If only one person in Finland watched linear television at the time, and that person watched Eurovision, the figure would be 100%. Basically it makes little to no sense in a world where people don’t watch TV obsessively any more.

Even when people just don’t care any more in Norway it’s arguably indirectly related to Israel, since some artists (notably Ylvis) stepped out of the competition. The whole thing this year felt like a concert at a Trump rally, where only spineless and morally deprived artists are willing to play.

The biggest share of viewers watching Eurovision was recorded in Finland (93%), Sweden (86%), Norway (83%) and Denmark (79%)

Share of viewers seems like a potentially problematic statistic to base comparisons on. Is it share of everyone watching linear TV? Do people still watch linear TV in parts of Europe outside of big live events? Percentage change in absolute viewership from last year would have been a better indicator.

Anyway, I usually either go to or host Eurovision parties. This year the whole thing went by unnoticed. It seems nobody watched it, and nobody talked about it.

If I had the skills and time to develop a whole new federated platform this is absolutely be what I would work towards. Sadly I have neither.

OsmAnd is a navigation app, it wouldn’t be the right place to start.

My best idea for the easiest possible integration would be to allow for OSM IDs to serve as attachments to posts in the Fediverse (such as mastodon). The lowest effort would be to simply attach ID codes as hashtags. An example of a mastodon post could be:

Impressive, but a little tacky. Worth a visit. 9/10 #OSM #43768260

Here a bot would search for posts with the hashtag #OSM, and include posts with valid numerical OSM IDs as a separate hash tag. Scoring could be included in the text, and be flexible (2/5, 7/10, 87/100), with clients reading the reviews optionally converting them into any form of indicator.

The challenges of this approach (that I have thought of) would be:

1. Adding the tags would need to be automatized somehow. Mastodon’s share functionality could be used to integrate the functionality directly into apps and maps, but this would not work across the Fediverse. OSM IDs are not generally easy to find, so users posting in the format manually is unrealistic. Ideally apps like CoMaps would allow for Fediverse sign-in directly in the app.
2. Content visibility is a challenge unless some centralized service is tagged. Adding a centralized service would add further problems. A solution would be to make the service dependant on tags.pub for guaranteed hashtag visibility.
3. Moderation is another challenge, especially if there is no centralized authority. Mastodon is doing work towards shared blocklists on the Fediverse which might help in this respect. Reviews from users blocked by major blocklists would be rendered invisible.
4. Reviews viewed from the Fediverse wouldn’t automatically link back to the OSM location, leaving Fediverse users with lacking context. Using a form of attachment rather than hashtags could solve this issue, but it would require more development.

The benefits would be that the federated infrastructure doesn’t really need to be developed much - we would just need people to agree on the standard and find ways to display reviews.

An app to post reviews making use of specialized content fields would probably be nice, but I fear anything that requires additional accounts or apps would deter people. Being able to sign in to existing Fediverse accounts inside of map apps and posting reviews directly seems like a better solution.

I’m sure there are many people with more knowledge than me on the matter though, and some of them are probably working on this already. As I said, I’m just daydreaming. :)

I dream of an integration between the Fediverse and OSM, where Mastodon or similar accounts can be used to leave comments on nodes in OSM. Of course it would present a lot of technical challenges, but I feel like it should be possible to get it right.

I have seen Mangrove before, but even with all the goodwill I have for finding an alternative platform for reviews it just does not make sense to me at all. The closest restaurant I could find on the platform is 800 km away from me. Without OSM integration it just seems futile, and without ActivityPub I just don’t see myself contributing content.

I am probably wrong to be critical. It’s seems to be an interesting project attempting to provide an open source solution for the biggest missing feature I identify in the open web at the moment. But right now I find it impossible to use.

Just started using it a week ago or so. Guess it was good while it lasted.

Google Maps and Calendar will probably not be the biggest problem as they don’t verify the “authenticity” of the install. Banking apps and other apps that have gone out of their way to add questionable security features is usually where problems start occurring.

That, or apps that depend on sensors.

There’s an argument to be made that this is a reasonable price, and that much cheaper phones should be treated with high suspicion.

Oops, obvisouly, was thinking about the Muslim world and getting terms mixed. Fixed.

I think the advantage is that it reads partly as a FAQ, partly as a place to read whatever commentary on the situation people seem to agree with. It’s a place where people can discuss and ask questions more generally. Other threads tend to be more about specific breaking news and developments, maybe missing the bigger picture.

All fascists need a good enemy, obliviate one and you have to move on to the next. The only end game to this bullshit is total apocalypse. Which of course is what the evangelical Christian supporters of Israel has been cheering for all along.

Iran has been a headache for a long time. Much like in America and Israel, violent religious fundamentalists took control over society and installed a reign of terror.

This has of course been bad for the Iranians, but America of course could not care less about that. However, Iran has been a major concern for Israel, as they are an unreliable an aggressive neighbour. Again, don’t let the irony get lost on you. The threat of Iran maybe managing to develop nukes has been a particularly salient issue, and perhaps one of the driving forces behind Israel getting its own nukes decades ago.

In short, Israel just cannot feel safe with the current rule in Iran. Or so the Israeli far right has insisted for decades, anyways. Keeping this fear high on the agenda has been key to winning elections and to get in place the far right genocidal lunatics currently in the Israeli government. Along with the fear of Palestinians of course.

The US is of course loyal allies of Israel as their one true friend in a region full of oil. The Saudis are of course also good friends whenever they are not actively attacking America and killing civilians or journalists, but they are not quite as good at lobbying. So American interests and Israeli interests are pretty much the same, and the Iranian regime has been the face of evil for decades. Conveniently they are also super evil, so it’s easy to make propaganda.

Recently the Iranian regime has murdered a bunch of civilians who protest the regime. The US and Israel wouldn’t usually care about dead civilians in the middle east - they certainly wouldn’t oppose it at least - but right now it provides a convenient excuse to bomb the fuck out of Iran. Trump needs this because he needs support before the upcoming election- a successful impeachment might allow the opposition to grow teeth, and if they do he could end up locked away for life.

Netanyahu is in even deeper ship than Trump, with corruption charges at home and crimes against humanity abroad. Now that his genocide in Palestine is getting old he needs something new to keep him in power.

Iran responds to attack by sending missiles towards American military bases in the area. American military bases are located in the surrounding countries, which is why you see newspaper headlines making out as if Iran is launching a war on every country in the regioun. They’re not, they’re just trying to strike back against America and Israel. Just like the Americans and Israelis they suck at hitting military targets and often end up hitting civilian ones instead.

I could really only see one thing when contemplating mr. Bunny’s fashion choices.

Needless to say I approve.

Instagram and Linkedin was the latest last autumn I guess. Would have deleted them sooner had I actually used them, but I don’t think I had signed in to either for years. Spotify before that (though Swedish), replaced with Qobuz.

The current battle is to get my partner to cancel her American streaming subscriptions. Don’t want to be too extremist about it, but yet…

There’s a blog post on contactless payments in /e/OS here, which talks about options without Google Pay. It’s written by the guy who started /e/OS, so it should be a decent source.

My guess would be that Google Wallet is so embedded in Google dependencies that you’d pretty much be back at stock Android by the time you get it working. But I have no personal experience, sorry.

Yeah, this is true. They just seem to have a specific beef against Fairphone and /e/OS because it’s presented as a privacy alternative (due to no big tech tracking), and the Graphene team believes they are the only ones with the security features to ensure true privacy (because of their… hardened malloc?).

They (Graphene) have very strong ideas about security, and argue that Google Pixel devices are the only ones that can truly be unhackable enough because of some feature of hardware design. I have read it a bunch of times and I still don’t understand, but I’m sure there’s a valid point there somewhere. It has nothing to do with security as in safety, but relates to some sort of local hacking that requires access to the device I believe.

Really nothing to worry about unless you have very specific needs, in my opinion. But there are some people who feel very strongly about it, though without ever being able to clearly express their precise concerns in a coherent way.

The Graphene team has also been very outspoken about how much they dislike Fairphone for this very reason.

I use /e/OS on my Fairphone 5. It’s not a Graphene alternative as it’s not a hardened OS, it’s just Android without Google. Good enough for me, I’m not afraid of secret agents stealing my phone to extract data or whatever, I just don’t want American big tech anywhere near my phone.

Yeah, the machine learning functionality is missing in Nextcloud as far as I’m aware, and I remember it being pretty cool when it rolled out in Google photos (though that’s also why I deleted all my stuff from there - I wear a tin foil hat). Personally I’m waiting for a good open source photo management software to handle it locally (I remember seeing Shotwell was working on face recognition), but that’s hardly a solution at all.

I used Google photos just to have my pictures and videos automatically uploaded from my phone when I took them and to the cloud, with the added perk that they could be viewed and shared online if I felt like it. I’m not sure if there’s anything more to it?

If not, I recomend Nextcloud managed by some hosting provider. Hetzner is German and probably the cheapest option out there. I use Murena from France, as I’m fine paying a little more because they develop my phone OS. It’s still a lot cheaper for me than my Dropbox subscription was, and I couldn’t be happier with how Nextcloud works.

The fact that it’s the same apps and functionality between different providers also makes it easier to switch down the road if necessary, whereas other providers might try to lock you into their app ecosystems in order to make you stick with them even as they increase prices or make their services worse.