It will also come with an open source “For You” algorithm. I’ve been wishing the fediverse do this since I joined and it took literally banning TikTok for it to happen in the span of a few months by dansup for Loops, who thankfully has a favorable outlook on the use of algorithms on the fediverse.
“Training pa lang daw pero full battle action naman,” ito ang batikos ng mamamayan sa isinasagawang Balikatan exercises sa mga baybaying komunidad sa mga bayan ng Abulug, Ballesteros at Aparri sa prubinsya ng Cagayan at sa bayan ng Basco sa prubinsya ng Batanes. Dahil sa nasasaksihan nilang maigting at mataas na antas na moda ng pagsasanay at paggamit ng abante at malalakas na armas, naniniwala sila na hindi simpleng pagsasanay ito kundi paghahanda sa isusunod na gera ng US dito sa bansa—sa mismong bakuran nila. Mula Abril 20 hanggang Mayo 8, nagaganap sa Pilipinas ang pinakamalaking Balikatan Exercises 2026, kung saan nagsasagawa ng joint military exercises ang 17,000 tropa ng US, Pilipinas, Japan, Canada, Australia at New Zealand. Dito ay ginagawa ang rehearsal ng digmaan sa karagatan, gamit ang mga missile at drone. Bago pa nito ay isinasagawa na ang Salaknib exercises sa bahaging Central Luzon. Mula Abril 27-28, sa mga baybayin ng Barangay Bagu, sa Abulug at Ballesteros, nagsagawa ang mga tropang Pilipino, Japanese at US ng Amphibious Operation Exercises o pagsasanay sa militar na operasyon at gerang pandagat, kasabay ng mga ehersisyo sa maniobrang panghimpapawid at panglupa. Ginawa din ito sa Barangay Dodan, Aparri at sa Itbayat, Batanes, na dati nang pinaglunsaran ng Balikatan. Katulad sa nakaraan, nakaliligalig ng matindi ang mga live fire exercises at mga maniobrang panggera sa mga komunidad at nababalam ang kanilang kabuhayan sa pagbabawal sa pagpapalaot ng mangingisda habang isinasagawa ang mga ehersisyong panggera. Missile arc Sa isinasagawang Balikatan ngayon, mas matindi pang pangamba sa mamamayan ng Cagayan Valley ang idinudulot ng pagpoposisyon ng tropang US ng kanilang mga missile system sa kanilang teritoryo sa isla ng Itbayat, Batanes. Ang pampasabog sa barkong NMESIS anti-ship missile system ay ipinuwesto sa itinakda nilang forward-position sa nasabing isla, na nakaharap sa Taiwan sa distansyang 142 kilometro lamang. Ang NMESIS na una nang ipinuwesto sa isang EDCA site sa Cagayan North International Airport, ay kayang tumama sa mga target nang hanggang 185 kilometro. Ang isa pang missile system, ang High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) na may kapasidad na tumama nang hanggang 499 kilometro ay idineploy din sa isla ng Itbayat. Ang HIMARS ay hindi lang pangwasak sa barko, kundi sa iba pang target mula sa lupa at himpapawid. Sinasabi ng US Marines na ang pagposisyon ng NMESIS at HIMARS sa Batanes ay istratehiko sa pagpapalakas ng kakayanan nilang magdepensa dahil madidispers nila ang kanilang firepower o lakas pamutok sa mga isla dito. Itinapat sa mga missile system na ito ang advance surveillance sensor na inihulog ng UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter sa bahaging Bashi Channel. Ito ay isa sa mga patunay na hindi simpleng ehersisyo lang ang Balikatan, kundi bahagi ng pinaigting na paghahanda sa digmaan na papalapit sa aktwal na pagpapalitan ng mga misayl. Naka-activate ang live sensor na ito, na anumang oras na may ma-detect na anumang galaw o paglapit ng mga tropa, barko at armas mula sa China ay nakahanda ang mga itong paputukin. Maliban sa NMESIS at HIMARS sa bahaging Luzon Strait, pinaputok din ng Japan ang kaniyang Type 88 surface-to-ship missiles sa kasalukuyang Balikatan sa baybaying bahagi ng Paoay, Ilocos Norte. Mula sa sibilyang eropwerto ng Tacloban, ipinutok ng Typhon Mid-Range Capability launcher ang Tomahawk missile na ipinatama sa Laur, Nueva Ecija kung saan nahagip ang isang sakahan. Ang Brahmos Missile naman mula sa India na ipinagmamayabang ng AFP na pinakamalakas na sandatang nasa arsenal nito ay ipinusisyon din sa baybayin ng Zambales malapit sa pinagtatalunang Scarborough Shoal. Ang pagpuwesto ng mga missile system na ito sa mga estratehikong lokasyon ito ay bahagi ng pagbubuo ng US, Japan at mga kaalyado nila ng missile arc, kung saan ipinuposisyon ang kadena ng mga missile sa itinakda nitong First Island Chain. Paglalaro sa apoy Ang missile arc na ito na nakaumang sa China ay mga mitsa sa pagliyab ng gera sa Indo-Pacific. Inilalatag ito sa First Island Chain, o mga mayor na arkipelago sa West Pacific Ocean na nakapalibot sa China, ang Kuril Islands sa bahaging Japan, Ryukyu Islands sa Taiwan, ang hilagang Pilipinas at ang Borneo. Layon ng First Island Chain na kulungin at gapiin ang China upang patatagin ang kapangyarihan ng US sa Asya at kamkamin ang mga natural na rekurso at dominahan ang kalakalan dito. Ang missile arc na nakalatag dito ay bahagi ng pagpapalakas sa kakayanang umatake at magdepensa ng First Island Chain para sa pinaghahandaang gerang agresyon ng US dito. Ang Palawan, Zambales, Ilocos Norte at Cagayan Valley ang itinakdang mga susing lokasyon sa Pilipinas na ipinaloob sa First Island Chain. Ang Batanes at Ilocos Norte ay nagsisilbing entrada sa hilaga patungong Bashi Channel, ang importanteng lagusan na nagdudugtong sa South China Sea at Western Pacific na ginugwardyahan at nais kontrolin ng US, habang ang Palawan at Zambales naman ay nagsisilbing lunsaran sa atake sa bandang kanluran. Kung kaya naman dito ipinupwesto ang mga missile system bilang bahagi ng missile arc ng imperyalistang US at Japan. Ang ipinangangalandakan ngayong pinakamalaking Balikatan Exercises ay nagkanti sa China upang magbabala sa US at Pilipinas na ito ay “paglalaro sa apoy.” Sinabayan nito ang Balikatan Exercises 2026 sa paglulunsad ng sarili nitong ehersisyong pandigma sa South China Sea, malapit sa hilagang silangan ng Pilipinas. Isinara ang mga byaheng panghimpapawid sa teritoryo nito at nagdeploy din ito ng malalakas na sandata, misayl, barko at eroplanong pandigma kagaya ng carrier strike group Liaoning. Ang mga sandatang inilunsad ng China na itinapat sa Balikatan sa Pilipinas ay parehas na pinakamalalakas at pinakasopistikadong sandata at kagamitang pandigma sa buong mundo, at ang iba dito ay mas malalaki, mas malalakas at mas sopistikado pa sa mga kagamitan ng US at Japan. Kabilang dito ang kauna-unahan sa buong mundo na drone carrier warship, ang missile launcher at aircraft carrier na 052D Class Destroyer Cangzhou, na isa sa pinakamalaki sa buong mundo. Pinailanlang sa destroyer na ito ang isang cruise missile sa nasabing ehersisyong pandigma ng China. Pinasinayaan din nito ang isang submarine hypersonic missile. Habang nagyayabang ang US sa kaniyang mga sandata at kapabilidad militar, ang China ay mabilis at tuloy-tuloy ding nagpapalakas ng kaniyang armamento at militar na pwersa. Maraming ulat na nasa China ang pinakamalaking arsenal ng ground-based missiles sa buong mundo. Ligalig, hindi istabilidad Malinaw sa mga kaganapang ito, ng paghahanda sa gera ng dalawang magkaribal na imperyalistang US at China, na malao’t madali ay puputok. Kinukumpirma ito mismo ng AFP at US na nagsasabi na ang Balikatan exercises na ito ay hindi lamang drills o simpleng ehersisyo, kundi rehearsal o pinal na pag-eensayo sa isang magaganap na gera. Sinasabi nila ito dahil sila at ng amo nitong imperyalistang US ang nanghahamon ng gera sa China. Sadyang napakamapanganib ang paglalatag ng rehimeng US-Marcos sa Cagayan Valley at iba pang susing lokasyon sa Pilipinas bilang bahagi ng First Island Chain at pagdedeploy ng mga misayl at kagamitang pandigma dito. Sinasalaula ng AFP, ng rehimeng Marcos at ng imperyalistang US ang mamamayang Pilipino sa pangangalandakan na ang Balikatan Exercises ay para sa istabilidad at kapayapaan sa rehiyong Asia Pasipiko. Malinaw na malinaw ang kasinungalingang ito sa nararanasang matinding ligalig at paghihirap ngayon ng mamamayan sa Iran at Middle East, na walang pakundangang inatake ng imperyalistang US upang kamkamin ang kanilang natural na rekurso at langis at pagharian ang rehiyon, hindi upang isalba ang mamamayan doon at panatilihin ang kapayapaan at seguridad nila. Sa kabila ng malawakang protesta sa pag-atake ng US-Israel sa Iran at pagpapaigting nito ng pandaigdigang tensyon, lalo pang pinapalawak at pinapaigting ang tensyon na ito sa pang-uupat ng gera sa Asya. Ang paggamit sa Pilipinas bilang lunsaran ng digma ay sukdulang pagpapakatuta ng rehimeng Marcos sa amo nitong imperyalistang US sa paggigiit ng paghahari nito sa Asya-Pasipiko, parehas ng ginagawa sa Middle East Ang mga misayl at sandatang pandigma na ito ay malayang ipinoposisyon sa bansa at pinapaputok dahil sa mga kasunduang militar na pinasok ng rehimeng Marcos sa US. Lansakang paglabag sa soberanya ng Pilipinas ito at inilalagay ang rehiyon ng Cagayan Valley at buong Pilipinas sa direktang panganib mula sa ganting aksyon ng China at iba pang kaaway ng US. Digmang bayan lamang ang makakagapi sa paghahari ng imperyalistang US Anuman ang kahihinatnan ng mamamayan sa sandaling pumutok ang inuupat nitong gera sa Asya-Pasipiko ay pananagutan ng AFP at rehimeng US-Marcos at isasakdal sila sa krimen sa gera. Napakahalaga sa ngayon na palakasin ang anti-imperyalistang alyansa ng mamamayan ng Cagayan Valley at makibaka upang itigil ang gerang agresyon ng imperyalistang US at tanggalin ang mga kagamitang pandigma nito sa rehiyon at sa buong bansa. Higit sa lahat, paigtingin ang digmang bayan dahil tanging ito lamang ang makakagapi sa imperyalistang paghahari ng US.” The post Balikatan 2026, paghahanda sa gera sa Asia-Pacific appeared first on PRWC | Philippine Revolution Web Central. From PRWC | Philippine Revolution Web Central via This RSS Feed.
This is totally different from Trump. Trump wanted Republicans to ban TikTok. Biden wants bipartisan support in banning TikTok. Two very different things.
I could not find a working pipped to front end the YT. Javier Milei is brash and audacious and he loves Donald Trump. But in many ways Donald Trump is the one who is following Milei. Argentina has an 18 month head start on Russell Vought’s wet dream of implementing a harsh libertarian doctrine. For a while it looked like everything Milei did was succeeding. He tamed inflation, created an export surplus and got back on track with debt service. Economic shock doctrines that rely on austerity for the masses and corporate giveaways always wind up the same, however. It was only a matter of time. The wheels are coming off Milei’s project this year as inflation is back, money is tight and people are pissed. America’s canary came out of the coal mine with black lung. Sign up for the UNFTR Free Weekly Newsletter at https://www.unftr.com/ Bluesky - @unftr.com IG | FB | TikTok - @unftrpod EPISODE RESOURCES Bloomberg / Batimes, Argentina’s Economic Activity Posts Biggest Slump Since 2023 Argus Media, Argentina’s Economy Contracts in February (April 22 2026) Peterson Institute for International Economics, Argentina’s Fragile Monetary Framework Risks Renewed Volatility (February 11, 2026) BBVA Research, Argentina Economic Outlook — March 2026 Americas Quarterly, Argentina’s Polarization Threatens Milei’s Pro-Market Agenda (February 25, 2026) [Paul Krugman Substack, Why Is Trump Bailing Out Argentina?](Paul Krugman Substack, Why Is Trump Bailing Out Argentina?) New York Times, Milei’s Argentina Economy (September 26, 2025) Download the “5 Non-Negotiables of the Left” and Spread the word https://www.unftr.com/5NN SUPPORT THE SHOW Become a Member or Leave us a Tip https://www.unftr.com/memberships Buy our Native Roasted Coffee https://www.unftr.com/shop Check out our book list https://bookshop.org/shop/UNFTRpod Shop UNFTR Merch! https://www.unftr.com/merch ABOUT UNFTR Unf*cking the Republic (UNFTR for short) is progressive media organization that produces a longform podcast, YouTube videos, newsletters and original essays on U.S. politics, socio economics and civil liberties. Our features attempt to explain how we arrived in Bizarro America, the funhouse mirror version of what was originally intended. You can access all of our work at www.UNFTR.com #SocioEconomics #AmericanHistory #Economics #USPolitics
I’m a simple man, I see TikTok I dislike.
I could not find a working pipped to front end the YT. Javier Milei is brash and audacious and he loves Donald Trump. But in many ways Donald Trump is the one who is following Milei. Argentina has an 18 month head start on Russell Vought’s wet dream of implementing a harsh libertarian doctrine. For a while it looked like everything Milei did was succeeding. He tamed inflation, created an export surplus and got back on track with debt service. Economic shock doctrines that rely on austerity for the masses and corporate giveaways always wind up the same, however. It was only a matter of time. The wheels are coming off Milei’s project this year as inflation is back, money is tight and people are pissed. America’s canary came out of the coal mine with black lung. Sign up for the UNFTR Free Weekly Newsletter at https://www.unftr.com/ Bluesky - @unftr.com IG | FB | TikTok - @unftrpod EPISODE RESOURCES Bloomberg / Batimes, Argentina’s Economic Activity Posts Biggest Slump Since 2023 Argus Media, Argentina’s Economy Contracts in February (April 22 2026) Peterson Institute for International Economics, Argentina’s Fragile Monetary Framework Risks Renewed Volatility (February 11, 2026) BBVA Research, Argentina Economic Outlook — March 2026 Americas Quarterly, Argentina’s Polarization Threatens Milei’s Pro-Market Agenda (February 25, 2026) [Paul Krugman Substack, Why Is Trump Bailing Out Argentina?](Paul Krugman Substack, Why Is Trump Bailing Out Argentina?) New York Times, Milei’s Argentina Economy (September 26, 2025) Download the “5 Non-Negotiables of the Left” and Spread the word https://www.unftr.com/5NN SUPPORT THE SHOW Become a Member or Leave us a Tip https://www.unftr.com/memberships Buy our Native Roasted Coffee https://www.unftr.com/shop Check out our book list https://bookshop.org/shop/UNFTRpod Shop UNFTR Merch! https://www.unftr.com/merch ABOUT UNFTR Unf*cking the Republic (UNFTR for short) is progressive media organization that produces a longform podcast, YouTube videos, newsletters and original essays on U.S. politics, socio economics and civil liberties. Our features attempt to explain how we arrived in Bizarro America, the funhouse mirror version of what was originally intended. You can access all of our work at www.UNFTR.com #SocioEconomics #AmericanHistory #Economics #USPolitics
If by normal people you mean the general public, my guess is just Tiktok and social media.
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/ask/p/1088403/what-happens-when-reddit-actually-dies-start-being-90-bots Right now there is high bot activity on Reddit, but the high amount of users make it tolerable to some extent. But one thing that I don’t see anyone talk about is what happens when bots to humans ratio become so high(>70%)? Like what if you checked Reddit only to see reposts and propaganda? Following news websites does not have interactivity and more importantly, sharing events as it happens is something that is rare to get outside Reddit aed TikTok If I am being very honest. I even stopped seeing more new memes outside meta platforms. Is there is a forum/app for citzen journalism? Any crowdsourced tech tips forum exist?
This is the first “TikTok trend” I’ve seen that doesn’t make me cringe
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/ask/p/1088403/what-happens-when-reddit-actually-dies-start-being-90-bots Right now there is high bot activity on Reddit, but the high amount of users make it tolerable to some extent. But one thing that I don’t see anyone talk about is what happens when bots to humans ratio become so high(>70%)? Like what if you checked Reddit only to see reposts and propaganda? Following news websites does not have interactivity and more importantly, sharing events as it happens is something that is rare to get outside Reddit aed TikTok If I am being very honest. I even stopped seeing more new memes outside meta platforms. Is there is a forum/app for citzen journalism? Any crowdsourced tech tips forum exist?
This happened 3 days ago and was caused by faulty solar panels catching fire on the rooftop. This is the same video as on the tweet. It was posted on tiktok 3 days ago. The tweeter claims this happened today. https://www.tiktok.com/@rocio1821/video/7626431313540631839 https://www.10tv.com/article/news/local/amazon-fire-west-jefferson/530-277bbf96-6cf9-4ed9-be88-72416f683a4c Remember when the East Palestine Ohio chemical spill train crash happened and then for like a week we everyone was talking about every train crash but also train crashes aren’t that uncommon? Maybe factory fires aren’t that rare and most of them are caused by faulty equipment.
Right now there is high bot activity on Reddit, but the high amount of users make it tolerable to some extent. But one thing that I don’t see anyone talk about is what happens when bots to humans ratio become so high(>70%)? Like what if you checked Reddit only to see reposts and propaganda? Following news websites does not have interactivity and more importantly, sharing events as it happens is something that is rare to get outside Reddit aed TikTok If I am being very honest. I even stopped seeing more new memes outside meta platforms. Is there is a forum/app for citzen journalism? Any crowdsourced tech tips forum exist?
This is not surprising, video gaming has been around since the 70s, the first gamers are hitting 70+. I don’t use tiktok, but I was hanging out with brother and his gf and they showed me how they watch reels/tiktok. It was funny, I won’t lie, but man the format is slop.
If Libs of Tik Tok is saying it, then you know to be on the other side.
If you’re excited about the Linux desktop, you had no chance to be a teen tiktok star in any timeline.
Wake up and immediately witness man made horrors within my comprehension. I saw a video on TikTok of Palestinians gathered inside of an apartment, that reminded me of the Come and See Church/Hall scene.
Lihat kiriman asli pada platform media sosial terkait.
terrygodier.com The Boring Internet https://indieweb.social/@tg 16–20 minutes You have noticed that the internet is dying. Twitter changed hands, changed names, and changed shape, and the version of it you knew is gone. Reddit went public. Google search now returns generated answers stapled to half a dozen ads. Instagram is bots making content for bots. Discord servers you joined in 2019 have gone quiet. The blogs you read in 2012 redirect to parked domains. The forums where you learned what you know got bought, gutted, redesigned, and left to rot. This is real. You are not imagining it. The places you spent your younger years are gone or unrecognizable, and the places you use now are visibly straining under a flood of machine-generated text nobody asked for. There is a low ambient grief about it, and a faint guilt, something like: “I should be doing something. I should be somewhere else. I want the old thing back.” I want to tell you a thing that I think is true, and that I think will make you feel better. The internet is not dying. A commercial veneer glued on top of it is dying. The layer where every human activity became a venture-backed destination, every destination became a feed, every feed became ad inventory, and every ad market became a machine for producing more things to interrupt you with. Underneath that layer is another internet: older, slower, less polished, harder to monetize, and much harder to kill. It is not utopia. It is full of spam, abandoned servers, broken clients, hostile nodes, strange old commands, half-maintained software, and people arguing in plain text about things no normal person should care about. But it has one enormous advantage over the platforms that replaced it in your imagination. No one owns it. The Layers You can see the layers if you draw them out. services things you can be priced out of GmailGitHubCloudflareAWSStripeAuth0CDNsVercel protocols things no one can take from you HTTPSMTPIRCRSSIcecastNTPUsenetDNSBGPSSHFTPNNTPWebDAVGeminiFingerTCPUDPPOP3IMAPXMPP a thin commercial crust on something much larger The platform layer is the loudest and the youngest. It is culturally dominant. It is where most of the screenshots come from. It is where the arguments happen and where the panic lives. It is also a thin commercial crust on top of older, quieter machinery. Under the platform layer is the service layer: the companies that own infrastructure but do not always need to become the destination. Gmail. GitHub. Cloudflare. AWS. CDNs. Payment processors. Identity providers. These things are not innocent. They are not outside the market. Some of them are enormous, and some of them have more power than anyone should be comfortable with. They don’t need to become the place where your whole social life happens. Cloudflare does not need you to scroll Cloudflare. AWS does not need you to post memes. Under that is the protocol layer. This is the old machinery. Not pure. Not beautiful. Not easy to use. A lot of it is ugly, ancient, underspecified, overcomplicated, and held together by conventions nobody remembers writing down. But it has a different shape. Most of these protocols were designed from the 1970s through the early web era by small groups of people solving immediate problems. “How do we send mail between machines?” “How do we ask who is logged in?” “How do we move hypertext across a network?” “How do we synchronize time?” “How do we publish a stream of updates?” “How do we broadcast audio?” They were built mostly by nerds with no business plan, no venture capital, and no permission. The protocols belong to no one. They can’t be acquired. They can’t be taken public. The reason your mee-maw and your bank and your boss can all reach you at the same email address is that the protocol that made it possible was published more than forty years ago, and the people who published it did not successfully capture it inside of one company. Tuning In Rusty Hodge has been running an internet radio station called SomaFM out of San Francisco since 2000. The station is independent, listener-supported, ad-free, and curated by actual people with actual taste. For more than two decades, people around the world have been listening. SomaFM runs on boring internet radio infrastructure: open streams, playlist files, direct URLs, Icecast servers. When you press play on a SomaFM stream, your browser does not ask a social graph whether the song is relevant. No algorithm decides what plays next because it predicts you are likely to remain engaged for another seven minutes. No advertiser shapes the rotation. No platform tries to convert the moment into a growth loop. A person makes choices and broadcasts them. You tune in or you do not. That’s the whole transaction. Here’s SomaFM’s live stream. Press play and a small server in San Francisco starts handing you a song. For the purpose of this essay, I set up my own internet radio station featuring the latest album of music I wrote, recorded, and produced. You can listen live, streaming (miraculously!) from a small computer in New York. Spotify launched years after SomaFM. It was supposed to make stations like these obsolete. It did not. The reason is structural. Spotify has to extract enough value from listeners to satisfy public-market investors. Over time, it will be pressured to transform, bundle, optimize, and extract more from the same act of listening. SomaFM has to cover bandwidth costs and keep Rusty fed. My station has an even lower bar. It’s just for fun. It can be tiny. It can be pointless. It can run for a while, make a few people smile, and disappear without becoming a failed startup. This distinction matters. some things need to become enormous to survive. other things survive because they never needed to become enormous. Fossils Still Load-Bearing SMTP1982 email — the federation that didn’t lose Still federated. Still belongs to no one. Still the only mass communication system on earth where any provider can reach any other provider without permission from the company that owns the network. Email is not clean. Email is full of spam, phishing, AI-generated sales sludge, fake invoices, newsletters you swear you never signed up for, and random dudes asking whether you have fifteen minutes to discuss pipeline optimization. But that is the point. Email did not survive because nobody abused it. Email survived because abuse did not turn it into one company. Spam can ruin an inbox. A bad provider can ruin a service. A policy change can ruin deliverability for a domain. Gmail can make life worse for everybody by becoming too powerful. But no one can ruin email in a product meeting. That is what survival looks like at the protocol layer. Not purity. Persistence. IRC1988 chat — before chat became a workplace surface The chat protocol that predates Slack by decades. The old networks are mostly gone or changed beyond recognition, but IRC itself is not gone. Libera Chat and other networks are still active every day. Open-source projects still use it. Rooms descended from IRC culture still shape how technical communities get things done. It’s not fashionable. It’s not welcoming in the way modern software tries to be welcoming. It has commands. It has norms. There’s a culture and a learning curve. You can absolutely enter the wrong room, say the wrong thing, and discover that nobody there has any interest in making the experience smooth for you. And yet it remains one of the few places online where chat still feels like chat instead of a workplace surface. Usenet1980 threaded conversation — the original shape of the social internet Less alive than the others, but the bones are warm. The shape of nearly every threaded discussion you have ever read descends from it: named groups, posts, replies, quotations, arguments accreting around a topic until the topic itself disappears under the argument. Reddit did not invent this shape. Reddit made it legible to a later web, walled it off, and monetized it better. Usenet is what the social internet looked like before the social internet had product managers tasked with growth and viral loops. RSS1999 syndication — the protocol that survived its own death Google Reader was discontinued in 2013, and a generation of people decided RSS was over. It wasn’t over — it just stopped being fashionable. RSS still delivers news sites, changelogs, newsletters, video, and the quiet daily output of people who still publish on their own sites. It’s also the distribution substrate for podcasting, a medium now consumed by enormous numbers of people, most of whom never see the feed. NTP1985 time — the protocol that synchronizes the clocks Every device you own needs to know what time it is. So does your bank, your calendar, your router, your security certificates, your deployment logs, your authentication tokens, and the payment terminal at the coffee shop. Almost every modern system assumes time is boringly, invisibly correct. NTP was shaped for decades by David Mills and a small orbit of maintainers, volunteers, students, and institutions. It became so essential, and so commercially unglamorous, that almost everyone depended on it while almost no one thought about it. That’s another kind of boring. Not abandoned. Load-bearing. Finger1971 presence — the first status update The deepest cut on the list. The kind of thing you bring up at dinner if you want everyone to look at you with concern. Finger is a protocol from before the web for asking: what is this person up to right now? It was the first status update. Before feeds, before away messages, before AIM profiles, before Twitter bios, before Slack status, before stories, before /now pages, there was a little command that asked a machine for a person’s .plan. It is barely alive. It is a fossil you can still run. I set up a server with a finger service on it that you can try right now. Open your terminal and type: finger [email protected] and see what comes back. a protocol from before the web, still answering There are more. DNS, the protocol that turns terrygodier.com into a number. BGP, the protocol that decides how packets actually get from one continent to another. SSH, the protocol that lets you step into a machine far away as if distance were a local inconvenience. NNTP. FTP. WebDAV. Gemini. The whole neighborhood of the IndieWeb. Most are older than the kids on TikTok and still running. Why They Survive The reason these systems survived is also the reason they are surviving the AI flood, and the reason they will probably outlive most of what is being built today. boring adjective. Of a technology: too useful to disappear, too uncool to hype, too federated to acquire, and too awkward to turn cleanly into a platform. The single most reliable predictor of digital survival. The boring internet survives for three reasons, none of them romantic. First: it has no CEO. Nobody can sell it. Nobody can pivot it. Nobody can take it public and gut it for shareholders. Nobody can call an all-hands meeting and explain that, going forward, the protocol will prioritize video. This is not because protocols are magically democratic. Many are governed badly. Some are captured in practice by big companies. Some are maintained by exhausted volunteers. Some are trapped in standards bodies where good ideas go to be slowly discussed to death. But the decision-making is distributed among the people who use it, implement it, maintain it, extend it, argue about it, and occasionally abandon it. This is slow. This is frustrating. This produces committees, mailing lists, drafts, forks, incompatible clients, flame wars, and astonishingly ugly configuration files. It is also why the thing is still here. Second: it is too federated to centralize. There is no single email server. No single IRC network. No single RSS endpoint. No single website. No single Icecast directory. No single DNS server that is “the internet.” There are many of each. platform one switch flips the lights on every node protocol one neighborhood burns; the rest keeps posting You cannot kill a federated thing by killing one node, the way you can kill a platform by changing one company. You can damage it. You can neglect it. You can make parts of it unusable. You can create enormous power concentrations around it. Google can dominate email hosting. Cloudflare can sit in front of half the web. Spotify can intermediate podcasts. Apple can shape how feeds are discovered. Bad actors can flood open systems with garbage. The failure mode is different. A platform fails in public. One acquisition, one pricing change, one API shutdown, one new owner, and suddenly the place you used to live has different locks on the doors. A protocol fails unevenly. This server goes down or that client stops working. This network gets weird or that provider becomes hostile. One neighborhood burns while another one keeps posting through it. That isn’t perfect. But it’s better than a single switch. Third: it is too awkward to fully extract. Machine-generated garbage does not spread evenly. Search. Social. Video. Shopping. Feeds. Anywhere a human glance can be measured, packaged, auctioned, and sold, machines will arrive to manufacture more things for humans to glance at. Boring protocols are not immune to this. Email proves the opposite. The boring internet isn’t protected by innocence. It’s protected by awkwardness. There is no global RSS feed to poison. No central IRC timeline to optimize. No Finger For You page. No Icecast engagement graph deciding that your ambient drone station should pivot to reaction content because thirteen percent more users remained active through minute four. Every property that made these protocols feel old and uncool to you in 2014 is part of what’s keeping them alive in 2026. What I’m Building I’ve spent the last year building things on this layer. Current is an RSS reader. Not a social app pretending to be a reader. Not a recommendation engine wrapped around articles. A reader. It takes feeds from sites you choose and shows them to you. Sourcefeed and Byline live in the same neighborhood: small tools for publishing, reading, and moving through the web without pretending the web needs to become a platform again. These aren’t acts of nostalgia. I don’t want to teleport to 1999 with a beige computer and pretend everything was better when getting online made a noise. I am trying to build on the part of the internet that still has the properties I want software to have: durable, legible, user-shaped, hostile to enclosure, and quiet enough that a single person can still understand the whole thing. I’m not the only one. Personal sites are coming back. RSS feeds are coming back. Webrings are coming back. People are remembering that a website can be a home or a place instead of a profile. Mastodon is, for all its quirks, a federated SMTP-shaped thing for short messages and not a platform in the old sense. Small internet radio stations still broadcast from servers with ugly URLs. Newsletters still arrive through SMTP. Software projects still publish changelogs through feeds. Communities still gather in places too small to be interesting to investors. You Are Standing In It You are reading this in a web browser. Take a moment and notice what is around you. the page reached you HTTP1991 three decades old, still serving every webpage you have ever read. the clock in the corner stayed accurate NTP1985 right now, your computer thinks it is 11:46:24. you probably found this essay through RSS1999 the same protocol family that delivers podcasts and blogs to people who may never know it exists. the audio you heard came over Icecast2001 from a server I run, broadcasting music I made. if you signed up, your address travels by SMTP1982 still federated. still belongs to no one. if you ran the command, you used Finger1971 a protocol from before the web. the first status update. Six old systems, all passing quietly under your hand. You did not just read about the boring internet. You used it. The internet you grew up on is not gone. Some of its commercial superstructure is, and more of it will go. The next decade is going to be strange for any company whose value proposition was: we host the place where you talk to your friends. The platforms will keep mutating. The feeds will keep filling. The slop will keep rising. The grief is real and you are not wrong to feel it. But the actual internet — the protocols, the federated services, the plain-text commands, the open feeds, the small servers, the personal sites, the things people built when user and developer were sometimes the same word — is still right there. It was not demolished. It was buried under a louder layer for a while. Now the louder layer is thinning out. You do not have to wait for someone to rebuild what you lost. You are standing in it.
This evening in Manhattan, “The Great Israeli Real Estate Event” will be advertising land available for sale in Gush Etzion, a cluster of illegal West Bank settlements, while also making legal, tax, and banking services available for those who want to become settlers, according to the event’s publicly listed information. Despite the commercial and internationally illegal nature of the event, it is being hosted at a religious institution, Park East Synagogue on the Upper East Side. Previous events have drawn protesters and counter-protesters, leading to charges of antisemitism leveled at the protesters for demonstrating near a synagogue. The protesters have countered that it is inappropriate to use a religious institution to shield such a contentious practice. A spokesperson for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani declined to comment on the Israeli real estate expo. In the wake of previous protests, the New York City Council, with a veto-proof majority, in March passed legislation restricting such demonstrations. This week in Washington, meanwhile, saw the launch of Israel Advocacy Day, a high-profile lobbying campaign led by Eagles’ Wings, a New York-based Christian Zionist organization. What we can reveal today is that the campaign is secretly financed by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, implicating foreign agent registration laws in a serious way. That story, by journalist Nick Cleveland-Stout, is below. If you agree that you’re unlikely to find this kind of reporting anywhere but in Drop Site News, consider upgrading to a paid subscription to support the work. When we launched, we aimed to grow to 20,000 paid subscribers by our two-year mark, which comes this July. But we’re already at 19,818. If you can hit that target two months early, we’ll be that much closer to long-term sustainability. If you’re already a subscriber, or just want to make a one-time contribution, we’re grateful for that as well. Help us get to 20,000 paid subscribers —Ryan Grim Robert Stearns preaching in 2022. Photo: Wikimedia Commons. Prominent Christian Zionist Group Is Lobbying U.S. Lawmakers on Israel—Without Revealing It’s Funded by Israel Story by Nick Cleveland-Stout WASHINGTON, D.C.—On Monday night, over 500 people packed into the Ronald Reagan Building in downtown D.C. to kickoff Israel Advocacy Day—a major pro-Israel lobbying push on Capitol Hill spearheaded by Eagles’ Wings, a New York-based Christian Zionist organization. During a break in the evening’s programming, a list of sponsors of the event appeared on screen. The list included the National Religious Broadcasters, the Jewish Federations of North America, and Israel365, a group that organized a trip of MAGA influencers to Israel last year. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs was not advertised as a supporter—despite funding upwards of half of the lobbying push. Eagles’ Wings was secretly paid a total of $700,000 by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, $245,000 of which was allocated for its lobbying efforts this year, according to a previously unreported Israeli procurement document. Robert Stearns, a pastor and the founder of Eagles’ Wings, did pause to thank Tammy Ben-Haim, a Ministry official, for attending—but left it at that. The lobbying campaign plans to hold more than 100 meetings across Capitol Hill this week. “We would welcome the opportunity to meet with you to discuss the U.S.-Israel relationship,” reads a meeting invite sent to a Democratic Congressional staffer obtained by Drop Site. Subscribe now The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs notes in the contract that it is funding Eagles’ Wings in order to prevent churchgoers and priests “from adopting pro-BDS and anti-Israeli positions.” In the contract, an Israeli official conveyed that the campaign has support from high-ranking officials within the Israeli government. “The Eagles’ Wings project is very important to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Office of the Director General in particular.” Eagles’ Wings, the official added, is trying to invite the “most important among the attendees to more intimate meetings in order to improve their views on the State of Israel and to fight against the lies [people] are spreading about the country.” When contacted for comment about the funding, which Eagles’ Wings does not disclose anywhere on their website, Eagles’ Wings did not respond. A spokesperson for the Israeli Foreign Ministry did not respond to a request for comment. Eagles’ Wings, which has about 30 employees, is not a registered foreign agent. Craig Holman, an ethics expert and government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen, told Drop Site that Eagles’ Wings’ lobbying campaign raises serious questions about the organization’s compliance with the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA), the U.S.’ preeminent law for regulating foreign influence. “They should register as a foreign agent, declare how much money they’ve been paid, what they’re using the money for, and what offices they are lobbying on behalf of Israel,” said Holman. Religious organizations can avoid registering as a foreign agent if they are solely engaged in religious pursuits. However, Jonathan Winer, a Washington D.C.-based attorney who has worked on FARA issues for decades, explained that if an organization engages in “political activities”—an activity intended to influence the U.S. government to change its policies—they are required to register. “If you’re doing public relations work for a foreign government, that’s what FARA registration is for,” said Winer. “It’s not a gray area.” The goal of Israel Advocacy Day, according to the organizers themselves, is to shape U.S. policy towards the Middle East. This year’s agenda will focus on “reinforcing US support for Israel’s security, addressing the sharp rise of anti-semitism, and advancing protections for faith-based institutions facing increasing threats.” Last year’s Israel Advocacy Day featured speeches by Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.), Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee, and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.). It also included a performance from musician Yair Levi, who is a registered foreign agent of Israel and oversees a cohort of social media influencers paid by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Israel Advocacy Day is co-hosted by the American Christian Leaders for Israel, the International Christian Embassy Jerusalem (ICEJ), the Israel Allies Foundation, and the Israel Christian Nexus, another organization led by Stearns. By not registering as a foreign agent, lawmakers are left in the dark about who is funding the pro-Israel lobbying effort. “Members of Congress will want to know if the person they are talking to is a foreign agent who is being paid to represent Israeli interests,” said Holman. “That shouldn’t be used to discriminate against the lobbying effort, but it’s useful knowledge to weigh the merits of the messages they’re receiving from that lobbyist,” he added. The Israeli government also gave funding to Eagles’ Wings for major events with Evangelical Christians in Orlando, Washington D.C., and Memphis, a solidarity event for Israel featuring speakers from the Israel Defense Forces, and a music tour led by Christian singer-songwriter Jordan Feliz. Eagles’ Wings’ revenue was about $6 million in 2024, the most recent year available. If its revenue in 2025 is similar, the Israeli government will account for over 10% of its funding last year. The Israeli government has poured money into other ventures to win back support from American evangelicals. In September, the Israeli Foreign Ministry greenlit a $3.2 million plan to pay pastors, hire celebrity spokespeople, and target attendees of major evangelical churches in the American southwest during worship hours with ads. After significant backlash, much of that plan was scrapped. Anne Nelson, author of “Shadow Network: Media Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right,” explained in an interview with Drop Site that Israel is spending an “unprecedented amount of money to cultivate relations with Evangelical Christians” who have broken with Israel over Gaza. “Israel is going to be facing headwinds among younger Evangelicals who have been increasingly critical of Israel due to human rights and America First concerns,” she said. Stearns, the founder of Eagles’ Wings, acknowledged to the Jerusalem Post in October that his work bringing Evangelical leaders to Israel is partially funded by Israel. “We’ve brought 900 leaders so far…I’m so grateful for the visionary support Gideon Sa’ar and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs are giving in funding toward this project,” said Stearns. The Israeli government frequently sponsors trips to Israel; in December, 1,000 evangelical pastors flew to Jerusalem as part of a fully funded trip backed by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs. However, he has not acknowledged the funding appropriated for the lobbying campaign. According to annual IRS filings, other donors to Eagles’ Wings include the Christian Broadcasting Network and the 85 Fund, an organization co-founded by conservative legal activist Leonard Leo. Stearns, who founded the organization in 1994, has said he is willing to die for Israel because he sees it as a “crucial ally in a war against Islamic extremists.” A week after the U.S.-Israeli bombing campaign against Iran began, Stearns authored an article in the Jerusalem Post asking Christians to stand with Israel and visit the country. In a video on his YouTube channel, Stearns criticized the lack of American support for the war, blaming what he called the “dumbed down American public.” Stearns has spent years sounding the alarm about declining Evangelical support for Israel. “Support for Israel doesn’t just seem to be weakening; it is weakening, and at a concerning, alarming rate,” he told the Jerusalem Post. Support for Israel among evangelical Christians, a historically staunch pro-Israel stalwart in the U.S., has dropped in the past few years as Israel carried out attacks in Gaza, Lebanon, and Iran. Among white evangelicals, approval of Israel dropped ten points from February 2024 to September 2025, according to Pew Research. Last year, the Israeli government also gave more than $300,000 to create a show on Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN), the largest Evangelical television network in the world, according to a separate Israeli government procurement document. The payment was made to Shar-El Media and Productions, the official representative of TBN in Israel, to produce and broadcast a television program called “Insights.” The show, historically, has done several episodes dedicated to highlighting Israel’s military, artificial intelligence, and drone industries. Meeting with evangelical leaders in Palm Beach in late 2025, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu urged Christian Zionists to help fight Israel the “eight front,” the public relations battle. Stearns, for his part, sees himself as a foot soldier in this new “propaganda war.” At the gala on Monday night, Israel’s public relations crisis was a central theme. “According to recent statistics, less than 38% of young Americans, ages 18 through 34 hold a favorable view of Israel,” said Stella Inger-Escobedo, an anchor with One America News and one of the emcees of the night. “Their views are the result of lies, misinformation, propaganda that they have been exposed to by the media, academia, literally like 15 second TikTok videos.” Two IDF reservists from the U.S. and Canada, Noy Leyb and Max Long, delivered a video message at the gala echoing her concerns about Israel losing the eighth front. “What was happening on the ground was one thing. What the world was hearing was very different,” said Leyb and Long, who co-founded an organization that brings Israeli soldiers to American churches and schools. They credited Stearns with helping facilitate the partnership. 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Photo illustration: The Intercept / Screenshots: Clavicular Braden Peters, better known online as Clavicular, did not become famous by offering young men discipline in any ordinary sense. He became famous by selling them “ascension”: the promise that a better face, leaner body, harsher jaw, and ruthless optimization could buy them power in a world they believe has already priced them out. In April, that sermon hit a grisly wall (or, more accurately, a floor) when Peters was hospitalized after a suspected overdose during a livestream in Miami. Bloody and bruised, he later described the hospitalization as “brutal.” In the aftermath, Clavicular’s online presence has unraveled. YouTube recently removed his channels for repeated policy violations, including linking to prohibited sites and attempting to evade a previous ban. Despite being pushed off major platforms, he doubled down, staging a stunt trip late last month with a group of young women to Little Saint James, the private island once owned by Jeffrey Epstein. Now, that same pattern of boundary-pushing has bled into the courts: Clavicular is facing a civil lawsuit in Florida from Aleksandra Mendoza, who alleges battery, fraud, and emotional distress, including claims that he injected her with a non-FDA-approved substance during a livestream and engaged in nonconsensual sex. Still, the streamer seems to make news almost daily, most recently for reportedly entering into a club venture in Miami with a man with ties to the Israeli mob. None of this ongoing ordeal is some tragic footnote to the Clavicular brand. It has been him reaching his final form, stripped of filters: a young man preaching mastery through chemical self-invention, then collapsing live on camera, only to be slapped with subpoenas. The New Prophet of Male Despair Clavicular’s movement lives in the vocabulary of “looksmaxxing,” “hardmaxxing,” and “ascending,” a lexicon born in incel-adjacent internet forums and now being pushed into the mainstream by TikTok, Kick, and algorithmic outrage. Looksmaxxing culture didn’t emerge from nowhere; it grew out of the fringe online forums where users reduce attraction to “power, status, and looks,” obsessively rate faces, and turn self-improvement into an unyielding, almost clinical hierarchy of attractiveness. His popularity stems from selling what he claims is the answer to a worldview born from the insular hodgepodge of pickup artists, anti-women forums, and involuntary celibacy groups — and he’s dragged it into the spotlight. [ Related Trump Helps Alleged Sex Trafficker Andrew Tate Cross Border Into U.S.](https://theintercept.com/2025/02/27/trump-andrew-tate-sex-trafficking/) He has promoted steroid use, “bone smashing,” injecting peptides, and even using methamphetamine as part of a savage self-improvement regimen aimed mostly at young men. He has also drifted openly around Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, and the broader online right while insisting politics are for “jesters” (an insult in the looksmaxxing community). That juke is its own tell, because when a teenager builds an audience on hierarchy, humiliation, sexual scarcity, and racialized beauty standards, he is doing politics whether he says so or not. Clavicular did not invent male despair, but he has certainly monetized it to his own great success. It’s not unheard of for a young man to throw himself into the gym, practice self-discipline, embark on a rigid diet, and curate a public-facing persona. I’ve imbibed on bodybuilding culture in my own life. But Clavicular’s worldview is fueled by more than simple vanity. It is blackpill nihilism in gym clothes. The “blackpill” tells young men that the social order is fixed, intimacy is a commodified market, and the only thing left is to become more physically dominant than the next guy or accept your permanent irrelevance. In that mental framework, body maintenance becomes class warfare of the face. It is triage in a mating economy. Clavicular did not invent male despair, but he has certainly monetized it to his own great success. Blackpilled There is a reason this message is resonating. Clavicular’s runway to launch is an America where young men are more atomized and are worse off than their forefathers. Young American men are lonely, socially frayed, and increasingly detached from the kinds of institutions that once gave people identity outside romance and work. Gallup found that 25 percent of U.S. men ages 15 to 34 said they felt lonely “a lot” of the previous day, a higher number than young women and second in the world among our peer countries. The 2023 surgeon general’s advisory on social connection warned the country’s broader epidemic of isolation is not merely personal but structural. [ Related Right-Wing YouTuber Behind Viral Minnesota Fraud Video Has Long Anti-Immigrant History](https://theintercept.com/2025/12/31/nick-shirley-videos-minnesota-somali-day-cares-fraud-claims/) Gone too is the era where men could feel like they were contributing to the community and world around them. A farmer could see his food nourishing his neighbors, a cobbler’s work lived on the feet of his peers, and a doctor literally saved the lives of his local village. These are now nothing more than oral legends passed down from baby-boomer and Gen X parents of the way it used to be. But it is also revisionist history. This is the part too many elders refuse to admit: A lot of men were raised to expect an unearned inheritance. It was an entitlement gained at the exclusion of everyone else. They were assured that stable work, baseline social respect, and starting a family would follow if they merely stayed on the tracks as a heterosexual, yet basic, white man. But the tracks have buckled. Economist Raj Chetty’s work on mobility found that 90 percent of children born in 1940 earned more than their parents; for children born in the 1980s, that figure had fallen to around half. Meanwhile, wage growth for the top has badly outpaced the bottom 90 percent over the long arc of modern American inequality. That does not excuse reactionary politics, but it does explain why so many young men feel they were promised adulthood and handed precarity. Misogyny is foundational to the entire right-wing project. The modern far right, which has stepped in to fill the space the erosion of our institutions and social fabric have left behind, understands something even modern liberals tend to flatten: Misogyny is not a secondary issue. It is foundational to the entire right-wing project. Researchers have described misogyny as a gateway into far-right radicalization, and scholars who research white nationalism have shown how “Great Replacement” ideology is soaked in reproductive anxiety — the fantasy that white decline is caused not just by immigration but by women refusing their assigned breeding role. In these circles, women are not citizens. They are demographic assets and currency. But as civil rights, reproductive rights, and immigration have expanded opportunities, life isn’t so easy for the static white-bread young men of America. They now have to bring more to the table. [ Related “Me Too” Comes Back to Congress](https://theintercept.com/2026/04/24/congress-me-too-swalwell-democrats-midterms/) It is why in Clavicular’s talk of “ascension” doesn’t just coincide with a rise in personal male beauty, but in parallel with right-wing mansophere attacks on what has been the perceived robbery of white male entitlements. It’s no shock that much of Clavicular’s vocabulary aims to diminish women, whom he publicly humiliates on his stream and reduces into self-serving chasers of status, making claims of centuries-old patriarchal domination as a societal good. It’s an ethos that punches back at the external reality of his impressionable fanbase. That is why Clavicular matters beyond his own cartoonish excess. He is not just some young misanthrope with a camera and a syringe. He is a clean vessel for a much older grievance: that sweeping social change has stripped certain men, especially but not exclusively cis white men, of an unearned ease their fathers and grandfathers treated as normal. The Disappearing Man The real theft here is spiritual. In a quixotic quest for authenticity, young men are instead being sold a playbook that they must collapse themselves into tiny, fixed archetypes: warrior, king, alpha, mogger, Chad. Missing is heroism — not performative strength, but the harder labor of standing against cruelty. In Clavicular’s lane, and under the auspices of social media attention, the commandment is simpler still: become beautiful or become nothing. Conspicuously absent from that script are virtues like wisdom, tenderness, stewardship, restraint, humor, and even morality. Missing, too, is heroism — not performative strength, but the harder labor of standing against cruelty, telling the truth under pressure, protecting the vulnerable, and trying to tilt the world a few degrees toward justice. That is why the blackpill philosophy, and broader manosphere, is antithetical to perhaps the most important tenet of true growth: courage. It is surrender disguised as realism. It tells men to stop imagining themselves as builders of community tasked with fighting unjust systems, and instead obsess over their social ranking. It is a feudal vision of manhood with the body as castle, the whole world as an ever-present threat, and other men as rivals. That is the real cowardice of imagination at the center of Clavicular’s rise. Not that he tells young men to exercise, clean up, or care how they present themselves. Fine. Groom yourself. Build your body. Take some responsibility. But do not confuse optimization with grit. And do not mistake a man begging his followers to buy into his despair for a leader of men. The post Clavicular and the Right-Wing Project to Radicalize Young Men appeared first on The Intercept. From The Intercept via This RSS Feed.