Here is the data they are forced to report to the EU:

Logged In X Users 61.8M Logged Out Guests 49.6M Total 111.4M

https://transparency.x.com/en/reports/amars-in-the-eu/amars-in-the-eu-aug-24

“Logged out Guests” is everyone who gets linked to a thread, who was send an video on Twitter and so on. And also take a look at the definition of the logged in users:

EU Active Recipients of the Service - Average between August 1st 2023 - January 31 2024

So you do count as active EU user if you have logged in between August and January with an IP address from the EU. That should even include some tourists.

No, but there really is a difference to Russia

Still better than Chrome. Mozilla is not perfect, but in comparison to Google and its behavior they are saints.

Russia invaded a peaceful european country without any reason and is committing war crimes there. Every country which supports them is supporting that. Fuck everyone who is downtalking that and is talking about “nothing new” or “the west is also…”

Kind of not what you’re looking for, but use rss2email to send everything as a mail to a mail address.

Language is democratic. If people are starting to speak or write in a certain way, that is the correct way to use a language. I know that we have all these organizations trying to define “correct” language use, but if many Germans are deciding that they want to use this apostrophe, that should be correct.

And there is another issue: There are a lot of people looking down on people who can’t read or write correctly. You can see this here: people are calling other people itiots just because they are using an apostrophe in a not officially accepted way. Which should never, never happen

It is even worse:

Between 20-25% of the European population is functionally illiterate. In other words: at least one citizen in five does not have the reading and writing skills they need for functioning in society, with all its consequences for education, employment, health care, welfare, social integration and political participation. ‘More than 73 million adults in the EU… do not have sufficient literacy levels to cope with the daily requirements of personal, social, and economic life’

https://blogs.fasos.maastrichtuniversity.nl/EUS2516/lowliteracyineurope/

So they are not just not reading any books, they literally can’t read books.

I would question your focus on growth. Yes, we all want this place to succeed. But do we really want this unlimited growth like Facebook, Reddit and all those other companies? Small communities are great, they give you a connection between users, they spark friendships and great discourse. Those are great. Yes, they are smaller than those multimillion user subreddits, but we’ve all seen those big subreddits slowly burning down. Dying to bots, to marketing spam, to low effort, popular comments, to reposts, to karma farming, to US politics. We’ve seen subreddit after subreddit dying to moderator burnout - because big subs are really hard to moderate, people will burn out. They are sacrificing their free time to deal with trolls, shills, putins guys and receive no compensation for that.

So maybe … let’s don’t replicate Reddit? Let’s focus on creating small, helpful communities and people will come.

If it is counting website visits, I’m wondering how they are filtering out bots using selenium on a linux system to crawl their sites. That should be a huge amount of traffic

You should remove old posts & comments from every site you post to on a regular basis. There is no reason for those pictures from 2007 being on Facebook. Your old Twitter comments from 2011 might bit you in the ass in a few years. Nobody in their right mind is looking at your 2014 Instagram posts and you don’t want people out of their right mind seeing those. Why should that comment about Obamas election still be available for the world? Just nuke your old stuff on a regular basis - nobody looks at it and if people are searching through your old posts, they want to harm you.

And then there is the whole issue with private property - even if you’re not allowed to use metal detectors, there is nothing preventing you from digging holes in your own garden. But that is not what most people are doing - most suburbs are getting an archeological survey before they are build and then the construction will destroy everything else. So most metal detectors are running around on fields, through woods, some with private owners, some in state ownership

It totally does make sense. Amateurs with metal detectors are in most cases not really qualified to to archeological digs. And they really are not able do document them properly. Archeology is not only about the artifacts, but also about how they were found. Take a roman coin: If you buy it on Ebay or find it in the street, it is a roman coin. But if you find a roman coin f.e. on an ancient battlefield, you can use it to date the battle. That context gets lost when archeology is not done properly.

Also their finds are vanishing mostly into private collections. That really doesn’t matter with random coins, but f.e. the sky disc of Nebra, one of Europes most stunning bronze age finds, was dug up during an illegal private metal detector search and they then tried to sell it on the black market. So it does make sense to ban metal detector hunting.

Don’t listen to Axel Springer propaganda. They lie and distord facts. They want to make you angry.

Tourism also comes in seasons - a ski resort will be crowded in winter, but empty when the snow melts. A beach town is empty in the winter, but busy in the summer. Some cities are getting a huge influx of tourists for specific events, like Munich for the Oktoberfest. So your calculation won’t be accurate to measure the impact of tourism.

It also depends on what tourists are doing in the city and where they are staying. When they are visiting Disneyland Paris or some musical in Hamburg, they aren’t really bothering the locals. That’s different when they are all crowding in the old town of Dubrovnik.