Haha I think they might be talking of how Mastodon doesn’t insert ads or bought posts right next to your own posts, so a professional institution like a parliament no longer risks having erection pills or a crypto ad that fakes association with a celebrity next to a post by a political party leader.

The EU itself also has a Mastodon instance with the funny, overly clear name of https://social.network.europa.eu/

But only the institutions of EU, not for EU residents.

I like this idea because it becomes very easy to verify authenticity especially now that verification badges on X is just subscription badges without verification. You simply set up a subdomain of the form social.country.tld (much like the German parliament did) and you’ll know [email protected] is an authentic representative for a political party or whatever. No money involved other than running the instance, which will be a tiny cost for something as niche as one offering a voice for the parliament alone.

So I hope this takes off even more around the world. It is certainly a more democratic way to do social than paying some dude in America that runs his personal garden to have badges.

I know it’s supposed to make them sound good and might indeed be meant for leaking, but all I can think of is the demands on quality assurance and risks of failures down the road if such precision is paramount for the operation of the vehicle and assumed by the teams building it.

So give me a less finicky vehicle, please, and leave that precision for devices not subject to highly varying road conditions at very high speeds and housing people.

I assumed the intent is not to actually be Polish or Celtic etc. but give areas influence. I’m still not sure I like it though.

I would rather have seen it done more like Middle-Earth where names can be different depending on language, but the common “English” tongue is normally used. So you have a river called Brandywine and another place Rivendell for locations in regions for two different races. Both just being English-sounding words unless asking their native races.

It kind of takes me out of it when suddenly stepping into Druid country and I start thinking of Scots and single malt whisky. I mean there’s no lore reason behind this at all because this is not even planet Earth. It just… is. :-/

Honestly from experience I’ve learnt that the yes answer also usually applies to the no answer because it’s important to everyone. Advanced users tend to hit advanced issues and surprise, surprise, then community size matters all the same!

So since Linux is highly customizable and the choice of e.g. desktop environment matters little (just install whatever you want on any distro, including DE), community size is the most hard-earned property and thus usually trumps all.

So I personally try to keep closest to upstream regardless experienced or less experienced users => Debian if you adore those DEB packages and management, Fedora if you love those RPM packages and management, indie ones for indie packages e.g. Alpine, Arch… If you still run into issues it’s usually you, not the distro because it’s already battle hardened. :) But no worries, then you’ll find a lot of help and the problem has usually already even been discussed and is googleable! It’s 2023, none of the huge distros are plain shit and annoying, that’s been ironed out like a decade ago. So just go with a (big) flow somewhere.

The main feature is that you’ll never have problem with too few or no seeders again, and everything will be fast always, and no one will ask or expect you to seed. Some have retention period on the content for like a decade.