@DavidDoesLemmy @Zagorath Here’s an article about a company named RedFlow, that has sold its fourth grid-scale long-duration zinc bromine flow battery to California:

https://reneweconomy.com.au/redflow-tapped-as-preferred-battery-provider-for-a-fourth-major-california-project/

Where’s RedFlow based? Brisbane.

An alternative to bromine flow batteries is grid-scale lithium.

And where is one of the world’s largest lithium minjng regions? Western Australia.

The Coalition’s policy is to ban any further investment in grid-scale batteries from RedFlow or with WA lithium, along with banning further investments in wind and solar.

Instead, it wants to hand roughly half a trillion dollars to largely foreign-owned multinationals to build nuclear power plants in Australia.

Assuming the Coalition can deliver 7 large-scale first-of-its-kind infrastructure projects on time and on budget in Australia, it will take 10 to 15 years to build them. In the meantime, Australia will continue burning coal and natural gas.

And all this for an energy source that costs substantially more per megawatt hour than renewables, coal, or gas.

@sunzu @dvdnet62 Oh come now. If there’s one thing Mozilla doesn’t need anyone’s help with, it’s shooting itself in the foot with its own gun.

Now excuse me, I have some Pocket articles to read on my Firefox OS phone…

@makeasnek On a broader note, I think possibly the best approach for decentralised, open-sourced web search might be an evolution on the SearXNG model.

At the top of the funnel, you have meta search engines that query and aggregate results from a number of smaller niche search engines.

The metasearch engines are open source, anyone with a spare server or a web hosting account can spin one up.

For some larger sites that are trustworthy, such as Wikipedia, the site’s own search engine might be what’s queried.

For the Fediverse and other similar federated networks, the query is fed through a trusted node on the network.

And then there’s a host of smaller niche search engines, which only crawl and index pages on a small number of websites vetted and curated by a human.

(Perhaps on a particular topic? Or a local library or university might curate a list of notable local websites?)

(Alternatively, it might be that a crawler for a web index like Curlie.org only crawls websites chosen by its topic moderators.)

In this manner, you could build a decent web search engine without needing the scale of Google or Microsoft.

@makeasnek @schizoidman YaCy is still around.

And https://searx.space/ is an open source metasearch search engine with many instances. (Try https://searx.be/ if you want to test it out.)

SearX/SearXNG allows you to aggregate results from a number of different search engines. You choose which ones, and they’re stored in your browser without setting up an account.

@sabreW4K3 Plume doesn’t appear to be active, unfortunately 🥺

There’s a notice on the official Join Plume website saying the former developers don’t have the time to maintain it anymore. Most of the former public instances now throw up errors of various kinds.

WriteFreely ( @writefreely ) is alive and well. I was seriously toying with the idea of setting up a blog through its main instance, which is called Write.as Professional. The sticking point for me was that the official on-platform monetisation tool (Coil) appears to be dead, and doesn’t support members-only posts (like Ghost).

Ghost, when federation goes live, looks like it will be the best option for my blog.

WordPress plus @pfefferle 's plugins is another great option, depending on what you want to use it for. (There’s no shortage of WP plugins!)

As for Lemmy, I could see a blogging-focussed front end being created for it, in the same way FediBB put a traditional message board front end on it, but one doesn’t appear to exist at present.

@trk @TassieTosser Knox City Council in outer-eastern Melbourne did exactly this: https://www.knox.vic.gov.au/whats-happening/news/keeping-your-cats-safe-and-secured .

The council did it because some of its suburbs (The Basin, Ferntree Gully, Upper Ferntree Gully, parts of Boronia, Lysterfield) border national parks and the Dandenong Ranges.

Younger cats can adapt to living indoors.

But the challenge was with older cats, who are used to roaming around.

The happy medium would be to phase it in over five to 10 years, where any new cats registered or adopted after a particular date have to stay indoors, but older cats can continue to roam.

@geillescas @jajabor @asklemmy That, and also making files/emails/calendar events synced across your computer and your phone.

@denshirenji @asklemmy On photos, does NextCloud Photos or Memories play nice with Digikam or any other desktop photo gallery applications? And what about Immich?

@Dymonika @MossyFeathers I’m guessing you’re overseas?

Super fund, short for superannuation fund.

Basically, in Australia 11% of wages are automatically deposited into a compulsory retirement savings account, known as a superannuation account.

A superannuation fund is a financial institution that manages these accounts.

More information here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superannuation_in_Australia

@lemmyreader Here’s a starting point for a fediverse StackExchange: Make sure it’s interoperable with Lemmy.

Now, you may not get the full feature set on Lemmy, but you should be able to interact with it from Lemmy as if it’s a group on there.

#StackExchange #Fediverse #Coding

@Dangdoggo @Rentlar Or allow it to be downloaded in a DRM-free file format that can be used with other apps, platforms, or services…

Also , if connecting a server is an absolute necessity and you are not longer going to maintain it, release the server source code as open source.

@CEOofmyhouse56 🎶🎶 https://youtu.be/d3sRF6IaORQ?si=QaqXP32GGdGwdCDx

@Baku @beeng Or Boronia.

Because when you say the name, you think of… Boronia.

@Ilandar Most major platforms are based in the US.

A DMCA request basically means the flagged content is taken down globally, not just for the US.

If the person who uploaded that content is not a US citizen, it still gets pulled.

@LostXOR @yogthos @NoIWontPickAName @technology There’s a few other steps they could potentially take.

The first would be to block any financial institution in the US, or that deals with the US, from sending any payments to or from ByteDance’s accounts.

They could also freeze any assets currently held by US financial institutions.

Second, if they can get Apple, Microsoft, and Google on board to help do their bidding, they could pull the ByteDance app from the Apple and Google Play app stores.

That includes removing it from any apps where it’s already installed. Globally.

They could also request that TikTok is removed from Google and Bing search results.

On top of this, they could do what you suggested, and ask ISPs and mobile carriers to block domains and IP addresses used by ByteDance.

And the US could apply diplomatic pressure on other countries to implement similar financial and ISP-level blocks and bans.

So, potentially, it’s also blocked in the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and elsewhere.

@shirro @MHLoppy @australia The irony here is that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is a piece of US legislation that is regularly used to take down content globally. Even when it’s posted by people who aren’t Americans.

@crispyflagstones @yogthos Someone is named @dansup who also created @pixelfed, the app is called Loops, you can follow his progress here: @loops

@shirro @tardigrada
Not just *would*, but *has*.

Here’s the “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk, in his own words, in 2023:

“The rules in India for what can appear on social media are quite strict, and we can’t go beyond the laws of a country … If we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we will comply with the laws.”

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/29/tech/elon-musk-twitter-government-takedown/index.html

@skribe @danbeeston @Salvo The other option would be to set up an official gov.au Mastodon instance, and give each government department, agency, and Parliamentarian an official account.

People can then have their choice of instance, whether that’s community run or private (e.g. Threads).

In the longer term, there might be scope for some other government institutions — particularly universities — to set up their own instances as well.

@Ilandar @quoll You mean like the US government’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act