Johan Bové

Here is the full reply I received earlier today.

Dear Mr Bové,

Thank you for your message and for sharing your opinion and concerns with us.

We confirm that your message has been passed on to the services of the European External Action Service, who have taken note of it.

"The situation is changing rapidly and we encourage you to follow the below official channels for any new updates:

https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage/111539/latest-news-ukraine_en

Further measures to respond to the Russian invasion of Ukraine: Press statement by High Representative/Vice-President Josep Borrell, 27 February 2022

https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage/111751/further-measures-respond-russian-in...

EU sanctions against Russia following the invasion of Ukraine 26 February 2022

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/fs_22_1402

Please also find attached Council Implementing Regulation (EU) 2022/332 of 25 February 2022 implementing Regulation (EU) No 269/2014 concerning restrictive measures in respect of actions undermining or threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine. (In English only).

Frequently asked questions: Restrictive measures (sanctions)

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/qanda_22_1401

Joint Statement on further restrictive economic measures, 26 February 2022

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/STATEMENT_22_1423

Foreign Affairs Council: Press remarks by High Representative Josep Borrell 25 February 2022

https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage/111687/foreign-affairs-council-press-remar...

European Council conclusions, 24 February 2022

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2022/02/24/european-council-conclusions-24-f...

Declaration by the High Representative on behalf of the European Union on the invasion of Ukraine by armed forces of the Russian Federation, 24 February 2022

https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2022/02/24/ukraine-declaration-by-the-high-r...

Statement by President Von der Leyen at the joint press conference with NATO Secretary-General Stoltenberg and President Michel

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/statement_22_1332

EU delivers emergency civil protection assistance to Ukraine

https://ec.europa.eu/echo/news-stories/news/eu-delivers-emergency-civil-protection-assistance-ukrain...

EU solidarity with Ukraine

https://ec.europa.eu/info/strategy/priorities-2019-2024/stronger-europe-world/eu-solidarity-ukraine_...

Follow the latest tweets of HRVP Josep Borrell https://twitter.com/JosepBorrellF

Follow the latest posts of HRVP Josep Borrell https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage/77199/window-world-personal-blog-hrvp-jose...

EEAS latest news on Ukraine https://eeas.europa.eu/headquarters/headquarters-homepage/111539/latest-news-ukraine_en

EUvsDisinfo https://euvsdisinfo.eu/category/ukraine-page/

Disclaimer Cases in the EUvsDisinfo database focus on messages in the international information space that are identified as providing a partial, distorted, or false depiction of reality and spread key pro-Kremlin messages. This does not necessarily imply, however, that a given outlet is linked to the Kremlin or editorially pro-Kremlin, or that it has intentionally sought to disinform. EUvsDisinfo publications do not represent an official EU position, as the information and opinions expressed are based on media reporting and analysis of the East Stratcom Task Force. "

Why do I believe Gemini is great for personal Internet presences? First of all, it's a real grass-roots initiative which I am very excited about.

If you're reading this, chances are high you are already using Gemini. But for history reasons and to share my opinions of Gemini I would like to offer you here some views of mine.

Collecting some of the strong-points of Gemini from my perspective of having some experience with Gopher and running personal websites.

Fast and lightweight

• It's very easy on the system resources. So the protocol works really well on slower hardware without any problems. Hosting on a Raspberry Pi3 is easy-peasy.
• Since there are no fancy design in Gemini capsules, it is really optimized for low bandwidth.
• It should work really fine on a feature-phone, like for KaiOS. I don't believe there is a client yet for KaiOs at this time.
• It's fairly easy to build clients and servers for the protocol.

Simple yet complete

• The specifications provide enough functionality to do basically what you would expect to be able to do online.
• Much lower learning curve compared to Gopher and HTML. You can start publishing Gemini pages within minutes.
• Even-though the syntax is limited, it still gives enough playroom for creative expression.
• Use of TLS certificates promises security and privacy.
• It is more international than US-centric Gopher.
• The procol supports the UTF-8 character set so any language can be used to publish sites in.
• This should help make the protocol more popular in non-ascii wielding regions in the World.

Easy to publish

• Content will be probably first of all stored in static text files which are future-proof and easy to maintain.
• Many servers already available that require minimal technical skills.
• Yes, you still need a server, but there are many collectives which you can join to facilitate this.

Focus

• No popups, animations, videos, sound effects.
• Focus on actual content instead of fluff and effects.
• No advertisemens and commercial tracking.
• No Facebook, Google or Twitter.

Accessible

• Power of formatting goes into the clients or readers. Like in the good old days of the early Web, people are expected to style the content to their own liking.
• It's pure text, has simple navigation rules, so should be great for people with disabilities.
• No JavaScript so you really see what you get.

And on top of this, the young Gemini community is driven to make this a success!

I'm sold.

ps. I published this first in plain text on my Gemini capsule and now that I copy paste this into a HTML document I can really tell just how easy it is to publish on Gemini.

See this page if you have a Twitter account and want to control what kind of ads you get served: https://twitter.com/settings/your_twitter_data/twitter_interests

It contained over 300 keywords, some of them I totally did not know why they would be added to my profile, some clearly wrong (Loud Orange Face was in there too) - so I started curating the list. The UX of this page is terrible.

In my case, there are over 300 checkboxes in a long list and there is no way to go through the process of unchecking the boxes easily because on EVERY click a POST request is sent to Twitter, which creates a brief moment where the user needs to wait before they can click on the next checkbox.

So obviously when a lot of people do this at the same time, especially now after watching the Social Dilemma documentary, clearly this page was not designed with that kind of traffic and server load in mind.

Was it done deliberately to discourage people to maintain this list? After 10 clicks or so the server is responding with error 503 ("Service Unavailable" or "over capacity") and none of the changes you make to the list is actually stored. I only noticed this after a reload. Yes, you can happily click further ignoring the error toast notification, but none of your changes will be saved.

This smells like a dark pattern, doesn't it?

Regarding the Status plugin:

Just like Twitter does within pinning a status to a profile, a specific Status can be pinned to appear at the top of the list.

Would this be done within this plugin or would this have to be added to the Known core project?

These are some questions I have about my Known server instance.

Q1. Redis Support?

My web host supports Redis. Anyone know if there is a plugin for Known which activates Redis cache? Does it make sense to activate Redis for a single-user Known site?

Q2. AsynchronousQueue on a shared web host without sudo access?

Also, I'm on a shared web host where I have access to a limited SSH access, without sudo; how can I set up Known cron for the AsynchronousQueue event queue?

Q3. Which PHP 7.3 Extensions should be active?

Which PHP (7.3) extensions should be active for a Known server instance? See my list here in the screenshot below:

Q4. RESOLVED - How can I get the Twitter POSSE plugin working? 

I currently need to manually mention the https://brid.gy publish webmention endpoints to repost my posts and status updates. The Twitter plugin by Known doesn't work on my server. Suspecting an outdated dependency on the tmhOAuh PHP library. Would be awesome if I can get that to work.

Resolution: update the tmhOAuth plugin and cacert.pem certificate.

Q5. Tagging with Known input forms is missing the dedicated tags field

Check why.

To be continued...

How knowing the number of #Twitter followers I have makes me want to use it less

I seem to have been hovering around 404 followers for a couple of months now. Some tweets bring me a couple of new ones, other tweets seems to scare away followers. Not sure how to interpret that.

Following people based upon a single Tweet is a mistake and a sure-fire hit to get disappointed later. When I see someone posting something interesting or funny, I don't immediately decide to follow them. I always have a look at their timeline to see the general tone and topics they post about. There is hardly anyone who consistently posts interesting stuff. (There are some really clever people out there, so there are exceptions)

Anyway, I'm not using "social media" to post curated and carefully picked words to please every follower; I share it because I care about the content and/or the author and believe the message important enough to be passed along or promoted.

Some time ago somebody shared the thought that Twitter should offer an option to hide the follower and other counters from the User Interfaces. I agree that this option would actually benefit new joiners to not really know just how little followers they have.

I can understand that the number of followers, retweets and likes are easy to messure metrics to analyse the reach and the impact Twitter users have. But to most, I believe that knowing these numbers will actually demotivate and push those users away from the platform entirely.

That's one of the main reasons why I am totally for taking back control over your online presence and about hosting your own "social website". And thanks to the Known CMS project I could create a pretty neat social media hub within a limited amount of time and effort. It's all open source and currently maintained by Marcus Povey.

He's doing a lot of excellent work on the Known platform and posts about his ideas and implementations.

So I degressed from my original topic; I'll share more insights in how to set up your own Known site in a future post. It wasn't super-easy to set up the site, WordPress is a lot easier to start with, but Known was developed with the ideas of the Indieweb movement in mind.

So thanks to the IndieWeb, Twitter is not my main social media platform any longer. I own my content here and will continue to decide for myself what will be shared on that silo and what stays on my private social media Indieweb site.

We need the IndieWeb, so we can take back our online presence and feel back in control over social posting.

ps. I used Mastodon for a while, but couldn't get the feel right and didn't really enjoy using it. Having to decide on one or maintain multiple Mastodon instances, and set up in a way multiple social media accounts, was too much of a hassle. And unless your hosting your own Mastodon site, it's not really the #Indieweb :-)