That number is a bit questionable:

• It only includes sites where the server-side language can be detected. That’s often easy with PHP because of URLs ending in .php and well-known software like Wordpress which identifies itself in ways that are easy for a crawler to detect.
• It counts sites, not traffic. There are a lot of Wordpress sites out there which get three visitors a month.

The EU already did, but it lets Apple impose significant restrictions and charge fees. I don’t think it went nearly far enough.

A significant chance of having to defend one’s self in court is enough to keep most people from doing a thing. That’s a major inconvenience, expense, and risk of serious consequences. It surely has a chilling effect on speech, or a civilizing effect on public discourse, depending on your perspective.

In the USA, I can write online that Trump advisor Stephen Miller is a Nazi, an asshole, and a xenophobe, and that I want him to kill himself, with no legal risk whatsoever. Nazi is the only one of those that even comes close to having an objective test for truth, which is actually what makes the statement protected under US law. If I called him a rapist or an embezzler, he might be able to sue for defamation.

Case law makes a big difference here. Germany allows a number of significant exceptions and limitations to freedom of expression, while the right is closer to absolute in the USA.

• In the USA, photographing people in public places and publishing those photographs without permission is legal, and cannot be made illegal without changing the constitution. It is mostly illegal to publish photographs of people without permission in Germany, even if they were taken in public.
• Making true statements about a person, even if they’re about something intimate or intended to diminish the person’s social standing is legal in the USA unless there’s a specific obligation of confidentiality, such as between a doctor and patient. Germany punishes releasing intimate information and presenting information in a way that encourages discrimination.
• Insults that do not amount to false statements of fact are protected speech in the USA. Insults are a crime in Germany.
• Hate speech is protected in the USA and criminal in Germany.
• Making false statements about history is protected in the USA. Holocaust denial and the like is criminal in Germany.

So no, Germany does not have a right to free speech in the sense that the USA does. One significant structural difference is that the US constitution expresses it as a negative right: it starts with “Congress shall make no law” and lists several topics the government may not regulate. The German Grundgesetz establishes positive rights to both freedom of expression and dignity, implying that the government must actively protect both and resolve conflicts between them.

I have long supported old-style platform immunity protecting providers from liability for the content of a search result, forum post, or the like.

Both individually tailored content recommendation algorithms and LLM output are different, and companies should be liable for the output of both when they’re used in the way social media platforms and search engines are currently using them.

I self-host Mastodon on a cheap VPS. It’s kind of a hassle. Just recently I found it running out of disk space because I followed an account that auto-boosts a lot of media. It was like 50gb per day of media cache. I unfollowed that account.

That’s a minor problem that didn’t even involve malicious activity. I’m going to keep self-hosting, but I have no trouble understanding why someone wouldn’t want the hassle.

I see 2FA as mostly a mitigation for users reusing passwords between services, which users of password mangers usually don’t. Of course, the password manger itself can be a single point of failure.

A proposal I’ve seen floated a few times is to require police to carry liability insurance individually and give them a stipend for an average/reasonable amount. This is usually paired with changes to qualified immunity to make lawsuits and insurance claims easier.

The idea is that risky behavior from police costs them money personally.

In a just world, the officer, the police department, and Flock would all owe her compensation. I’d put the amount at about 10x the fine for the offense.