From Kyiv, in Kyiv.

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Joined 27 days ago
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Cake day: February 4th, 2026

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  • Many thanks for such a detailed answer. I agree that blocs and federations are a good thing, and hope to see Asian, South-Eastern Asian, African, and South-American alliances similar to EU form around democratic values. I also hope that they don’t turn into rival fortresses with armed borders and migration restrictions between them. As someone from former USSR (Ukraine), I’m quite sure that Russia on its own, without Chinese government assistance, especially technologic, wouldn’t at their current economic state be able to wage war and suppress internal movements to democratize and/or truly federalize (in the North, particularly); but I read, admittedly not extensively, about Chinese history and recognize how dangerous it is not to have strong allies when empires are nearby - without strong allies, it’s a must to have mostly autarkic production and strength in numbers.





  • Most positive things about my teenager years, especially when it comes to forming critical thinking by trial and error, was by actively using the Internet using a pseudonym and accounts with providers who didn’t require me to prove my identity. Learning English and programming skills, for example, and talking to people outside the local political bubble. Banning young people from the Internet will also make them more vulnerable, withholding access to the main public forum of nowadays. There was a popular saying in parts of the Runet, “ban kids from the Internet - they make it stupid”; these parts have since become openly fascist. We should fight fascists not kids.



  • Volunteers indeed have translated join-lemmy and the engine itself, but from what I’ve seen, Lemmy developers have never turned on Ukrainian in either codebase, unlike other languages with similar completion rate, which means any instance admin willing to use the translation has to fork, patch and rebuild to add the support. Technically, PieFed 1.6.x still hasn’t the translation-enabling commit cherry-picked from main, either, but 1.7 should have it if minor versions begin as branches off main.




  • I hope Klychko will not just receive generators, but focus on actual resilience improvements. Centralized electricity generation (thermal and nuclear) is quite vulnerable, we need to deploy lots of small-scale wind and solar ASAP, widely, preferably from European sources because China is financing the Russian war effort. Elevators in every tower block need to be retrofitted with backup batteries, subsidized up to 100% in low-income neighborhoods where lots of older and disabled people live. Public transit financing from the budget must increase at least threefold, through things like a progressive tax reform and cutting down the privacy-negating IT superstructure creep, as the situation with overcrowding and inability to use electric vehicles has severely worsened; it sucks to wait an hour for a bus in freezing cold and be unable to enter because standing people have squeezed into every cubic centimeter.




  • Unsure about offline-first, but yes, local-first, for which a LAN is enough and no cloud is needed, is very much what I’d rather we depended on more, instead of what’s considered professional and an industry standard. Organizations requiring SaaS (as in, a network of 20 computers simultaneously becoming unable to open an app because the Internet went down) in a country experiencing war and blackouts is an additional source of stress. Free software requiring containers and gigabytes of dependencies is also suboptimal, we should aim to simplify native packaging for GNU/Linux and BSD distributions.

    Another thing, programmer visions of what would suffice in bad situations are often very Western, anglophone. Software, including operating systems, eschewing localization in a quest for a lightweight footprint are not accessible or are outright unusable for the majority of the people in the world. Please take care to make your software possible to translate, including documentation. Best if the focus is on tutorials and handbooks; manpages are less of a priority.




  • Yes, setting up YunoHost on a new Debian VPS was a couple of commands, and having it install Synapse and Element was a few clicks in the UI plus a lot of waiting.

    However. I thought of Element as an alternative to Slack or Telegram the way OP thinks of it as an alternative to Discord. I was wrong. Element competes with IRC. This is the only platform from which I’ve seen actual groups of people (FOSS projects) switch to Matrix. I think Matrix focuses on different usage needs than Discord, and trying it with willing Discord users will be an interesting exercise in seeing what perspectives they bring and what issues that raise, but the solution to their problem will be somewhere outside Matrix, and it will be in somewhat distant future, not with the current state of FOSS tools.