Using large instances kind of defeats the points of the fediverse, so I would like to move away from the matrix.org homeserver. What are solid Matrix homeservers that works well? Preferably ones hosted in Europe rather than the U.S. for lower latency.

My little laptop server is already full of other stuff and is slightly struggling hosting a bunch of other stuff (Nextcloud, Immich, Minecraft server), and I only have it exposed to my local network (since I doubt my ability to securely selfhost something exposed to the internet and don't have the time to deal with DDoS, bots, crawlers, etc) so am not looking to self host my own Matrix instance.

edit: I have decided to go with matrix.glasgow.social

This post is about Iran and Cuba

When European Commission and Council Presidents Ursula von der Leyen and António Costa arrive in Kyiv for a day of remembrance on Tuesday, they will have little to offer other than condolences.

Four years to the day since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, the EU hoped to bring some comfort in the form of fresh sanctions against Moscow and a €90 billion loan to Kyiv.

Hungary has stopped that happening.

If Iran’s leaders believe U.S. strikes threaten their hold on power, they may opt to launch large-scale retaliation aimed at causing American casualties or disrupting the oil industry in the Persian Gulf, former U.S. officials, foreign diplomats and experts say.

Although weakened and facing a domestic crisis, Iran’s regime still has substantial firepower that could inflict damage on American interests and allies in the region, disrupt the global economy and trigger a protracted conflict in response to a U.S. military attack, according to former U.S. officials, foreign diplomats and regional analysts.

The prospect of Iranian retaliation has factored into Donald Trump’s deliberations over whether to order a military attack in Iran following strikes on its nuclear program in June, as well as discussions between the U.S. and its allies in the Middle East, according to current U.S. officials.

While Iran retaliated in June against Israel and a U.S. base in Qatar, it stopped short of more dramatic actions that could have caused casualties among American forces or destabilized Persian Gulf economies. Iran’s response to U.S. military action could play out very differently this time if Trump makes that decision, the former officials, diplomats and analysts said, particularly if Iranian leaders perceive a threat to their survival.

With the Russian military performing poorly, Ukraine is clarifying strategy and pushing back with modest success

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, now entering its fifth grim year, has already gone on longer than the entire fight on the eastern front in the second world war. The Soviets marched from the gates of Leningrad to Berlin in a little over 15 months in 1944-45; today the Russian rate of gain in Pokrovsk in Ukraine is 70 metres a day, in Kupiansk, 23 metres, according to the Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

The gains are trivial, given Ukraine’s size, amounting to 1,865 sq miles during 2025 (about 0.8% of the country) – so the idea touted by the Russians, sometimes accepted by a credulous White House, that Ukraine is suffering a slow-motion defeat, is not accurate. In reality, even allowing for the fact that hundreds of thousands of homes are without electricity, heating and water after Russian bombing, Ukraine is clarifying its strategy and pushing back with modest success.

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/10816484

And his sidekick.

Source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qc7QVofykyA&pp=ygUIQmFkbW91c2U%3D

Bro talks like Anarchist history and philosophy is suffocated in the west when it has been the most pushed-around anti-capitalist ideology by the bourgeois state ever. They literally have programmes and curriculums dedicated to promoting anarchism or as the westoids like to call it, 'anti-authoritarianism', in the "left" since the red scare era to spread anti-communism.

Scholars like Parenti, activists like Hampton, orgs like BPP & RCA were the biggest targets of suppression, and the anarchists love to pretend that it was the MLs who broke the left-unity. They think of themselves as the real victim and regurgitate capitalist state propaganda. Fuckers just want an enemy state to removed about all day. Doesn't matter if the state is capitalist or Socialist.

This is what the lack of historical materialism does to people.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/55833796

Everyone knows that YouTube is a hot mess when it comes to privacy, and I finally got fed up with having to shell out my hard earned money for YouTube Premium. It wasn't too dificult to find a reasonable solution for my Fedora system... just pop into Gnome Software and install Pipeline. Problem solved there... no tracking, and I only had to deal with the occasional sponsor message in a video. I've also got UBlock Origin, Sponsor Block and Dearrow installed in Fire Fox, so things are solved there too. The problem was my iPhone, and how to work around the ads in YouTube there. Thankfully, a little research lled me to an app/server called Yattee. I found a few guides in their documentation about how to install it (it assumes Docker, but I have Podman on my Fedora system and had to modify some instructions slightly to take SELinux into account), and I successfully got it set up. I did have to connect Yattee to an Invidious instance, but that's quite straightforward to do. Finally, I used Tailscale Serve to create a reverse HTTPS proxy in front of the Yattee server hosted via the Podman instance so I could access the server from the client app on my iPhone regardless of wherever I happen to be. I've tested it out, and despite the client being a beta (v2.x) and the server being fairly new as well, it allows me to enjoy YouTube videos without Google's privacy-invasive BS. Two final notes: 1. The server isn't exposed to the public internet, and is only available over my tailnet. 2. I use a public Invidious instance, but the integration isn't for the actual retrieval of videos (that's handled by the Yattee server, which is YT-DLP based), it's more for search and metadata retrieval. Maybe not a perfect solution, but it does the job I want it to do.