MulticMC isn’t abandoned, though it doesn’t look like they’re doing lots of significant updates these days.

He’s such a thoughtful artist, and I really love how he explains his process.

What, you’re scared of getting harrassed by your government for wrongthink on your hobby project? You sir are the actual fascist! We’ll defederate! Can’t let any of those instance users access ours. 🤡

And yet every self-declared pro-Zionist I’ve talked to says Zionism is just the right of the state of Israel to exist, and so being anti-Zionist is being for the destruction of the state, and being for the destruction of the state is being for the death or dispossession of every person in the state.

I think the German state is probably more inclined to interpret discussion of Zionism the way the pro-Zionists I’ve spoken to have describe the term.

I think the historical description in the text that you link is accurate, but if you’re trying to argue that Germans should be able to critique Zionism however they want because of that, it’s like literally getting into an argument about the literal meaning of literally with people who use literally to mean figuratively, but instead of a random teenager or twee linguistic descriptivist, you are arguing with the state.

What the fuck is a VPN going to do if your name is known to the web host? If you have given away personal identifying information in the purchase or maintenance of the website?

“Oh no herr officer, look at mein IP address, I am le French where such rules don’t apply. Please ignore all the other identifying information you may have gathered over the time that the website was hosted.”

Here’s how Firefox translates what I see to be the relevant parts from German to English:

“The Ministry of the Interior used a legal trick by declaring the platform not as a medium, but as an association. All investigations against allegedly involved persons, including because of the formation of a criminal association, were suspended or went into the sand. At the time, there was criticism from different sides against linksunten.indymedia.org.”

“The accused is to have published an article on the homepage of the aforementioned radio station, which contains a link of an archive of the forbidden association “left-unten.indymedia”. The association “linksunten.indymedia” was banned and dissolved with the disposition of the Federal Minister of the Interior of 14.08.2017, since the purpose and activities of the association contravened the criminal laws and was directed against constitutional order.”

I mean translations get a little funky but I’m reading this as saying that this office and two private homes were raided because someone posted a link to an archive of an indymedia website which was declared to be a criminal organization.

So here’s an article about a raid on an environmentalist group in Germany called Last Generation: https://earth.org/last-generation-activists/

There’s a link to the German language statement from the police which is quite readable after translation, and of course the article itself describes the general activities that they were engaged in and accused of.

Of the activities that they were accused of, it does seem in line with prior environmental activist groups like Extinction Rebellion, Greenpeace, and Earth First!

As for what laws get enforced by a website, that is going to depend on jurisdiction. For example, the USA has section 230 of the DMCA, which holds that website operators are not responsible for user content with the exception of content accused of violating copyright within certain parameters. Doesn’t mean they won’t raid your servers, just means you won’t be held legally responsible if they think you were sufficiently responsive to issues when raised.

At this time I don’t know the specifics of what Germans have to think about to avoid state interference, but it does look like it is more severe than what the US has to do with.

No, the person you are arguing with is correct.

Please click the link at the top and read the full text of the feddit post which it takes you to. It is okay to dislike feddit’s policy, and it is perhaps okay to believe that they are lying and that the words they wrote down explaining what it is are not true.

But this person from another instance whom you are arguing with is accurately describing the content of the text on the feddit post.

Does Grayjay get around region restrictions?

The link has a 500 error for me. Can you say more about this?

This is kind of like what happens internally on platforms for 3rd party sellers like eBay, Amazon, and AliExpress. Even decades later they’re still working the kinks out obviously. Amazon and AliExpress particularly have lots of scammers, so they clearly haven’t figured out the secret sauce yet. They’re not under-resourced, so either they’re under-motivated to weed it out or it’s actually pretty tricky to do.

My guess is it’s both, but more that it’s just tricky to implement a reliable system of reputation and trust. EBay and Amazon got around it early on by being cheap and establishing policies that heavily favored buyers in disputes, which made the prospect of using the service less risky to the public, improving their market shares. They probably also have non-trasparent systems for tracking buyer reputations as well to avoid abuse.

It seems to be the norm to keep these systems obscure to avoid abuse, but to make a truly functional open platform you would need to have public systems, so I’d hope that the norm of obfuscation is out of convenience or laziness and isn’t required to make the system function.

Broad federation, low conflict.

Layer 7? Eta: Oh shit we’re seeing red again