Tootfinder

Put away pipelines, go with grids!
By David Suzuki with contributions from Senior Editor and Writer Ian Hanington
It’s good to see ideas such as increasing self-sufficiency and diversifying trade partners emerging in response to U.S. attacks on Canada’s economy and threats to our sovereignty. As usual, though, the fossil fuel industry and its supporters are taking advantage of this “crisis” to push for more oil and gas infrastructure, particularly pipelines.

Put away pipelines, go with grids!
A true nation-building project would be to create a renewable-powered integrated electricity grid throughout the country.

"What is different, is that before what were largely fringe anti-Semitic and white supremacist theories floating around the far corners of the Alt-Right, have now become the backbone of the Republican party. 'The Great Replacement,' once a conspiracy pushed by only hardline neo-Nazis and white supremacists, is now being touted by everyone from pharma billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy, Swason frozen foods heir and Twitter troll Tucker Carlson, to the billionaire backed Turning Point US…

"But there were technologists and open source projects in attendance. Notably, representatives from the Mastodon and Bluesky teams were at the Festival. The Newsmast Foundation was also present, incisively taking part in conversations to help newsrooms onboard themselves onto both of them. I got to hang out with them all, connecting with people I’d spoken with but never interacted with in person. Mastodon has undergone a transformation, has doubled its team, and is working on smoothing out some of its rough edges, while not letting go of its core ethos. It’s also beginning to position itself as a European alternative to American social media platforms, with a community-first values system and new services to directly help organizations join the network.
Bluesky, on the other hand, has done an able job of bringing journalists onto its existing social app, and is now hard at work explaining why its underlying protocol matters. Both want to engage with newsrooms and journalists and do the right thing by them. They each have something different to prove: Mastodon that it can be usable and accessible, and Bluesky that it can provide a return to its investors and truly decentralize while holding onto its values. I’m rooting for both of them.
These platforms’ messages dovetail with my own: news can own the platforms that support them. Lots of people at the Festival were worried about the impact of US big tech on their businesses — particularly in a world where tech moguls seem to be aligning themselves with a Presidential administration that has positioned itself as being adversarial to news, journalists, sources, and, arguably, the truth. The good news is that the technology is out there, the values-aligned technologists are out there, and there’s a strong path forward. The only thing left is to follow it."
#media #Mastodon #BlueSky #Journalism
https://werd.io/2025/notes-from-perugia-journalism-values-and-building-the-web-we