European Commission - Have your say

For too long, the internet has been shaped by platforms funded by venture capital and advertising. The Fediverse is testament to a different kind of social media: one built for its users, not corporate interests. This independence is what makes Mastodon and the wider Fediverse special, fostering a diverse and resilient network of communities. We are showing the world every day, that this model works! Independence comes with its own set of challenges. Running a server, moderating content, and developing the software that powers this network requires resources. We want to make it easier for those who value Mastodon to make donations directly, to “flip the script” from corporations funded by surveillance capitalism, to sustainable support built from many small donations. When the people who use the platform are its primary backers, the platform’s loyalty remains with them. Over the next few days, we will be taking a deliberate and measured step forwards, by making the donation feature more visible. We will be rolling out a campaign on the Mastodon servers that we operate (mastodon.social and mastodon.online). This will allow us to gather feedback and understand the process, so we can learn whether it feels right for our community. The initial campaign will appear via a banner to people that use our Android and iOS apps, if they are signed-in to an account on one of our instances, and only if their account has existed for four weeks or more. The banner will be easy to dismiss, of course, and we will not continually prompt users to donate. This will only show up in our mobile apps for now - in a future campaign, we hope to extend the feature to the web as well. The banner is separate from the existing Donate button that appears in the app settings for users on our instances. If this works well, we would like to make this fundraising option available to all other Mastodon instances. This would empower individual server administrators to receive direct support from their users. Each instance could then choose whether or not to enable this feature, giving them another tool to ensure their long-term viability. We expect this to have a number of detailed requirements, and it would take effort to build out as a broader feature; it is something we consider a medium to longer term concept, rather than an immediate next step. We know that collecting money can present complexities and questions. We’d like to figure out how to do this well, together with the community. This is not a corporate fundraising campaign: it’s an effort to secure the future of a more ethical and independent social web. It’s an invitation to help us build a platform that truly belongs to all of us. Thank you for your support as we take another small step forwards in our fundraising efforts. ### Thank you for supporting Mastodon We develop and maintain the free and open-source software that powers the social web. There is no capital behind this—we rely entirely on your support through platforms like Patreon. Donate on Patreon Donate directly View our sponsors

Sechs Verdächtige festgenommen. Ein 71-jähriger Mann hortete 87 Lang- und 51 Faustfeuerwaffen.

In everyday life, we naturally assume that it is up to us how we act, and that we are therefore responsible for our actions. However, free will in this strong, ‘libertarian’ sense – involving a choice between alternatives – is increasingly being questioned by philosophers and scientists. While traditional concerns were predicated on the deterministic laws of classical physics, today sceptics also cite biology and neuroscience. We are told that our genes or our brains, not we, decide what we want and how we act. This conference gathers leading experts in philosophy, biology, and neuroscience who argue the opposite. Cutting-edge research into the biological and neural basis of human and animal agency challenges deterministic assumptions, adding to doubts from quantum physics and pointing to non-reductionist views of agency and action causation. At the same time, recent advances in the philosophy of biology and metaphysics offer new conceptual resources for understanding agency and free will under indeterminism. The conference explores the resulting prospects for a scientifically grounded, ontologically robust concept of ‘libertarian’ free will, breaking new ground in interdisciplinary research on free will.