I’m not familiar with every client, but on mine it only hides the domain for users on my own server. (Early email used to work exactly the same—you could send an email addressed to just a username with no tld and it would go to the user with that name on your own server by default.)

It should work the same as email: you can trust it’s them if the user account is hosted on their own site, or their employer’s, or if they link to it from another confirmed source.

It’s like eleven Floridas crammed into the space of Michigan.

This user’s name is displayed in Arabic, although the characters in the URL are Latin.

AFAIK, the only practical thing in the way of having a separate server that just hosts identity accounts for all types of fediverse content (while the content itself is hosted on other servers) is that your host server is responsible for presenting the interface through which you view the rest of the fediverse, and the interfaces are specialized for a particular content type. You could have a server running a variety of fediverse software (mastodon, lemmy, etc.) which automatically generates similar accounts for each user on each service, so users could sign up once and then switch interfaces; but I think the rest of the fediverse would still treat them as separate identities.

I have little hope that Biden, Harris, or (obviously) Trump will actually change course on the US’s Israel/Palestine policy—but to be fair, we shouldn’t expect the current vice president to openly say she would reverse the current president’s foreign policies even if she intended to.

“The boat suffered a series of indescribable, unreasonable errors, the impossible happened on that boat … but it went down because it took on water.” […] The CEO ruled out any design or construction errors, which he called unlikely after 16 years of trouble-free navigation.

This sounds like an out-take from the “front fell off” skit.

According to the article, there were restrictions imposed three years ago to pressure the Saudis to reduce civilian casualties in the Yemeni war, and (according the to administration), the Saudis complied.

Rather than starting from scratch, would it make more sense to make an ActivityPub plugin for the open-source MediaWiki software Wikipedia runs on? MediaWiki already has some “interwiki” functionality that such a plugin could expand on, and you’d have the advantage of being able to fork content from WP and other MW projects without having to re-format it. Plus you’d be able to leverage other MW plugins—Semantic MediaWiki in particular could add a lot of useful functionality to federated wikis, like articles that could query and aggregate information from other federated articles rather than just linking to the text.