It’s still on and will close at the end of the month. But yes I’m very annoyed that they didn’t share much of the instance outside a small notification on the admin.ch website. But the goal of this whole pilot test is that if Mastodon became big within the year, they would already have an instance running with officials accounts. But instead I guess they will focus on Bluesky.

The USSR (then Russia) did this in the 90s, first prototype was a 20m wide reflector. Second prototype failed and then interest and money went away. Originally it was meant to also test solar sails feasibility.

If you have Nebula, Mustard did a 10mn documentary on it.

Project Znamya on Wikipedia

Can they add an option to show roads with more twist for us riding a motorbike? I’d love to road trip without having to look too closely at the map for nice roads.

Switzerland does have a mandatory service for all men, and doesn’t have belligerent neighbours… But the Swiss army is still very much stuck in the cold war mindset of being afraid of an invasion. Last time there was a vote, the people refused to abolish the militia system.

Tbh I don’t think military service is a problem as long as it’s only used for defence and is properly setup, instead of have nutjobs running the small professional army and wanting war because they trained their whole life for it…