#castopod — Public Fediverse posts

Destroying Autocracy – July 24, 2025

Welcome to this week’s “Destroying Autocracy”.

It’s your source for curated news affecting democracy in the cyber arena with a focus on protecting it. That necessitates an opinionated Butlerian jihad against big tech as well as evangelizing for open-source and the Fediverse. Since big media’s journalism wing is flailing and failing in its core duty to democracy, this is also a collection of alternative reporting on the eternal battle between autocracy and democracy. We also cover the cybersecurity world. You can’t be free without safety and privacy.

DA comes out on Thursday and is updated through the end of day on Friday. Then we start over. So take your time in perusing it and check back in over the weekend.

FYI, my opinions will be in bold. And will often involve cursing. Because humans. Especially tech bros. And fascists. Fuck ’em.

Featured Item

TechDirt writes:

Over the last year or so I’ve seen a disturbing tendency in tech/startup/VC worlds to buy into the neoreactionary view that for startups to be successful they need to get on board the Trump train.

Yes, there are the big name folks who everyone knows about and who didn’t really surprise anyone—Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, David Sacks, Elon Musk (pre-fallout)—but the more troubling trend has been watching younger entrepreneurs and VCs listen to their podcasts, read their posts and books, and slowly nod along to the idea that democracy is holding back innovation.

Fascism For First Time Founders

We start and end with good news to make the middle bearable.

The response to Russia’s War Crimes, Techno Feudalism, and other douchebaggery

BleepingComputer reports:

Ukraine arrests suspected admin of XSS Russian hacking forum

Radio Free Europe reports:

Drone Attacks Even The Odds For Ukrainian Frontline Units

BitDefender reports:

Europol targets Kremlin-backed cybercrime gang NoName057(16)

Bruce Lawson reports:

CMA designates Google and Apple, proposes measures

TechCentral reports:

Italy takes Meta, X and LinkedIn to court over unpaid tax

404 Media reports:

Hacker Plants Computer ‘Wiping’ Commands in Amazon’s AI Coding Agent

Archivists Recreate Pre-Trump CDC Website, Are Hosting It in Europe

The Register reports:

Radio geeks reveal how to access crucial hurricane data after US Department of Defense cut it off

The Register reports:

AI data-suckers would have to ask permission first under new bill

Laptop farmer behind $17M North Korean IT worker scam locked up for 8.5 years

TechPolicy reports:

The Case for Europe’s Backing of Digital Civil Society Groups

Open_Future shares:

Licensing, Levies, and the Limits of Copyright

Open Forum Europe announces:

OFE Publishes Landmark Study Calling on Funding Europe’s Open Digital Infrastructure through an EU Sovereign Tech Fund (EU-STF)

DarkReading reports:

Stop AI Bot Traffic: Protecting Your Organization’s Website

Speaking of your websites, LocalGhost has:

This page is under construction: a love letter to the personal website

Hamish Campbell has:

The Open Media Network: More Than Just a Tech Project

This is what your site could be a part of.

Neutral

TechPolicy reports:

Brazil Has a Bridge to Defending the Internet

The Financial Times:

UK government seeks way out of clash with US over Apple encryption

When you have three sets of c^nts involved, it’s hard to know who to route for.

TechPolicy opines:

Enforcement of EU’s Tech Laws Should Not Be Traded Away

And they are right.

The Evil Empire (AKA Autocracy) Strikes Back

So-called newspaper, The Wall Street Journal reports:

White House Prepares Executive Order Targeting ‘Woke AI’

MIT Technology Review reports:

America’s AI watchdog is losing its bite

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports:

Axon’s Draft One is Designed to Defy Transparency

EuroNews reports:

UK online legislation could threaten Wikipedia volunteer safety, group to argue in court

Pariah States

The Register reports:

UK uncovers novel Microsoft snooping malware, blames and sanctions GRU cyberspies

Silicon Valley engineer admits theft of US missile tech secrets

Four new Android spyware samples linked to Iran’s intel agency

TechCrunch reports:

A surveillance vendor was caught exploiting a new SS7 attack to track people’s phone locations

Hackers exploiting SharePoint zero-day seen targeting government agencies

BleepingComputer reports:

Microsoft links Sharepoint ToolShell attacks to Chinese hackers

Big Media

Today in Tabs reports:

Billionaires Destroyed American News Media On Purpose

Mother Jones reports:

Colbert’s Cancellation Is a Dark Warning

Akademie shares:

Investigating AI datasets: A journalist’s guide

Big Tech

Where’s Your ‘Ed shares:

The Hater’s Guide To The AI Bubble

🙂

The Next Web reports:

ChatGPT advises women to ask for lower salaries, study finds

404 Media reports:

A Startup is Selling Data Hacked from Peoples’ Computers to Debt Collectors

Spotify Publishes AI-Generated Songs From Dead Artists Without Permission

Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain

Grindr Won’t Let Users Say ‘No Zionists’

EuroNews reports:

Meta ran ads that fundraised for Israeli Defence Forces, analysis shows

Meta won’t sign EU’s AI Code, but who will?

The Electronic Frontier Foundation reports:

Amazon Ring Cashes in on Techno-Authoritarianism and Mass Surveillance

Ars Technica reports:

Researcher threatens X with lawsuit after falsely linking him to French probe

xAI workers balked over training request to help “give Grok a face,” docs show

TechCrunch reports:

Microsoft says it will no longer use engineers in China for Department of Defense work

For privacy and security, think twice before granting AI access to your personal data

Terror

The Register reports:

IRL Com recruits teens for real-life stabbings, shootings, FBI warns

Cybersecurity/Privacy

TechCrunch reports:

Serial spyware founder Scott Zuckerman wants the FTC to unban him from the surveillance industry

BleepingComputer reports:

CISA and FBI warn of escalating Interlock ransomware attacks

DarkReading reports:

Translating Cyber-Risk for the Boardroom

Fediverse

Connected Places has:

Fediverse Report – #126 July 22, 2025

Bonfire is:

Exploring a Bonfire Geosocial Extension

MarkWrites reflects on:

Being a Mastodon Moderator

Mastodon announces:

A nudge to fund our future

If you are on the Fediverse please donate to your instance’s maintainers. Especially if they ask nicely.

Aphyr opines:

The Future of Forums is Lies, I Guess

Fediverse favorite, Elena Rossini shares:

The Future is Federated: Year 2

ActivityPub for WordPress has an update:

7.1.0 — Polishing Tables

We Distribute has details:

WordPress-ActivityPub v 7.1.0 Introduces Following Capabilities

Randall Black show us:

How to Install and Set Up Castopod for Your Podcast

TechCrunch reports:

Threads adds improved content performance metrics for creators

Slightly Federated Social Media

The Register reports:

Selling your digital soul to use Bluesky’s DMs isn’t just a bad idea, it’s the law

CTAs (aka show us some free love)

• That’s it for this week. Please share this edition of Destroying Autocracy.
• Follow me on the Fediverse. Or this site via the button in the footer. Or via RSS.

Keep fighting!

Ringleader, Battalion
Reuben Walker
Follow me on the Fediverse

#126 #ActivityPub #AI #Autocracy #BigJournalism #BigTech #Bluesky #Castopod #Democracy #Fascism #Fediverse #Mastodon #StopChina #StopIsrael #StopRedAmerica #StopRussia #SupportUkraine #TechnoAnarchism #TechnoFeudalism #Threads #WordPress

https://battalion.mobileatom.net/?p=2151

@Ada @defcon42/Mirko @[email protected] To me, it sounds more like some #Mastodon users, especially those who came in through the #TwitterMigration, actually can't stand there being something else in the #Fediverse than their beloved Mastodon. When they caught their first glimpse of the Fediverse beyond Mastodon, they reacted much like the people of Krikkit when they caught their first glimpse of the universe beyond Krikkit: "It has to go!"

They make themselves and each other believe that Mastodon is superior to any other Fediverse project in just about any regard imaginable while apparently completely refusing to learn about those other projects. They're supported in their belief by mass media only ever writing about Mastodon and the number of Mastodon users.

However, mass media only write about Mastodon because they simply don't know a thing about the rest of the Fediverse, and they didn't know a thing about Mastodon until the #TwitterTakeover had actually happened, and the second wave of former #birbsite users had come flooding into Mastodon in such numbers that it was impossible to ignore even for those who act as if #FLOSS doesn't exist.

As for the numbers of Mastodon users, they're so high because I guess more than 90% of all Mastodon users still don't know that the Fediverse is not only Mastodon, because they have never heard of anything else in the Fediverse. Mastodon was pretty much the only Fediverse project advertised on #BirbSocial when this was still possible.

There are various reasons why Mastodon users don't spread across the Fediverse in masses. None of it is because Mastodon is superior to everything else because, truth be told, it isn't. I'll come to this later. One reason is, again, that the vast majority of them still don't know anything else. Another one is because it was hard enough to get used to Mastodon after years of using #Twitter, and they don't want to get used to yet another platform. And another one is that it's hard to move from Mastodon to something else and take your account or at least your connections with you.

Another reason may be because people don't need anything beyond microblogging, and that's what Mastodon does. Now, sorry for all those of you who fight tooth and claw to defend Mastodon against the competition, but #Akkoma does microblogging, too. With extra features beyond Mastodon, some of which Mastodon users have been pestering Eugen Rochko to include in Mastodon for ages (e.g. "quote retweet"). All while being more lightweight and requiring fewer server resources than Mastodon. Oh, and it federates with Mastodon.

Other Fediverse projects aren't even competition for Mastodon because they specialise in something else. @Pixelfed specialises in posting pictures, much like #Instagram. @PeerTube specialises in video upload and streaming, not too dissimilarly from #YouTube. #Plume and #WriteFreely specialise in distraction-free traditional blogging, much like #Medium. #Lemmy specialises in groups and posting and discussing news, much like #Reddit or #HackerNews. You can't claim that Mastodon is better at each of these things than these platforms.

And then there are the jacks-of-all-trades which are usually filed under either "macroblogging" or "like #Facebook ". They weren't launched to have something that goes beyond Mastodon because their history reaches far back before Mastodon. Mastodon was launched in 2016 (and not 2022 like many believe). #Friendica was launched in early 2010, even before the crowdfunding campaign for the development of #Diaspora started. And in that early stage, Friendica, then still named #Mistpark, was vastly more powerful than Diaspora* ever got and also vastly more powerful than Mastodon 13 years later.

#Hubzilla, created by the same man as Friendica, is the most extreme one of them all. For starters, it eliminates the need for multiple accounts by having multiple independent channels with separate identities on the same account. Each channel can have multiple profiles like on Friendica so you can present your channel differently to individual contacts or groups of them and differently again to the general public.

It can do micro- and macroblogging with 50,000 or more characters and just about everything that can be done with #BBcode (italics, bold type, underline, lists with bullet points or numbers, quotes, code blocks), and you can embed as many pictures as you want in your posts where you want them instead of them automatically being attached to the end of the post.

Group handling in Hubzilla is much easier than list handling in Mastodon. You never have to type the name of a contact to find them. You can edit contacts and add them to groups or remove them, and you can edit groups and add or remove contacts, all with a few mouse clicks. And while Mastodon shows a maximum of four lists on the main page, Hubzilla will give you easy access to all your groups.

On top of that, you can have

• very fine-grained access rights control with pre-definable contact roles
  
• forums (just like Friendica, Hubzilla has #Guppe built in)
  
• more elegant macroblogging with articles which, in addition to BBcode, support #Markdown
  
• simple webpages (or not so simple if you're the admin of a hub, and you can expand it further)
  
• wikis (I'm not even kidding)
  
• a public calendar
  
• a virtually unlimited number of private calendars with #CalDAV connection
  
• a virtually unlimited number of address books with #CardDAV connection
  
• a file server with #WebDAV connection with its own access rights management which also ties in with the Photos and optional Gallery app (Mastodon drops your pictures somewhere, Hubzilla lets you upload them to your personal cloud space where you can access them whenever you want)

All with one run-of-the-mill Hubzilla account. And once per channel, separately.

And as if that wasn't enough, Hubzilla introduced the #Zot protocol and with it a concept named #NomadicIdentity.

Mastodon and Friendica let you have multiple accounts, even on separate instances. They also support migration from one account to another, and unlike Mastodon, Friendica lets you take all your content with you. Hubzilla (and #Streams, the successor of its slimmed-down successor, still created by the same guy) goes even further: Not only can you easily move from one hub to another, you can have channels on multiple hubs and automatically keep them fully in sync! If one hub goes down, it doesn't matter because you've got everything on all your other accounts.

Last but not least, both Friendica and Hubzilla federate with almost everything that moves, even far beyond the #ActivityPub Fediverse. This could be Diaspora*, this could be #GNUsocial, this could be #Wordpress blogs with or without the ActivityPub add-on, this could be RSS feeds (and they both generate feeds themselves, so this is bidirectional, too), this could even be Twitter until the API is shuttered. Friendica even used to federate with Facebook until Facebook put rocks in the way; this is the only connector that Hubzilla didn't take over.

The obvious downside is that for someone who just came in from the #birdcage, all this is utter overkill. In fact, people who are used to Mastodon may find Friendica borderline unusuable due to its many features. And Hubzilla is so infamous for its own clumsy UI capitulating before its sheer power that even Friendica users find it hard to use, fresh converts from Twitter to Mastodon even more so.

Some design decisions may be hard to understand for outsiders. Converts from other Fediverse projects to Hubzilla regularly fail at something as seemingly similar as connecting to users on other ActivityPub-based projects until you tell them that ActivityPub is an optional app on Hubzilla that has to be activated first because Hubzilla concentrates on Zot with its Nomadic Identity.

Also, just because these projects offer so much power, that doesn't mean that everyone needs it. If you do, it can be convenient to have it all under one login. But if all you're looking for is a bit of microblogging and online socialising, you don't need to drag a CMS and a full-blown cloud server with all bells and whistles along with you that just clutter up the UI. In that case, projects like Mastodon and Akkoma win because they're more approachable.

And while Friendica, Hubzilla & Co. can do threaded discussions and even have something like forums, Lemmy can do this more elegantly because it specialises in it. While you can use Hubzilla's private calendar feature for event planning, it's easier to do the same with #Mobilizon which, again, specialises in it. Or you can host podcasts on Friendica, Hubzilla & Co, but you can host them better on #Funkwhale and even better on #Castopod.

Wanting the Fediverse to be only Mastodon hinders development, namely the development of new projects within the Fediverse that may be able to do all-new things that we haven't seen in the Fediverse yet. Things that, sorry to say again, you'll never be able to do with Mastodon.

P.S.: For extra kicks, don't just read this on Mastodon. Open my original post; there you can see what Hubzilla is capable of, and what Mastodon strips away.