I may be wrong about the actual reason for this - as ‘double V’ is also quite common - and it may just end up being some kind of ‘well when the printing press came to England’ thing, but:

In the classical Latin alphabet, the letter ‘V’ was not actually representative of what we today recognise as the /u/ sound (or its variants). It was in fact the written form of the /u/ sound (and related variants). So when the W was introduced to the English alphabet, I guess it was indeed a ‘double /u/‘.

This has been a necessary step for over a decade, honestly. Hoping it goes well.

I’m from Vesterålen in Northern Norway and this is giving me huge home vibes.

So I’m guessing it’s a combination of dun/den/tun etc being a common suffix in a lot of historical languages, and ‘ei’ being an extremely common diphthong worldwide just… leading to a lot of similar-sounding names that also converge in spelling in modern English?

AoE2 soundtrack is a timeless masterpiece. Still have the CD from the Collectors Edition somewhere.

I live in the UK, but am from Norway. I know a few librarians though, and I know that community libraries are usually (or at least often) interested in projects that can connect their communities and help them with outreach. Something like this certainly could do that, and with libraries existing in most communities there is a built in network for broader proliferation there.

I’m also just very keen on the idea of libraries having a central role to play in the future of the broader fediverse ecosystem.

Edit: It may be key to pitch this to them not as a platform, but as a decentralised community network.

Loving this concept. May I make a suggestion? Show this to and discuss this with your local library. That strikes me as a good potential partner, and a model that can be replicated in most places to potentially help with everything from hosting to community resources access.

Gonna ignore all context for the purposes of answering / contributing to a discussion of a kinda valid underlying question:

There is a disconnect between moderation and membership in an ostensibly democratic social media structure. How could that gap be bridged?

The way I see it, this is basically the representation vs delegation debate, though here it is arguable whether there is even representation. From this perspective, you can draw on a couple of hundred years of theory and practice to arrive at potential structures.

For example, you could have a system where members of a community mark themselves as willing to moderate it, and all members select a willing delegate essentially their ‘moderating power’ to. Mods are then selected by number of delegations, which would be a fluid process because users can redistribute their ‘votes’ at any time. This would make mods immediately answerable to the members.

To make the system less vulnerable to hijacking you would probably need some kind of delay in there so that you wouldn’t suddenly get a mass influx of new users delegating to the same mods to take over the community, and there would likely need to be other measures in place as well. But it would certainly be a neat experiment!

(Just to note, I am not saying the current moderation model is necessarily bad, just figured it would be interesting to consider alternative approaches and have a look at what possible problems there might be in both the current model and any such alternatives.)

Removal of dedicated server functionality in favour of matchmaking was always going to be a horrible, horrible idea. And this is honestly the least of its negative consequences. Even before that there was the requirement of multiplayer servers to be set up through ‘official channels’ of various sorts, which has this same problem because those are still platforms with maintenance costs that companies will eventually cut.

It’s the same platforms vs protocols issue that the fediverse is addressing, just in a different sphere of the internet.

You only feel bound by the social contract of the community / communities of which you actually feel part in your day to day. The one-two punch of neoliberal hyper-individualism (and the associated deliberate deconstruction of community) and online communities of special interests leads to people walking about a shared world with widely disparate senses of what their ‘social contract’ stipulates.

Thing to keep in mind on this is that it’s a national regulatory decision based on an EU regulatory decision, and it is expected to be just the first of several more like it to come from it. Meaning, it is likely to spread and it is likely to escalate over time. And even if it’s just an added cost of doing business, it does impact the financial viability of Facebook surveillance-capitalistic model.

The purpose and function of the police and the courts is the protection of capital from the people. Some cases illustrate this more clearly than others. This is one of them.