The European Commission president hinted Wednesday she would be open, after the European election in June, to working with some politicians in the European Conservatives and Reformists grouping

“The cut-off line is ‘do you stand for democracy?’, ‘do you defend our values?’, ‘are you very firm in the rule of law?’, ‘are you supporting Ukraine’ and ‘are you fighting against Putin’s attempt to weaken and divide Europe?’And these answers have to be very clear”

With the projected increase in seats from ECR and ID, this shouldn't be surprising to anyone, however EPP getting closer to ECR isn't exactly the best of looks.
To me, this sends a clear message that, as Renew falls off due to Macron's impopularity, the EPP is trying to gain more right wing seats by disregarding integration further down the line and possibly adopting more populistic policies.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/10937558

This group of Americans is less likely to have a license than its older counterparts at the same age. McKinsey points out that in 1997, 43 percent of 16-year-olds and 62 percent of 17-year-olds held a license. But those numbers have dropped substantially, and by 2020, only 25 percent of 16-year-olds and 45 percent of 17-year-olds have a driver's license, the consulting firm said citing data from the U.S. Federal Highway Administration.

Rare Gen Z W (as a Gen Z).

I thought this was mainly an European movement, but looking at this it appears that the USA too, despite being a mostly car oriented country, is following suit. Nice.

The article also mentions how having a car might have become too expensive for many, which isn't something to party about, but I am mostly concerned with young people no longer rushing to grab a licence the second they turn 18 (or earlier, depending on local country laws). Hopefully this will help shaping urban planning in a more sensible and humane direction.

A few months ago I released the Defederation Investigator, a tool to verify the federation status of Lemmy instances. With this new update, I've expanded it to support multiple Fediverse softwares, including:

• Mastodon
• Misskey
• Mbin
• Pleroma & Akkoma
• Friendica

This works both ways: you can verify which Mastodon (et al) instances have defederated your Lemmy instance, as well as check the federation status of an instance running any of the supported softwares.

Like most of my works, this tool is FOSS and available on my team's GitHub.

Limitations

Many microblogging platforms, Mastodon included, offer admins the possibility of hiding their blocklists from the public. As it turns out many instances have chosen this approach, so the available information can be pretty limited at times.

Also, this update has increased the pool of instances from a couple hundred to over 2 thousand, so query times have increased significantly. You can reduce them by deselecting some softwares from the query page (hint: most fedi instances are Mastodon ones, so by deselcting them you'll cut out over half of the pool).

What about Kbin?

To my knowledge, Kbin doesn't share its federation status through an API like most softwares do. Furthermore, given recent events, I have little faith in the Kbin project. Instead, I chose to support its community driven fork: Mbin.

What about Peertube and Pixelfed?

I tried looking through their API docs and wasn't able to find any endpoints sharing either federation or defederation statuses. If anyone is familiar with any of these softwares and has any ideas on what to do to retrieve such information feel free to contact me, I'd love to add support for both.

What about ...?

Want more softwares? Feel free to propose them. I'd like for this tool to support as many projects as possible.

cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/[email protected]/t/696926

Israeli officials are facing backlash after years of Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu quietly allowing Hamas to remain in power.

But reporting in the New York Times has revealed that Netanyahu's government was more hands-on about helping Hamas: they helped a Qatari diplomat bring suitcases of cash into Gaza, indirectly boosting the militant organization, according to the report.

The calculus — the Times reported on Sunday, citing Israeli officials, Netanyahu's critics, and the man's own reported statements — was to keep Hamas strong enough to counteract the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, allowing Netanyahu to avoid a two-state peace solution and keep both sides weak.

Israeli security officials got it wrong; they didn't think Hamas was capable, or even interested, in launching a large attack against the Jewish state.

Hear ye hear ye, Based Count folks, the @AutoMod bot developed by yours truly is now active on the instance!

Before you ask: no, it has no bullshit rules to discriminate users based on their account age, karma or anything like that. This bot moderates content, not people. While it has multiple features, the main one is the automated removal of posts and comments according to custom rules set by community moderators.

If you're a user this doesn't really affect you, I just wanted to put a PSA out there. If you're a mod in one of our communities and want me to add the AutoMod to yours, feel free to ask.

Here are the repository and documentation for the nerds out there that do care about this.

And of course if you are not a moderator but would like to create a community on our instance you can head over to our pinned thread in the [email protected] community and submit your proposal.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.basedcount.com/post/225787

I have built an AutoMod bot for my instance, lemmy.basedcount.com. The bot covers the following features:

• Automated removal
  • of posts, based on their title, content or link
  • of comments, based on their content
  • configurable with either regular expressions or substrings
• User whitelisting and exceptions for moderators to selectively lift some or all of the aforementioned rules for certain users.
• Mention based pinning and locking of a post, through commands exclusively available to the mod team
• Discord notifications for new registration applications through a webhook. [only for admins]

Naturally, the bot is completely open source. I have also written a rather comprehensive (albeit long-winded) documentation and some examples.

This project is mainly targeted towards admins of small instances, however anyone can spin up their own AutoMod instance for their favourite community (provided they are a moderator there).
The automoderator is also available as a Docker image, for ease of installation.

Feel free to suggest any additional features that you might want to see added to this bot.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.basedcount.com/post/225787

I have built an AutoMod bot for my instance, lemmy.basedcount.com. The bot covers the following features:

• Automated removal
  • of posts, based on their title, content or link
  • of comments, based on their content
  • configurable with either regular expressions or substrings
• User whitelisting and exceptions for moderators to selectively lift some or all of the aforementioned rules for certain users.
• Mention based pinning and locking of a post, through commands exclusively available to the mod team
• Discord notifications for new registration applications through a webhook. [only for admins]

Naturally, the bot is completely open source. I have also written a rather comprehensive (albeit long-winded) documentation and some examples.

This project is mainly targeted towards admins of small instances, however anyone can spin up their own AutoMod instance for their favourite community (provided they are a moderator there).
The automoderator is also available as a Docker image, for ease of installation.

Feel free to suggest any additional features that you might want to see added to this bot.

I have built an AutoMod bot for my instance, lemmy.basedcount.com. The bot covers the following features:

• Automated removal
  • of posts, based on their title, content or link
  • of comments, based on their content
  • configurable with either regular expressions or substrings
• User whitelisting and exceptions for moderators to selectively lift some or all of the aforementioned rules for certain users.
• Mention based pinning and locking of a post, through commands exclusively available to the mod team
• Discord notifications for new registration applications through a webhook. [only for admins]

Naturally, the bot is completely open source. I have also written a rather comprehensive (albeit long-winded) documentation and some examples.

This project is mainly targeted towards admins of small instances, however anyone can spin up their own AutoMod instance for their favourite community (provided they are a moderator there).
The automoderator is also available as a Docker image, for ease of installation.

Feel free to suggest any additional features that you might want to see added to this bot.

Context

As you probably now, Hexbear is a fairly large leftist instance, whose users are notorious for being very loud in the communities of every instance they federate with. For a long time they blocked all instances, preferring to remain isolated. Recently, however, they have started allowing some large instances into their allow list.

Yesterday they expanded said list by including the popular sh.itjust.works (SJW) instance.

• "Regarding Hexbear" post by the SJW admins

Some Hexbear users immediately jumped on the train by creating posts in [email protected] making sure everyone was aware of their presence and calling out what they thought was bigotry on SJW's side:

• Example 1
• Example 2, the post included in the meme, now removed

Currently, there's people on both sides calling for mutual defederation, as one Hexbear sees the other party as "bigoted" and "politically illiterate infants" while many people on SJW are just tired of the political spam.

Where do we stand in this mess? Comfortably on the sidelines, enjoying the popcorn while it lasts.

Unlike a certain platform with an orange logo, we aren't keen on sheltering pedophiles. During your stay on Based Count, feel free to make as many wood chipper jokes as you deem necessary.

I need to post a sample image to check some stuff on the admin side. But since I have your attention, why don't you tell me about your day?