Of course those would be good things. It still doesn’t sound like priority #1 when it comes to software freedom alone especially in a world where smartphones are mostly not open systems designed for installation of any new operating systems.

Are they planning to license it as free software?

Linux is already the most common kernel in phones in 2026. In this case we really have to distinguish between Linux (incl. Android) and GNU/Linux.

And given that AOSP is already FOSS, it doesn’t exactly sound like a priority to reinvent the wheel of a FOSS smartphone OS.

Huh? I don’t know where you get almost any of these ideas from…

As for myself, I thought of the Internet as a much bigger deal when I was mainly on small independent forums. I’ve never participated very much on any corporate social media except maybe reddit, but even on reddit I know I am one of millions.

That is not new. They’ve been doing that since the 2000s.

The way I understand it is that there are at least two reasons, maybe more:

• Google (like all tech companies) uses a lot of open source software internally, so benefits from it being improved
• Google wants to train possible future employees

Not everything Google or other big tech companies do is necessarily bad; we should be taking advantage of the good parts of what they do.

What about that?

You see, I grew up in the era of “You” being Time Person of the Year: https://time.com/6258607/you-time-person-of-the-year-2006/

I don’t see why, 20 years later, I should now think that the same phenomenon is a bad thing, but maybe you can explain that to me.

Your post contains zero examples of anyone telling anyone not to read newspapers. The Mélenchon example (according to your own words!) is him pointing out that voters already don’t read newspapers, not that they shouldn’t. The Musk examples are about one specific newspaper, and even there he isn’t telling us not to read it. (FWIW, I would never have known or cared about any of these examples before reading this post.)

So what exactly are you trying to tell us with this post?

I don’t know a lot about French politics and have no opinions about Mélenchon, but if he said something to the effect of “we are now in the great era of social media”, then I agree with him on that. It is, in my mind, enormous societal progress that lots of people now get their news from other ordinary people on websites/apps (“social media”) in addition, or even instead of, legacy media which sees it as its job to enforce an “Overton window”. It’s democratization of knowledge and information sharing, why should I think that is a bad thing?

It’s kind of ironic that you’re posting this to a social media site, TBH.

Yeah, well, you know, that question has been around for almost as long as the WWW: Which laws apply on the Internet, and how do you enforce them if they do?

Lots of politicians would like the answer to be: My country’s laws apply to all websites that can be accessed in my country. If they violate them, my country’s government should be able to fine them, order ISPs to block access to them, arrest people associated with them, maybe even more…

But if that’s the case, then cannot countries like the PRC, Thailand, Iran, North Korea, etc. also do those things? Can we claim they are doing something illegitimate when they do, when self-described liberal democratic republics do them too? Can the Internet even work at all if everyone constantly has to comply with all countries’ laws, most of which they don’t know about?

The business model of mainstream social media companies is that they are ultimately part of the advertising industry. They need some kind of legal presence everywhere that they have customers (advertisers). That legal presence can be fined like any other company, and that is how most laws are currently enforced against them. But those that don’t can do this https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c624330lg1ko or even this https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/05/when-trolls-take-on-tyrants-4chan-and-kiwi-farms-sue-the-uk-over-extraterritorial-censorship/ and then what do governments do?

Meat with berries is not an absurd idea at all? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lingonberry_jam

In fact, I ate some for lunch today. :D

https://xkcd.com/810/ was intended as a joke, but there is a kernel of truth to those thoughts…

On Microsoft’s own new hardware? Almost “not the onion” material…

huh, never knew that was a thing too on the fediverse, though I was familiar with the one on reddit

Not a new idea: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_bloc

We had a solution to this problem in the 2000s and early 2010s when we were on topic-specific forums where each (broad) topic was a separate website where you needed a separate account.

But that had its disadvantages too…

So people will be able to fork it and add ActivityPub integration? :D

I don’t see how it’s a generational thing.

People who grew up when smartphones were already a thing might never have needed to learn how the Internet and URLs actually work. To a lot of everyday users nowadays, the Internet is just a series of smartphone or tablet apps you switch between. I used to think that the spread of the Internet into more segments of society would create a society of computer nerds, ha ha ha ha ha nope.

The problem is that there is an almost infinite way to design these kinds of URLs, so maintaining a database of what should be stripped out isn’t trivial.

They do pretty much the same thing. If there are nuances, I do not know about them.

Governments of the world, get the hell out of the Internet, kthxbai.

That’s not a great acronym in a language where many different numerals start with the letter T. Could be a two letter acronym, ten letter acronym, twelve letter acronym, thirteen letter acronym, thirty letter acronym, thousand letter acronym, …