong.

Europe has a lot less social resistance to this stuff. You can see it here. Watching the watchmen turns out to be one of the best tools for defending democracy. And still the call is for more censorship. It’s insane.

Did you pick up, like 2 weeks ago, when Italy fined Cloudflare for not censoring hard enough? Italy is literally ruled by a fascist party. They literally present themselves as being in the tradition of Benito Mussolini. No one bats a fucking eye.

Of course, the censorship is about copyright; protecting the Italian media industry. Maybe people here are too young or unpolitical to remember Italian media billionaire Silvio Berlusconi. In the 1990s, he used his media empire to get himself elected prime minister and escape prosecution for corruption. At one point, he used his office and some lies to get an underage prostitute, he’d been fucking at one of his sex parties, released from police custody. That guy was Italy’s longest serving prime minister since WW2. He then was an MEP until 2022.

Italian intellectuals, identified Trump as a Berlusconi-type populist 10 years ago, when Berlusconi was fading out and Trump rising. Maybe something could be learned from that experienced.

So it’s not like Europeans believe that “It can’t happen here.” It is happening all the time. I think the pro-censorship people are simply so privileged that they can’t conceive of the state ever not being on their side. They seem to feel that being harassed or doxed on the net is the worst that could ever happen to them, personally, and they might be right.

No offense. I just never know how widely understood such facts are. People do not seem to appreciate that open social media requires that the data be stored anywhere.

Right. Merely making the recording may already be criminal; not only sharing it. I didn’t want to sound too alarmist. But when we’re ad it. Pixelating the faces means processing personal data which may already be illegal.

What it boils down to is this: If some lawless government goons arrest anyone recording their deeds and seized their phones, no honest, law-abiding judge or police officer would see a problem with that. Anyone live-streaming, just in case, would be guilty of violating fundamental rights in the eyes of all defenders of European values. The government could rely on the technical and organizational infrastructure to enforce GDPR to suppress inconvenient videos without bending the law.

But no problem. Freedom of information is in the constitution. So you just go to court and insist on your right. Of course, a far right government will have packed the highest courts with its people, and so you lose. Well, everyone has rights. Freedom of information isn’t everything. No problem there.

That’s something that may cause some grief in Europe. Moderation in ATproto is opt-in. You don’t have to subscribe to a US moderation service or any moderation service. One will probably want someone to filter spam, harassment, or content that one finds objectionable. But moderation according to EU regulations is about removing content that other people don’t want you to see. I’m not sure if that’s going to be super popular.

how the data is used and stored

That’s a tricky one and will potentially cause a lot of problems to open social media in Europe. Just know that there is no such thing as “looking” at a post, comment, or profile. It gets downloaded to your device and stored for as long as it’s needed, or maybe longer.

Just bear in mind that many Fediverse instances are in Europe and Europe has no free speech culture. EG In Germany, people who upload videos of police are commonly prosecuted for GDPR violations. It violates the fundamental rights of the police officers. When European activists oppose Big Tech in the name of democracy, they want more censorship; more government control.

Y’all will enjoy this: https://w-social.eu/

The company Bluesky Social PBC created the microblogging service Bluesky and the ATProtocol. It’s like the company Mastodon created the microblogging service Mastodon. There are other services built on ATproto that are EG like Reddit/Lemmy. But these have not taken off significantly.

The ecosystem is mature enough so that you can participate in Bluesky without using services offered by Bluesky Social PBC and without making sacrifices. For the most part, you can move without abandoning your account.

It is true that the servers are mostly run by the Bluesky company, but so what? Email is mostly run by Google and no one seems to think that’s a problem.

The option to self-host your identity piggybacks on the DNS-system. A certain domain name resolves to the server where you store your ATProto identity. As long as you control the domain name, you control your identity. The ATProto identity is simply a pointer to where you currently store your data that your followers/contacts can use to find your content (IIRC).

The non-selfhosted alternative is a central identity service run by Bluesky. Unfortunately, the identity cannot be moved for obvious reasons. It would be good if there were some more options there. In principle, if the ATProto identity was tied to the government identity, that would make it moveable and non-hijackable. For some people, celebrities and such, that would be a good option.

Regardless of whether you selfhost your identity, you can selfhost a Personal Data Server (PDS), which stores your data and makes it available to the network. The PDS can move, cause that’s what the identity is for.

Feeds and other stuff is again independent.