ProdigalFrog @ ProdigalFrog @slrpnk.net

A frog who wants the objective truth about anything and everything.

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If by Mesh Network you mean Meshtastic, they have very different use-cases.

Meshtastic requires regular nodes/repeaters within its somewhat short range to be effective (putting repeater stations atop hills or mountains can drastically extend that effective range), it also exclusively operates via text, not audio.

NVIS is just a small long-range portable radio that bounces radio waves directly off the ionosphere which is reflected in a circular radius of 150 to 300 miles from the transmitting antenna, and is not reliant on being atop mountains to attain that range due to the reflected bouncing. The video gives details on how it is generally used.

but at the moment - until further support - GNU Taler is for tech savvy people whereas WERO is in the middle of a broader rollout even at merchants.

I fear that without more Bank adoption and dog-fooding of GNU Taler, it may not ever get that additional support, as it is diverted in favor of the 'good enough' solution of Wero. I can't say I'd mind having Wero in addition to Taler as an option.

For exchanges, yes. For merchants, no.

After looking around a bit more, I found this link here, which seems to suggest a KYC implementation is still in progress, since existing services don't meet their criteria.

Merchants can’t take possession of the funds, the exchange determines when the money is sent.

The Wire deadline as you mentioned later limits how long they can keep the money, and if they are purposefully delaying, they could be investigated by an oversight body or go unused compared to an exchange that does not.

but given that shortening it makes the refund UX worse I’m not sure it’s ideal. It’s weird to have this be a tradeoff anyway.

I can't say I disagree entirely, and I would hope that such oddities would be improved in the future.

Fees differ per country [...]

Cheers for the info and link, that does make it quite cheap, I must say.

Based on that, Wero is objectively an improvement over the credit card monopoly or paypal. However I fear that if it wins out this payment war, it will end up being the only option, and I very much doubt that it will ever implement the privacy features from GNU Taler that I consider absolutely paramount for a future digital payment system to not be abused in the future. We're already seeing how governments are pushing for less online privacy with the constant Chat Control legislation, which we're only narrowly avoiding, and with far right parties across Europe gaining more and more of the vote, I very much think it prudent to advocate for privacy respecting technologies wherever possible, even at the expensive of some convenience.

The video creator is not a right-wing libertarian, they're a leftist Anarchist.

The most effective non-violent action we can take is joining local mutual aid groups, reading Full Spectrum Resistance for more details, and ultimately preparing and organizing for a General Strike.

The country would be brought to its knees if suddenly deprived of profit and labor. That tactic was extremely effective in Chile in 2019, and had they not fallen for the trick of liberal reform, they would've had a successful revolution on their hands with virtually no bloodshed.

If you aren't in a union (or even if you are, it's worth dual-carding), please consider joining the IWW to unionize your workplace (bonus: you'll get higher wages, better benefits, and more time off if you succeed!) to strengthen a general strike if we manage to enact one, as most unions have a strike fund that can supplement your income during a general strike to make it more financially bearable (you should also save as much money as you can reasonably do, so it can also be used to keep yourself afloat during a strike).

• 🌍 US/Global: IWW (Français) - (Español)

And for our international friends, you should join one as well, as fascism is gaining momentum globally. If your country isn't listed below, just contact the IWW directly in the link above, and they'll help you set up a new local branch.

• 🇦🇷 Argentina: FORA
• 🇦🇺 Australia: ASF-IWA
• 🇧🇷 Brazil: FOB
• 🇧🇬 Bulgaria: ARS, CITUB
• 🇩🇪 Germany: FAU
• 🇬🇷 Greece: ESE
• 🇮🇹 Italy: USI
• 🇳🇱 🇧🇪 Netherlands & Belgium: Vriji Bond
• 🇪🇸 Spain: CNT
• 🇸🇪 Sweden: SAC
• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: UVW

the anonymous aspect might sound nice but KYC laws prevent merchants from accepting it

GNU Taler's documentation already covers KYC laws.

This means a store has to wait 2 weeks at minimum before they get their money (modern payment methods are instant or next-day, 2 weeks is exceptionally long). That’s a massive dealbreaker.

They would only need to wait 2 weeks if they specifically want to be able to reverse a charge, but AFAIK a merchant can take possession of the money much earlier, and can still send a refund to a buyer's Taler wallet at any time as a separate transaction.

It also means exchanges can make tons of money by keeping the transferred funds in their account and collecting interest on it.

I'm not sure how that's a problem specifically? Why does it matter if they gain a little interest on it on the time that they have it until the merchant exchanges their tokens for the money? Is that worse than the fees associated with Wero?

The European Payments Initiative (EPI), which developed Wero, has indeed promised that the new payment method will not be more expensive than iDEAL for the first two years. However, it’s unclear what exactly this means. In any case, the rate will increase after two years, creating uncertainty about what the exact costs will be. And even if the per-transaction fee remains the same, the extra procedures around chargebacks will still cause a significant cost increase for businesses.

I'm assuming that source is financially biased against Wero's success, but I couldn't find anything else about Wero's fees except from Wero themselves, which was very vague:

Our pricing is clear and merchant-friendly: a small percentage fee with built-in caps, so you stay in control of costs - whether you’re processing €5 or €5,000. One model that works for businesses of all sizes.

If you have a more clear source, let me know.

It’s also quite funny to me that Taler claims to be immune to chargeback fraud, when it doesn’t offer chargebacks in the first place. Makes it easy, don’t it?

That is a legitimate downside of Taler. Personally I think the trade-off is worth it for the increased privacy, since corporations and states will inevitably use your purchase history against you at some point in the future if fascists take power once again.

GNU Taler does the same job that Wero is attempting (replacing Paypal, Mastercard, etc), only better and anonymous. We should be pushing for a long-term solution that can't be abused, and GNU Taler is that solution.

You‘re missing the point that Android and iOS are still the predominant platforms and realistically won’t go away anytime soon.

Android and iOS have both made it clear that they will only become further enshittified and consumer hostile. We should be advocating for non-corporate opensource replacements for them as well to truly take back our computing freedom and privacy, in same way that we should advocate for GNU Taler to free us from any corporate control over our payment systems, and give us a genuine cash-like anonymity that cannot be abused by states or corporations.

Per wikipedia:

Wero is managed by banks via their mobile apps. This creates a dependency on iOS (Apple) and Android (Google) systems. Consequently, Wero exchanges its reliance on payment networks like Visa and Mastercard, for a reliance on two Big Tech giants—Apple and Google, with the new dependency focusing on online availability and distribution through their application stores.

Needing to rely on two pro-fascist tech companies seems like a particularly bad idea. Wero also does not appear to be anonymous.

A better alternative to Wero is GNU Taler, which is a properly open standard that is a true anonymous digital cash, and offers real independence from tech-bro corporations.

We have a community that discusses GNU Taler over at !money@slrpnk.net

Per wikipedia:

Wero is managed by banks via their mobile apps. This creates a dependency on iOS (Apple) and Android (Google) systems. Consequently, Wero exchanges its reliance on payment networks like Visa and Mastercard, for a reliance on two Big Tech giants—Apple and Google, with the new dependency focusing on online availability and distribution through their application stores.

Needing to rely on two pro-fascist tech companies seems like a particularly bad idea. Wero also does not appear to be anonymous.

A better alternative to Wero is GNU Taler, which is a properly open standard that is a true anonymous digital cash, and offers real independence from tech-bro corporations.

We have a community that discusses GNU Taler over at !money@slrpnk.net

Also @PracticalFail@feddit.org

The migration to Piefed has been planned for quite a few months now, and has been brought up in previous Monthly Meta posts as far back as July 2025. I can see how it might seem like it's coming out of nowhere if you hadn't come across those threads.

The main reason we've been wanting to switch is the technical difficulties with hosting Lemmy itself, @poVoq@slrpnk.net goes into more details here. While poVoq has been able to manage the problems of Lemmy by diligently resolving odd issues and implementing workarounds as they come up, overall it has been a troublesome piece of software to host reliably.

Piefed has developed quite quickly, and nowadays is mostly comparable in features to Lemmy, as well as having some unique features of its own (the July 2025 link goes over the big ones). Piefed appears to be more stable than Lemmy due to using proven standard frameworks, and would bring with it some fairly dramatic improvements in efficiency and resource usage.

If the migration goes well, then it is unlikely that we would continue to host Lemmy in addition to the Piefed. However this should not cause too much disruption. Piefed is now 100% compatible with multiple popular Lemmy mobile apps, such as Voyager, Summit, Blorp, etc, so if you already use those apps, everything will still work exactly the same on that end. And Piefed is 100% federation compatible with Lemmy instances, so you will still be able to access all the same communities we have access to today from Lemmy. Our alternative Lemmy frontend Photon is also Piefed compatible, so that will remain the same as well for anyone who uses that. Even the creator of our Lemmy site theme is switching to Piefed, so that would carry over too. The only major change that would occur is the change to the main website UI from a browser, but Piefed is laid out fairly similarly, and shouldn't take much to get used to (you can try it out here).

Migrating an existing Lemmy instance to Piefed is still technically experimental, so we'll have to reevaluate if turns out to cause too many problems, but if everything goes well, we are likely to make the switch at some point.

I think what's now known as Utopian Scholastic has a particularly solarpunk-y vibe, IMO. You can hear an example here.

I had no issue making Wii Sports Resort with motion plus.

Looking at it again, I misremembered the Dolphin wiki entry for it. Apparently it only has problems unless using Bluetooth Passthrough mode, which I didn't really want to mess with to get working with my bluetooth dongle.

you can completely erase the pain point of this by using Playnite as front end (in windows) and configuring your emulators (Dolphin, PCSX2 etc) to start full screen WITH controller support started at run time, along with enabling hot key macros for shutting down game and returning to dashboard etc. Playnite has native scripting control.

Unfortunately I wouldn't be able to use Playnite, as I've fully sworn off Windows personally in favor of Linux. However, even if Playnite were on Linux, I'm honestly not sure I'd go that route for myself. Even though it's fully configurable powerful, with macros that can be set up to get things just right, and specific versions of Dolphin may be more ideal for a particular game, I'm kind've at a point in my life where that type of fine-tuning and tinkering is far less appealing compared to when I was younger, where I would've seen it as a fun challenge.

The original merit of consoles was that they're simple plug-n-play devices that don't require much though to use, and that aspect is really appealing to me nowadays, as it leaves me more time to troubleshoot or experiment with non-gaming things, like tinkering to get a good audio production setup going on my Linux PC with certain outboard audio (which can be time consuming to figure out). So for me, a jail broken Wii really fits the bill of a simple box that I can just turn on and know everything will just work, and no update will mess anything up and require me to look into it.

But that's just me! For others, that tinkering and the end result of it is highly gratifying, and more power to em, I say :)

Critically, they convert an old street legal pedal assisted moped from the 70's into electric (and make it much lighter to make pedaling actually viable) to skirt Canada's laws restricting the speed of e-bicycles, since the moped was already street legal, it can go much faster legally, but can genuinely use bike paths as well with a speed/power limiter activated.

Maybe I only tried Impossible after they perfected their formula, but in all the meals I've cooked with it, like burgers, chili, stuffed peppers, beef stroganoff, meatballs, etc, I wouldn't be able to tell that it's not real beef in either flavor or texture unless someone told me.

I cannot say the same for some other alternatives like soy curls, tvp, beyond meat, all of which have a certain 'off' flavor. Beyond meat as an example uses pea protein, which seems more difficult to mask.

The only other alternative that I've found that can convincingly be beef is Quorn, which if cooked with a bullion cube or marmite can very effectively replace ground beef in most recipes.

Oh, and those mushroom based Meati steaks are also really good and beefy. The texture is softer than real steak, but it works great for steak tacos.

Movim could be a good alternative. It supports group chats and group voice/video calls, and uses XMPP on the backend.

Thanks for the heads up! The Wayback machine shows their site was working a few months ago, so hopefully they get it back up soon. In the meantime, the joining page on the wayback machine says you can contact info@asf-iwa.org.au to join up, which is hopefully still an active email. The Wayback link also shows links to their Facebook pages (unfortunate choice of platform), which are still active.

No prob :)

This, pretty much. The IWW offers a great organizer training 101 program to members, and they'll take on any shop, no matter the industry and no matter how small (even if it's just two people).

Their dues are also very low, and as of a few years ago, have set up a strike fund to help striking workers make ends meet.

If you haven't tried Impossible beef yet, I'd highly recommend it. It's a 1 to 1 replacement for me (I actually prefer it and that's coming from someone who loved beef)

It may as well be equivalent to lab grown, but is already widely available, affordable (especially on sale), and uses tremendously less resources than the real deal. Def recommend giving it a shot!

The archive site is not their current website, you can find the active site at https://www.iww.org/

Dues start at $11 US dollars per month there for lower income folks, but as you say, they may vary depending on if you have a local branch in a different country.