German Chancellor Olaf #Scholz sought to justify his reluctance to supply Ukraine with #Taurus cruise missiles on Thursday by naming constitutional constraints and the risk of an “escalation of the war.”
@hanse_mina For now I expect Taurus only after ATACMS. Germany has been a strong supporter of Ukraine but only ever following the US’s lead. I hope ATACMS won’t be delayed by the Republicans playing politics with Ukraine aid.
Yeah the same UX design genius that came up with removing headline/description from links I’m sure… It’s really confusing if you have any preconceived notions about Twitter or microblogs and doesn’t say anywhere that it’s just listing a bunch of old posts…
🌊 Miniature octopuses, scuba tanks, life rafts, flippers, sharks and some very rare green dragons are still washing ashore along the Cornwall coast today, 25 years after a container of Lego was washed off the deck of a cargo ship.
Someone yelled at me for posting monochrome photos again.
That's kind of annonying, but this place still has fewer Nazis than that other place, so I'll be sticking around (along with my dreary monochrome photos, devoid of all color and joy as they may be).
@MAKS23 Did ATACMS already get fully and officially announced? This would be a bit surprising if Scholz is holding back on Taurus even after that (and Storm Shadow & French equivalent).
@FuckElon it indeed seems like they have made the mistake of thinking they can still negotiate with Hitler. I'm guessing Yaccarino sweet-talked them into it.
@idoubtit I wouldn’t despair yet. If I had to bet I would put my money on this exodus to Bluesky just being a brief wave that will pass just like every other time.
@idoubtit You’re not wrong that it could happen, most people are unlikely to have learned that lesson from Twitter.
I just think what is really the issue for them moving to another platform is simply that no other site has the same userbase and Bluesky is no exception to that. The fediverse still has more to offer and I think we’ll see it get more attractive to people as things like Threads federating become a thing.
Elon Musk's recent acquisition of Twitter came with promises of free speech. Yet, allegations of like count manipulations on critical posts have raised eyebrows. @hoblon tool tracks likes on a specific tweet by Pekka Kallioniemi @P_Kallioniemi (VatnikSoup) critiquing Musk, to observe any unusual changes in real-time.
Interesting to see how "likes" are disappearing in packs of 12k or so in 5 mn, and repeatedly so...The worst being over 24k vanishing in 5 mn on October 3.
1/ More details have emerged of a recent sabotage attack at Chkalovsky Air Base in the Moscow region. Although some attributed it to Ukraine, a Russian aircraft technician is said to have carried it out in protest against the war, using improvised explosive devices.
Interesting story relayed by @ChrisO_wiki. I guess it is more important for #Russia to make it seem to the domestic audience like everyone is united behind the war effort even if it means making #Ukraine seem more capable if this is accurate.
@MAKS23 interesting, first time I hear of Macron and Scholz relationship being strained. Can’t say I’ve noticed it in anything the two countries have done regarding Ukraine.
The Russians have opened a new "camp" in occupied Yevpatoria, where children will be taught the basics of military service, human rights representative of the Supreme Council of Ukraine, Dmytro Lubinets reports. Lubinets noted that by spreading propaganda related to the war, the Russian occupiers are trying to erase the Ukrainian identity in children, to break their connection with their native country.
@LukasBrausch@tiago@academicchatter Last I checked "quote tweets" were something that #Mastodon was planning to implement (see the roadmap: https://joinmastodon.org/roadmap) so I'm not sure it is relevant to go through why it was objected to once upon a time. Probably more interesting to ask what the current timeline for actually getting it in could be.
What kind of pull are you seeing towards #bluesky in the academic sphere?
Hi people from BlueSky checking out this post after it was shared there. Look! You can edit posts here!
Journalists and politicians would rather be on BlueSky with 200 followers than Mastodon with 20,000 followers. This supports my point: twitter's use to journalists and politicians was as a tool for watching political and cultural interactions not about reaching a big audience per se.
@Loukas@anderspuck was hoping for at least a bit more specific. It is worth noting bluesky is still a quite small audience even compared to just mastodon.
You can see they are only about 1.4 million total users and the active user number is always a lot lower: https://vqv.app/stats/chart
Mastodon has over 14 million users and 1.7 million active.
@Loukas In any case I would be a bit skeptical about how long public figures stay around if they have decided to try bluesky recently. We've seen it with other services, some of them try moving when Elon does his latest series of dumb things but seldom last.
@anderspuck@Loukas I guess my question would be, how is this different from the Migration wave(s) to Mastodon that we saw in the past? Seems to me like it is very recent so there is no way of telling whether retention will be any better than with any of the previous ones. A lot of well-known names with high follower counts came to Mastodon too. Only a fraction stayed long-term.
Happy to be proven wrong but it just seems like it way too early to tell if there even is any difference.
@philippsteinkrueger that sounds very subjective. I've seen many people be very excited about joining the fediverse. I've seen people who have struggled more with it. I find it hard to believe it is all sunshine and rainbows over at BlueSky but people who end up there are also the ones who actively seek out the invitation so maybe they are more likely to be that way.
@joesticker@AndersGottlieb Would not surprise me at all but more likely that he's using the ways he can to limit the reach of the account with shadowbanning etc.
The Australian company Electro Optic Systems is sending 'drone killer' system called Slinger to Ukraine. Slinger's price tag is less than $1.55 million per system. It aims to take down drones at a cost of between $155 and $1,550 per engagement.
The country where a pro-Russian party won the elections was Slovakia, not Slovenia. It hasn't been "one of the biggest supporters of Ukraine" and is a fairly small country.
That said, there's certainly some reason to worry about the trends with support for Ukraine. US politics has been worrying at least since 2016 . Also,seems like the threat is very real that with Biden's term we might only have gotten a breather.
Total Russian Combat Losses - 02.10.23 (www.mil.gov.ua)
Another big artillery day!