Liška

In fact, there is no American-style majority voting system in Germany - as long as the elected party receives more than 5% of the vote in the federal election, it is represented in our parliament! …Nonetheless, Germany is struggling with exactly the same problem of right-wing / neo-fascist populism as basically every nation in the Western world at the moment…

For more reading on Germany’s political power / party dynamics, please have a look here!

…Than let’s just flood the comment section with information and links to the Fediverse and esp. Lemmy?

Actually, there is at least one other company specializing in sustainable / repairable electronics - besides Fairphone - I’m aware of.

Check out Shiftphone: Their new Shiftphone 8 (still under development / construction) will be a pretty solid deal with a reasonable price-performance ratio - already pre ordered mine and very excited for final delivery in March.

… Their previous models as well as spare parts, etc. are also still available through their shop.

Just out of interest: What are the specific formating options / features you’re missing to be able to perform your job?

The case you’re referring to was the adoption of a Linux based OS (LiMux) by the city administration of Munich - here is the Wikipedia article on the subject.

Unfortunately, Munich totally rolled back Linux adoption for some shady reasons later on:

Microsoft had announced in 2013 its willingness to move its German headquarters to Munich in 2016, which according to Reiter though, is unrelated to the criticism they’ve presented against the LiMux project.

I don’t know whether this should be hastily dismissed as “FUD”: Do you want to live in a world where all of your country’s critical infrastructure is owned by Chinese state-owned corporations as soon as your government can no longer service its loans to Beijing?

… The situation is certainly not entirely comparable, but since the start of the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine, we have seen the problems Germany has had with the fact that its gas storage facilities belong to Gazprom…

Yeah, sure, but don’t whine and complain to the US and Europeans when you are being surveilled, dehumanised and slaughtered in the future either by the Chinese themselves or by your corrupt, “democratically elected” leaders bribed by the PRC with its slave labour money. The “West” has certainly done some terrible things to the peoples of this world in the past - especially during colonialism - but compared to modern China or its “best buddies” (Russia, Iran, North Korea and all the other current autocratic fuckers in the world), (i) most of its citizens and officials have at least given up on imperialistic and national chauvinistic thinking and ideology and (ii) are not constantly trying to violently revise the legal international order (Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Tibet, South China Sea, etc.) by any violent or covert means possible!

To avoid unnecessary discussion, I would like to point out that I fully recognise the West’s illegitimate and unethical interference in the second and third world in the past and present. But two wrongs do not make a right - every nation, power or entity is still subject to the same rules, norms and principles!

Wonderful idea - full support on my part 👍🏻

… The Fediverse can only acquire steady growth if engagement in some of the bigger communities picks up and new users are noticing that there is constantly something going on around here - I’m sceptic that with the natural spread of thematically related smaller communities over the Fediverse, we can make that happen without pushing some incentives for community centralization…

I’m totally with you, that’s a really important functionality to ease people’s GDPR concerns!

Yeah, that’s unfortunately correct - hopefully their instance / server gets broader adoption by cabinet members in the future, but for the moment I consider it a good start…

Actually, the German government was one of the first public entities adopting Mastodon as a secondary communication channel when shit hit the fan with regard to Musk and Twitter:

Here is their official Mastodon account!

Have an look at CryptPad :)