First of all, many of us used Google Reader and Google shutting that down totally destroyed my trust in Google and other companies. My reader is critical infrastructure for me and I do not want some random company to screw me again. I think that many others experienced losing a valuable tool and that is why there are so many selfhosted RSS readers out there.

If we are taking the 2004 NATO expansion as a cutoff and the fall of the Soviet union in 1991 as baseline, Russia attacked Georgia and Moldova in the 1990s. Followed by Georgia again in 2008 & Ukraine in 2014 and 2022.

It’s the right of every country to join military alliances as they want. And some promise back in the early 90s is totally nothing binding that is valid when one country is actively attacking its neighbors. Every neighbor state will then try to get into an alliance against such aggression.

There really is a place for closed forums of enthusiasts where not everybody can get access and where you can talk without being indexed by Google, fed into LLMs and analyzed by Palantir. There is a place for an open discussion on a public square, a place for a chat among mates in a pub and a scientific conference where people can speak freely about their research without fucking Elon Musk leading an army of trolls into the audience