EnKopVand

In what world did you see this? At least here in Europe the main conversation about Social Media has been that it shouldn't be operated by big tech companies. We've always viewed Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, and so on. Basically the way Americans are now viewing TikTok. Especially in the wake of Snowden.

It's true that more people are now putting actions behind their words, and leaving Twitter for the Fediverse because of the new leadership at Twitter, but this seem to be only partly because of the right-wing turn and much more because of the instability showing just how insane it is for the world to let a social media platform be moderated by the whims of a billionaire.

I frankly think Trump is right to stay on Truth. Because what happens when Elon eventually loses interest in Twitter and sells it to someone else? That is the strength of the Fediverse to be honest. You get to operate your own servers that are part of the larger whole. This would let journalists, politicians and NGOs run, and more importantly moderate, their own "Twitter" that is still part of the larger whole. Here in Denmark it would allow our government agencies to operate a "Twitter" where all our elected officials could have an account and not have to rely on an American tech company to moderate their feeds, or risk being banned for violating American laws. Yes, the consequence will very likely be that ultra right-wing networks will be largely isolated, but that's still free speech.

This seems very misinformed and I would like to see a source on it. In many European countries it's fairly easy to fire people. I can use Denmark as an example as this is where I'm from, here you can fire anyone if their position is no longer needed within the company. It's true that you cannot just fire someone and then hire another person to fill the same position without legal repercussion. This is to prevent things like firing people who get pregnant, but if your company is removing the position entirely, like when you're downsizing, you can fire people.

There are ways to fire people you really don't want in your company, however, it's just a matter of how expensive it will be. The typical Danish outcome of wrongful firing is 1-2 years worth of pay, which is (as I understand it) much lower than the outcome of similar American law-suits. In Europe, this is mostly handled by due diligence, where companies enter agreements with an unwanted worker, giving them 1-2 years of pay to fire them legally. But typically this doesn't happen, because why would you want to fire someone with no valid reason?

Firing someone for not responding to a single e-mail is insane.

One of the advantages to running a company in Europe compared to America is that many European countries are designed to make it relatively "easy" to fire people. This is because we have really good social security networks. In Denmark we have something called a "dagpenge" system, which is a type of unemployment system where you pay some tax-deductible money to be part of an "a-kasse" that will then pay you a healthy sum for two years after you lose a job. The sum isn't quite "programmer level salary" in Denmark, but many companies tend to deal with this by offering 80-100% insurances for those two years through either unions, pension-fonds or private security. In the public sector the unions tend to do the same thing.

I think you may be confusing our overall workers rights with company to employee relationships. Because it's true that countries like France sees some massive worker strikes once in a while, but these have more to do with the government vs workers than anything and typically have to do with how long a work week, how early you can go on pension, how long the social security period should be.

I think it has been time to leave the massive American (and now the Chinese one too) "tech" companies for a while. So in a sense, it's great that Elon has shown the world the existence of Mastodon and the ActivityPub beneath it. I know, I know, a lot of you already knew about it and were already on it too, but I sure didn't.

I'm European, Danish to be exact, and I've had this weird feeling about our politicians and public institutions being on things like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and so on, for about a decade now. Not because it's wrong for them to use the social media platforms, but because they rely so much on American advertisement companies in doing so. In that sense, something like Mastodon just makes a lot more sense. Our government could operate a Mastodon server where they house all our elected officials, and nobody would be at a risk of being banned for breaking some American TOS. They would even be able to moderate their comment threads a lot better, by not allowing stuff like American anti-vaxxers to comment on things about Danish vaccine programs without first having to rely on Twitter or Facebook to police it for them. It seems the EU has already gone in that direction, or at least did so back in the spring of 2022 when Elon first announced his plans to buy Twitter, but our local politicians haven't yet followed.

Similarly, our journalist profession has something called a "pressekort" which is basically a certificate that shows the world that you're a Danish journalist. They could come together and build a Mastodon server where a "pressekort" is required to be a member. (There are already some of those springing up, so I guess it's already happening), and it's already limiting the amount of misinformation that happens on their posts by a massive amount.

I know this won't be the "free to say anything without consequences" haven a lot of people here on HN want. We're already seeing right-wing network servers and users completely blocked, but it's sort of how free speech works in a democracy. Before the American advertisement companies gave the village looney a platform, nobody around here listened to them. We still largely don't listen to them in my country, but we sure waste more time on them than we did in the world before Facebook.

So yes, the time has come to leave centralised Social Media companies. The real question is, whether we will actually do it. I'm not going to say that joining Mastodon was hard, because it wasn't. But I spent about a week researching a good server to join, and that's sure "harder" than just pushing my telefonnumber into TikTok.

It's a good question, and it's frankly so complicated that I'm not sure I can explain it. Basically own capital is the operational capital that is on your company's books that your company can budget and spend. Investor money aren't.

This can play out in a lot of different ways, and many of them are probably a little different than what HN is used to, but in many cases, especially in investment banking, it's common for investors to buy into projects rather than into companies. Of course the projects are likely going to be multiple companies as legal entities, but basically, they are a lot like school projects in which one computer is great at doing the project and the other owns a computer to do the project on.

Let's say I'm really good at building offshore windmill farms. I'm also great at selling them for a nice profit once they are build, but a 40% profit on 10 is still just 14. You're rich on the other hand, but you're not really sure how to grow your fortune. Now if we pool my 10 and your 100 and the banks 100 together, then we can turn those 210 into almost 300 in the same amount of time that I could turn my 10 into 14. The 10 is own capital.

Even if you were to invest in my company directly, it would still make sense for you, and the other investors to keep some operational capital on the budgets. Both because it's healthy, and because it allows the company to move in on opportunities before they are sold to investors. Maybe there was an opportunity to turn the 210 into 1000, but you had to act NOW. I could put my own 100 up, and then slowly sell them to you, or other investors, over the following year.

And so on. It's much, much, more complicated than this, and then you also have to add the real complexity of all the bureaucratic "magic" that goes along with finances.

> I can’t say I understand why trillion dollar companies are doing mass layoffs

Most companies finance new projects with a combination of three things. Own capital, investor money and loans. Right now interest rates are high, I'm European so I can't speak for the US, but in some areas of the Eurozone the interest rates hit 12% a month ago. At that point it becomes impossible to utilise the loan part, because it's just too expensive. The investor money are similarly either slowing down or disappearing, not so much because they aren't around or that they don't have money, but because they are waiting to see what happens. This is fuelled not only by the loan part of the equation, but also by the inflation and global supply lines pushing the costs of projects to a point that has eaten a healthy chunk of the would-be investor profits, or put in another way, investors don't want to risk their money for 5% return when it was a 50% return a year ago. Lastly there is the own capital, one way to maintain this is to cut the work force, which aligns with how you need a smaller work force as things slow down.

Where do people go? Well, typically they find new jobs. Some change professions entirely. Some retire. A few unfortunate people break down and head down dark paths. But really, it's not unlike layoffs in good periods, there is just more of it with fewer opportunities.

> it still even possible to get a tech job in this downturn?

As with most things this depends on your situation. What is your educational background, your skillset and your history of work. I can't speak for the US, but here in Europe some countries you could double our amount of good programmers and still need more.

> good paying

As with everything, this depends on the amount of people who can do what you do, but compensation doesn't necessarily go down during harder periods. But it does mean you'll likely have to justify what you do to earn it more than you did before.

> in my shed so it is off-site.

My neighbour had a lightning strike hit their robot grass mower. It fried every electronic device on their parcel. Including half the non-connected power tools in their non-house-connected shed. It was a wild thing to witness the aftermath of. Basically anything electric that had been semi-close to the robot grass mower "stop here" line circling the grass, got fried. The plastic of on none-electric tool literally melted. Nobody got hurt, thankfully.

Your shed may be on another planet for all I know, but the amount of damage caused sure made me respect the "two separate physical locations" more than I used to.

It doesn't exactly save your privacy and it won't matter to everyone, but Hetzner is European.

I mostly write Typescript these days, and being lazy, I'll just quote wikipedia, but I'd much rather debug:

  const result = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
    .filter(n => n % 2 === 0)
    .map(a => a * 10)
    .reduce((a, b) => a + b);

than:

  const numList = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10];
  let result = 0;
  for (let i = 0; i < numList.length; i++) {
    if (numList[i] % 2 === 0) {
      result += numList[i] * 10;
    }
  }

Maybe it doesn't make so much sense in this simple example, probably even less so if you're not familiar with Javascript, but it mostly comes down to the state of what you're working on. In FP you know what you get, how it looks while you're working with it and exactly what to expect as the outcome, in OOP, well, you sort of don't. Reading Wikipedia, though, maybe what I like is called Functional Programming with Higher-order functions and not just Functional Programming?

Like I said. I'm not extremely religious about it, and I do think a lot of OOP design principles and code practices are slowly heading toward a more FP way of thinking. In that way I think it's sort of interesting that you mention Go, because with Go you seem to mostly work with immutable states and functions, rather than mutable objects, which is more functional than imperative programming, but maybe I just haven't worked enough with Go to know better. If you ask me, everything should frankly be immutable by default, but retrain the ability to become mutable like they do it in Rust with the "mut" keyword. I really, really, enjoyed working with that for the brief period I did. Anyway, I'm not sure I'm ever going to get into religious FP, I may very rarely use classes, but it's not like an abstract class can't be healthy for your 17:00 afternoon self once in a while.

But basically every best practice in regards to OOP that I was taught at university back 20+ years ago, the stuff they still teach today (I'm an external examiner a few times a year), has proven to be sort of useless in the real world for me. Maybe it works in more professional or competent organisations but it sure hasn't worked well in any place that I've ever worked, and yes, it does feel sort of dirty to examine people in theories I disagree with, but it's good money and a good way to keep up with both the CS world and possible hires.

There is a Danish scientist called Morten Münster who's done research on behavioural science. He's written a book for management that's gotten very popular in my country, and this is how I became acquainted with it back when I did a stint in management (which around here includes getting a MBA type education in management).

Aaaaaaaanyway, in it he talks about two ways of how we function as human beings, and I'm likely presenting this wrong, but one is basically the best practice theoretical mode of being and the other is how we operate at 17:00 on a Thursday after a week where both our children have been sick, and the overlaying message is that everything that isn't designed for the second mode of being is likely going to fail. Now the way it's presented in the research and the educational material, this has nothing to do with programming. It's more along the lines of companies needing to formulate missions and goals that aren't corporate bullshit, because nobody understands corporate bullshit when they are faced with an angry customer some late Thursday afternoon.

After a few decades in SWE, however, I've become sort of a fan of designing software for that 17:00 Thursday EnKopVand mindset, and functional programming helps a lot in that regard because it kills soooo many of the complexity pitfalls that you really don't want to deal with when you're tired, lazy and incompetent. Of course the other side of this is that I'm not religious about functional programming either, I rarely write classes these days, but if there is a good reason to write one, I will.

Considering the way it works, where your "twitter handle" is defined by the server, and I assume thus locked to it, I'd probably consider running my own instance if I wanted to use it for something serious.

I actually do think the federated version of Twitter, where organisations run their own "Twitter" which then connects to the rest of the "Twitters" is a solid foundation to build an internet that is not too reliant on massive advertisement corporations. I'm European and I did spend a decade in our public sector, but I think there is just something fundamentally wrong with Danish politicians being on Twitter or Facebook instead of being on something like a Mastodon server operated by the Danish state, and I frankly think the same for media organisations like our news papers. They'd be much better off in the federated version of Twitter.

The downside is of course that it's not easy. I looked into a few servers for Mastodon, and the one I liked the most would cost me a monthly fee of €1 with all profits going to planting trees. Which is nice and all, but looking into the "organisation" behind it, well... Most servers seem to be run by just a few people, who aren't really accountable. This is probably going to be just fine. It works pretty well for Open Source Software, but here you can't fork projects when their operators lose interest, and it seems like sort of a design flaw to have your "twitter handle" tied into something you still have no real control over unless you operate your own Mastodon instance or join one of the ones that are operated by real world organisations that you trust.

I think it depends on the circumstances and what you hope to get out of it. If my CEO said something that was technically wrong, I'm not sure I'd even reach out to them in private unless it was actually important. They run the company, and hire people to do X, and while CEOs very likely know a lot about a lot of the different Xs, they often don't really need to. If I knew my CEO would appreciate, and, need to know something, I would tell them in private, but not over the stuff you've seen with Elon. Though to be fair, in some of these cases Elon has asked some of the engineers directly in public first, and then you sort of get what you ask for.

That being said. If I was currently at Twitter in a high value position, I might also take the opportunity to get myself publicly fired. Maybe not in a fashion that is as rude as this particular example, but I'm guessing that even this display is still good exposure in terms of getting promptly rehired elsewhere.

We're in an in-demand field. Most of use exploit it by wearing programming joke t-shirts (again, not the rude ones) in dress code companies where we get away with it as long as we can dress up for when it matters, but I can certainly see why you'd want to get aboard the wave of people getting personally fired for correcting Elon Musk if you had no interest at remaining at Twitter under his leadership.

It works on all of us, doesn't it? I know I clicked this article because it was on page 2 of HN and not really because it was something that I actually wanted to read. I know it's not exactly the same as someone posting a picture of a pair of shoes on picture/shortmovie-app, but it's still driven by the social network algorithm of popularity = more popularity.

Maybe I'm ignorant but I still don't really understand it. There is a picture of some protest with someone wielding an actual Nazi flag... Which is pretty fucked up, but it's also sort of hilarious to see it next to someone wearing a hippie straw hat, another person wearing a bicycle helmet and then, what I am assuming is another ultra right wing idiot with a viking shield.

I'm Danish, I wonder what that those people would do if they knew that the viking culture they are appropriating was actually pretty "liberal". Homosexuality wasn't an issue, neither were mixing races or religions. They just recently discovered an Islamic Viking lord in Sweden.

Anyway. If one side of the "culture war" is Nazis, then why is it a war?

Don't get me wrong. It's not like we didn't have our share of village idiots who thought Bill Gates put Microchips in the Covid vaccines and thought the Face Masks were the end of democracy here in Denmark, but the vast majority of people who thought that Face Masks were stupid still wore them with the reasoning that they wouldn't hurt, even if they didn't help, and basically everyone above 18 got vaccinated.

On a side note, I do wish our own village idiots would come up with their own conspiracies though. I mean, why couldn't our Queen be behind the Microchips instead of Bill Gates?

What culture war? Is this some American thing?

> On the one hand Twitter's CEO with relevant domain expertise making...

The CEO of Twitter seems to have very little relevant domain expertise though. He mixed up all the async services and the Android client making many requests, and then fired the people who pointed out that it was silly to do so... After Elon asked them...

Aside from that, Twitter isn't actually a tech company. It's sort of weird from an European perspective that you guys call companies like Google, Twitter and Facebook tech companies. Sure they rely on tech, they create a lot of the tech all of use, but at their core they are advertisement companies. Considering Elon Musk has managed to drive basically all his customers away in a couple of weeks, or at least earn the "High Risk" mark, seems to suggest to me that he has absolutely no domain expertise in the field of advertisement.

Before all this nonsense Twitter had around half a million verified accounts. If all those accounts agreed to pay $8 a month, that would be $48 million a year. Twitter had a 4.5 billion advertisement revenue in 2021.

I'm personally a huge fan of the downfall of centralised social media. I really, really hope federated services like Mastodon take over. In my view, the world would be a much better place if organisations like the New York Times, the European Parliament and so on, operated their own "Twitter" servers and then had everything link up through the Fediverse to give users the "Twitter" experience, because it would put the ownership of the internet back in the hands of important institutions and organisations rather than American advertisement companies, and if Elon helps the world get there, then that's awesome.

Even if it's not what he wanted. But then that's sort of the thing with Elon isn't it?

I'm fairly certain that the EU wouldn't be on a path to ban the sale of new fossil fuel cars by 2030 without Tesla and Elons vision. Unfortunately for Elon, almost none of the EVs sold around here these days are Teslas. Great vision, shit delivery. You can say the same about PayPal, which I'm sure is still big in the English speaking world, but is basically non-existent compared to Apple or Google pay everywhere else.

This is also why I wish Elon would get some help. Because the visions have made the world better, and if he could just focus on actually seeing those visions through, then he might actually get to colonise mars.

I think he makes some good points, especially about how a lot of things really should be libraries. I'm also not sure I really understand the semantics of it all though. Because what is a color microservice? Something you call to get a color? Do organisations actually make stuff like that? That's wild.

I can only speak for the places that I have worked, but I think that what he calls an "App" is what would likely get called a "Microservice" in a lot of places.

The CRA is intended to protect the EU from pooling all its critical eggs in too few baskets, especially if those baskets are not EU based companies. I'm not sure what duplex does, but I'll use AWS or Azure as an example. This is where a lot of our critical software, like stuff that operates our public sector, banking and what not is put, because that's basically where everything is put these days. With the CRA, the EU is going to identify a range of businesses of a certain size, I work for one such business since green energy production is critical, and potentially demand that half of us leave Azure within 3-6 months because the EU can't function if Azure somehow becomes hostile to us. As with the GDPR, this actually has very little to do with software or development itself. It mostly have to do with bureaucracy, so we're not expected to build things that can take us out of Azure and put os into X, not technically, but we are required to plan for the eventuality and to get those plans audited. As I see it, it will be on your customers to handle these audits, not you, and it's not a contingency that is likely to ever actually happen, unless America goes full Right Wing populist, which frankly seems less likely than the EU doing it judging by this years elections.

Anyway, where this will become sort of an issue in regards to open source software and actual development, as the article points out, is when too many companies rely on the same business critical piece of software. I'm not sure I agree that this will be such a big issue, however, as most organisations that I know of tend to in-source the most vital open source projects exactly because it's too dangerous to rely on some random person.

We've done this our selves. We needed an ODATA package for TypeScript projects, and while there were a few options out there, none of them were great. Some of them would've been "good enough", sort of, but they were either maintained by one or two people or not at all. So instead of using these, we wrote our own. Which is frankly how I suspect a lot of Open Source projects happen, because while you can use GORM as your GO ORM and where we could have used one of these packages and even made it better, it was simply easier to make our own.

The CRA doesn't really change this, however, at least not if you're already taking security seriously.

I personally think the only area that will actually be interesting to follow the CRA on is what the EU intended to do with all the public sector smartphone Apps. Here in Denmark we can have things like our drivers licence in apps, but these apps are only available through either Google or Apple, and those aren't European companies. :p For everything else, I think this will mostly be bureaucracy, bureaucracy, bureaucracy, which is sort of fine, because as the GDPR has shown us, not every organisation can be trusted to do security that impacts the EU.

> An Azure Cloud Architect has joined our company. They are recommending that all our web apps that are currently deployed in Azure App Services/ VMs should be (gradually) split up into Azure Functions going forward.

Having your API's in a bunch of different App Services is sort of a bad idea. You can do it, but you're likely going to have "fun" with how much complexity is involved with setting up the VNETs, Private Endpoints, Custom Domains, DNS stuff and different Subnets that can't be shared across App Service Plans for all those apps and their deployment slots. You're likely also going to be a significantly higher price for it than the alternatives, especially if you use containers, but it's "significantly higher" in a way that's "unimportant" because it's likely peanuts compared to developer salary, total IT expenses and so on.

That being said, an Azure Function App is still an Azure App Service, so unless your Architect means that you should consolidate your different backend App Services into fewer Function Apps, then I don't see the benefit. If you're unsure what I mean by this, it's that you can replace the 60 API routes with 60 functions in an Azure Function App.

> I'm skeptical - I was under the impression that serverless was for small "burstable" apps with relatively low traffic, or background processing.

You're not correct about this. They scale just fine, and they can handle huge workloads, sometimes a lot better than their alternative, though at the cost of locking yourself into your cloud provider.

> The consensus on the internet seems to be "serverless has its use cases" but it's not clear to me what those use cases are.

I can't speak for AWS, but the basic way to view an Azure Function is to use a simple Express NodeJS API as an example. In a standard Azure App Service you're going to write the Express part, you're going to write the routes and you're going to write middleware for them. In a standard Azure Function App you take the Express part out, because that part is handled by the Azure Function.

Azure Functions have the benefits of integrating really well with the rest of Azure, and in many cases can be really good. It's also much easier to work with them because you don't have to care about the "Express" part and can simple work on the business logic. The downside is that you're limited to what Microsoft puts in the Azure Function functionality, and that you lock yourself into Azure.

With C# you further have to consider whether you want to run your Azure Function as an Azure dotnet, or an dotnet-isolated. Again dealing with the degrees of which you'll want to lock yourself into Azure.

> So what should you do?

I think your Cloud Architect should look into Azure Container Apps, or AKS if you want less lock-in. Both are kubernetes, but Azure Container Apps sort of handle the heavy lifting for you, again, though with some of the highest lock-in that you'll find in any Azure product.

It depends a little on your actual circumstances, but generally speaking, your backend service will have an easier life in AKS once you're up and running. I wouldn't personally touch Azure Container Apps, but I'm in a sector of EU where we might be forced to leave Azure. If you're not, it's a much easier road to kubernetes greatness than AKS.

I think the concept of it is kind of cool. The NYT or any other journalist institution could put up their own "twitter" and not rely on Elon not to ban them if they criticise him. Other people are setting up what is essentially their own YouTube, at least I found a French Blood Bowl 2 mastodont server that was full of match videos. I'm sure it'll be too much of a hassle, because you sort of need to put effort into it, and you don't on twitter/YouTube/discord/tiktok/whatevercomesnext. Especially in terms of actually turning your "views" into money, but the concept is pretty cool and very old "you own your own shit" internet.

Unlike a blog or something else you make on your own, it'll all be semi-connected though.

> I mean what are the economics of fediverse? Who pays to keep the lights on, and where do they get their money from?

Is this a genuine question? Because it depends. Some people/groups run their own server. Others run free servers, kind of like people ran IRC servers. Some pool money together to run a server. Some are run by NGOs. One I saw was charging around $2 a month, but would use any profits to plant trees. I know it's not really polite to call out people for a lack of effort on HN, but all that information that I just gave to you, I got from browsing the server section of join mastodon or whatever it was called for like 5 seconds. It took you longer to wonder about this stuff, than it would've taken you to actually find out.

I don't want to come off as advertising mastodon or the fediverse. I just think the payment model is actually quite good and that there are more serious concern. Like what happens with your "twitter" handle if you've joined a server that goes rogue or shuts down. You can solve this by hosting your own mastodon server on your own domain or by joining a server run by some sort of established organisation, of which there seem to be very few. I like the concept personally, but I can also setup a self-hosted serve, or alternatively spin up a vps fairly easily, as can a lot of people here on HN. That's probably quite a barrier for most twitter users though.

The guiding principle of the free western world is that the government is not allowed to just murder a child because they refuse to wear a funny hat. Everyone from the most radical left to the furthest radical right should be able to agree with that principle, and if they don't, then I highly suggest everyone else tell them to fuck right off along with whatever despotic countries might take offence at this.

It's not politics, it's not propaganda, it's simply what is right in our common western world view.

Americans really need to get their heads out of their asses if they can get at each-others throats over this. None of you want your government to decide what sort of hats you wear, you all agree on this issue...

Your e-mail address isn't tied to a server. It can be, but it doesn't have to be. I've had many e-mail services without changing my e-mail address.

I can use g-suite, fastmail, outlook for business and a range of other things, and the people sending me mails won't notice. I can't swap my Mastodon server.

I worked in digitalisation in the Danish public sector for a decade. It was at municipality level, but I did some work on the national strategies, and I'm sometimes just dumbfounded with how HN reacts to these sort of things. Of course SoMe networks have these sorts of portals... How did you expect they were allowed to operate in the sense they are? Obviously it's very 1984, but even in the West it's not like the secret police agencies aren't using every bit of privacy data they can get their hands on, they just do it differently than they would in an autocracy because we still have some rule of law protecting western citizens.

Here in Denmark we've had a silly amount of "scandals" going back to echelon, where our government works with the US government to share danish citizen data in a way where our PET and FE (police and defence secret services) also benefit from it. In fact we're currently in the middle of a scandal where the former head of FE is possibly being charged with espionage because he may have told his mother about the US getting raw access to all Danish internet data at some family dinner. I say possibly and may because it's so locked down that we basically only know about it because he was arrested and things got leaked. But we do know that our secret police called every editor of every major news paper in for a little "talk" where they tried to scare our editors into not printing the story.

Like I mentioned, it goes way back, back to before echelon really, and the Internet is fundamentally autocratic because we all need an ISP to get on it. I don't think there is really a big difference between the ISP and other "monopoly" companies in the sense that they all work with the governments in the areas in which they operate.

It's obviously a dance of diplomacy, law and business. As you can see with the GDPR and how the EU is dealing with US tech companies, or how Facebook complies with autocracies around the world. It's no different in western countries, I mean, why do you think Condoleezza Rice got on the board of directors of Dropbox?

In a post Snowden world it's not even tinfoil anymore, but most of us just don't really care.

You would be able to change servers and keep your username. Mastodon isn't really decentralised, it's just twitter with more twitter companies.

SoMe should be email based, and servers should just be relays. That way you could also create private SoMes for things that you'd do in Facebook group by simply setting up a relay on something cheap.

until you need a new server.

I think it has more to do with the way Mastodon decentralised and I imagine the people who figure out to do e-mail as a platform first, will be the next twitter.

The big issue with Mastodon is that your "twitter handle" depends on the server you join, which makes it hard to find you. If it was just your e-mail address, however, then everyone would be able to find you, and keep finding you even if you decided to change servers.

Next cloud doesn’t come with the chromebooks, or the educational tools that we’ve already paid for though.

I think you have to look at it from a bigger picture. We could technically use Linux, next cloud and something not office365, but who would operate and maintain it? Almost none of the IT staff in the public sector (or in my case the entire country) knows how to operate these things, and a major part of them don’t want to learn because they can just leave for a better paying job with AWS or Azure in the private sector. The teachers and other employees know how to use office365 and Google education because they have used it all their lives. The developers making the education software similarly know how to do so on these platforms.

I get that someone needs to make the first move, but if it’s going to be done this way, where the schools themselves are punished for decisions they don’t make. Which is essentially what happens when a city is told it cannot use the chromebooks it has already bought or the educational plans that they have laid out for the year. So in order to protect the educational data from google (again, only in the one city that fucked up their paperwork and not all the other cities using google education or chromebooks) that city is going to have at least a year or schooling broken, and will have to find the money to pay for new options. Money that means even less teachers.

If you can think of a faster way to lose public support for the GDPR in general than that, then I’d applaud you, because I sure can’t.

Mean while, the same data protection agency that banned the chromebooks removed the option from parents to avoid having institutions upload photos of their children to a national app run in AWS.

Or in other words, if the legalisation thinks it can move the EU forward through punishments, then I think the EU is going to wake up without member states because nobody is going to want to pay for it with nurses and teachers.

I spent a decade working with digitalisation in the public sector in Denmark and I doubt this will change a thing considering a executive order is too risky to rely on.

I'm a little torn on the issue because I value privacy, but currently we have a nice scandal going here in my country, which is essentially the former top intelligence boss of the military secret police, or whatever you'd call it in English, being accused of leaking state secrets. What he leaked was that our government let the NSA spy on our citizens illegally, so it's not like all our privacy laws actually protect us if our own governments let the Americans have free access to our data any way.

While the bureaucrats and lawyers discuss this, both the public and private sector suffers the financial consequences. We recently had a smaller scandal, where a town was told they couldn't use their chromebooks, or their google education setup, for this years schooling. Essentially making it impossible for that city to teach, because so much of their setup relied on google education and they only had a month to find an alternative. You can argue privacy over this, but it's sort of weird that one city, out of 30+ cities, were banned from using these tools while the others weren't, and that they were banned from it because they fucked up their documentation. I'm not going to defend google, but really, in this case we're hurting the education of thousands of children over something silly. Because the alternative to google education isn't going to be Linux and some European cloud alternative, because that simply doesn't exist, it's going to be Microsoft and the exact same data siphons. And this is really just a small part of the real world issue.

There is no European alternative to Azure or AWS, and while they are more GDPR compliant than Google, it's not like they are a safe bet either. So where do you put your infrastructure? In Azure or AWS and bet on the bureaucrats not coming for you, or in a worse alternative?

I'm a fan of the GDPR, you might not think so after reading what I just wrote but I am. I just think that maybe they should have worked on giving us some European options first. Especially since they seem to give the NSA access anyway, even though it's done in secret. But an executive order isn't really going to help us, because who knows what the next American government might do to it. Nobody in enterprise is going to bet their infrastructure strategy on american politics anymore.

I sort of see it the other way around. To me Google is an advertisement company first, and if you use Google products then you know your privacy data is how you pay for those products. With Apple and Microsoft you're paying for the product, but you're now also getting your privacy data sucked into their growing advertisement business.

I personally think the use of privacy data is a waste of resources, and that companies like duckduckgo have the longer end of the stick. Because it makes more sense to me, that I get advertisements for a robot vacuum cleaner when I'm searching for one, and not the 3 months after I buy one, but then there is a trillion dollar advertisement industry to prove me wrong. So who knows. But what pisses me off is that companies sell you a product, and then also include advertisement and privacy data harvesting in it, like that Samsung TV article that was on here recently. Or how Windows "home or whatever the non-enterprise edition is called" now sometimes installs pre-installers for things like candy crush or Minecraft without asking you to do so... Like what the hell?

I don't want you to read this as a defence for google, but at least they are sort of honest about the evil they do.

I'm not sure any of these sleazy moves will have the desired outcomes for these companies. I don't want to use linux, I did once, but I like my technology to work right out of the box with no effort to make it so or to maintain it, which is why I'm in the Apple ecosystem these days, but the ways things are heading, I think the only future will be linux, and trying to find appliances that aren't add-infested.

I'll piggy bag this, and say "especially for the Scandinavian ISO keyboard" part.