Every month, we post an update on the happenings of the instance, as well as provide a sort of town square to share news and happenings in your own life.
With January comes a new year, and this time even a new quarter-century! While the last year brought with it many things to grumble about (to put it mildly), this new year brings new hopes as well; China’s emissions could peak this year due to solar installations being constructed at an unprecedented scale, The fall of Assad’s regime may bring a reprieve for Rojava, Unions are forming and growing at a rate we haven’t seen in decades across the globe, and mutual aid organizations are experiencing an influx of new people looking to help due to recent events.
So let us face this new year together, and continue to build up, piece by piece and no matter how small, the world we want to live in.
📡 Technical updates 📡
Not much to report for technical updates, other that we updated to Lemmy version 0.19.8 last month. For the coming month we plan an update to our Movim enabling so called “stories”, a form of time limited micro-blog popular on some other messengers.
Due to various reasons, we didn’t finish the prototype donation page yet, but it will be available soon. Due to the high amount of submissions we also did not yet hear back from Nlnet if our grant application for adding GNU Taler donation support has been successful or not.
⚡Solar-powered servers ☀️
Last month has been again rather rainy and cold at out server location, therefore only 41% of the total electricity needs could be covered by the solar panels we installed in early October. The average over the last three months was 50%, which isn’t too bad considering that these were all unusually rainy winter months. The additional grid-power was mostly wind and geothermal energy. It should be noted that these figures include the total electricity usage on the site, not only those strictly for the server that this Lemmy instance runs on.
🗣️ Open Discussion 🗪
Remember, this post is also a place for you! If you have something to share, a new community to show off, a thought about the instance, or a story to tell, then please do tell!
Happy New Year, everyone.
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Hi! I was going to ask for a new feature to be added and realized that it was already there actually, so in case people are interested:
- You can sort the posts of communities you are subscribed to by order of most recent comment. That allows you to have long conversation of the type that died with most nested discussions platforms.
- You can make it the default in your settings.
If you are interested in more in-depth discussion about subjects that are not obsolete in 24 hours, I recommend doing such a change!
Maybe 2025 will bring an open source and decentralized global platform that can fact check, merge, deduplicate, and aggregate multiple online discussion forums into a shared graph representation that will be able to report on which topics are being discussed by the most people, what sentiment is expressed about proposed solutions to problems, and how that sentiment changes over time. It could become a form of collective terrestrial intelligence, CTI.
This feels like this idea is in the current Zeitgeist. Maybe as a reaction to various authoritarians having done exactly that behind closed doors to seize power.
The group vTaiwan and g0v seem to have a headstart in that respect, but they understandably don’t publish much in English, I’d love to contact people who know about them and their tools.
I have been pointed at pol.is which is interesting but a far cry from all the things we need.
This sort of things used to be called cyberdemocracy but nowadays this feels like an obsolete word. While different, I see the sociocracy, holacracy, memes floating around these ideas. I am currently exploring that space a bit, here in France.
Hello all.
Just wondering - why isn’t there a Peak Oil community on SLRPNK? Seems like an incredibly obvious thing to have. I’m getting really paranoid here - I feel like oil company agents try to infililtrate places like this and have stuff like that blocked and removed, and I’m wondering if that’s what’s happened here. It just seems like there should obviously be a dedicated Peak Oil community on SLRPNK. There are way more obscure communities on here than that.
Peak Oil will be solved by the same actions that are needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions; transition to solar, batteries, and EVs.
There’s a lot of environmental problems with all that that aren’t being solved and at least are worth talking about somewhere like a Peak Oil discussion community. The mining of minerals for solar panels for instance. Or the continuing inability to dispose sustainably of used batteries. And red states aren’t really transitioning to alternative energy, and may sour to alternative energy and reverse it. A fascist-dominated republican federal government may sabotage alternative energy in blue states. There’s also the wear and tear issue of alternative energy systems - they have to be repaired with components that are themselves manufactured with materials continually mined from the finite supply somewhere in the world which itself causes environmental destruction. And there are many problems with EVs. How weird that none of this is still being discussed in one place on here.
I’ll just address one point, the mining of minerals for solar panels. The lifetime for solar panels is at least 20 years. As soon as fossil fuels are burned, more fossil fuels need to be mined. First Solar claims to already have technology for recycling their panels that recovers 90% of the materials.
Points and responses like this are probably being repeated many times in different social and news media as well as in everyday conversations. IMHO, a top priority for humanity is building a global platform to merge these various forums, fact check and deduplicate claims, and aggregate sentiment expressed towards proposed solutions, to strengthen the signal out of all of the noise. This platform could become a form of collective terrestrial intelligence, which is desperately needed.
I’ll also add that a lot of the discourse around mineral scarcity often come from a misunderstanding of the various definitions of “reserves” used by geologists. There is no non-fossil mineral that is in any way geologically scarce right now (though an argument could be made for some radioactive isotopes and helium). Most “known reserves” of minerals are in the 20-80 years range and have been for a century. Miners don’t find prospection profitable when there are decades of known ressources identified.
Seconding PoVoq on this - you should make the community
Here it is then : https://slrpnk.net/c/Peak_Oil
Make one 🤷♂️
But in general I feel the interest in this has waned a lot since peak oil seems to have already happened (at least somewhat?) and the impact was just not what some people expected it to be. I guess it’s complicated?
Also, yeah it is complicated. But there is one thing I like to radically simplify it to sometimes that I feel keeps getting lost in the noise : there is only so much oil in the ground, and society does not seem to be properly coping with that reality yet all things considered.
I think the reason people have lost interest is that most of the predictions from this movement proved to be very wrong. New technology opened up huge new oil reserves that weren’t accounted for in some of these amateur peak oil calculations. And, my understanding is that this, along with melting ice continue to allow access to new reserves today, unless I’ve missed some major change in trajectory.
The reality is there is no peak oil supply for the foreseeable future and we need to aggressively transition away from oil long before we’ll run out. This matters because I think the idea of peak oil did lead to some complacency for some people in thinking that collapse would come without a need for political change. There are other similar narratives today that people fall for–for people with extreme climate anxiety, it’s somewhat comforting. But the reality is there’s no future but the one that we fight for. We can’t rely on some prophesized collapse to stop capitalism, we need to do it ourselves.
Fundamentally there is only so much oil in the ground. That’s all anyone is driving at, and everyone seems to be ignoring that. Plus it’s all shale oil now which is much more expensive to extract. The EROEI is going down as a result and all that oil is being wasted on routine economic activity. Other countries, where the rest of the shale oil will be, are getting much stronger and more able to defend themselves. Why is the concern with predictions? The main point is the working implication of introntrovertible material circumstances on the picture of the future. The economy itself must change. Being concerned with precise predictions even ignores the implication of ‘the bumpy plateau’ which is what I think we’re in now, bumpy not because of that one metric of global world oil production, but because of all of the factors that must distort around it in order to produce it and thereby distort and jeapordize the economy.
Well I thought I’d consult people first. But yeah this is the bumpy plateau is usually my whole thing and now there is all the drama of oil depletion itself sputtering into view.
Seasons greetings, and gratitude.
January is the nemesis of the solar punk in the northern hemisphere, so thanks for keeping the lights on. !
How do people here feel about that lemmit online bot that reposts stuff from Reddit?
It looks like some user has recently subscribed to a lot of subredits via it here and as a result the “All” feed has a lot of such posts now (maybe 50% of all posts?).
Personally I find it very spammy to have all this Reddit slop via such a repost bot and if I was interested in that I would just use Reddit. Of course I can block it individually on my account, but I find such a bot also counter-productive for the health of Lemmy in general, so I am considering to give it an instance wide ban.
Any thoughts on this?
I would be in favor of a diffy.chat online bot that could contribute real-time fact checking, as long as it identified itself each time it responded to a post.
Yeah one of the first things I did when I made this account is block that lemmit online bot. Looking at the 3 biggest instances:
- lemmy.world banned it: https://lemmy.world/u/[email protected]
- lemm.ee hasn’t received updates from it in a year: https://lemm.ee/u/[email protected]
- sh.itjust.works banned it: https://sh.itjust.works/u/[email protected]
+1 from me
I already had it blocked and forgot about it, and I don’t really feel like I’m missing anything important.
I used it to follow a couple communities a while back, but I found that it ultimately was causing me to actually use reddit more to respond to posts there, which I didn’t really want. After blocking it, I found that I haven’t missed it whatsoever. I’m down for banning it. 👍
No objections here. I don’t see it adding anything of value to my browsing anyway.
I’ve blocked it already but I would support an instance wide ban as a matter of principle. I’m not using Lemmy for Reddit bot spam. I’m here to share content and chat with people.
I get that the point was to provide Lemmy users with more content in their feeds but I think, though well intentioned, the idea of using bots to provide content from Reddit was misguided. It’s okay for Lemmy instances to be a small little corner of the internet. Anyone that expected activity levels comparable to Reddit was in for disappointment and have probably already left. So I’m not sure what value it ever really served.
Meh, maybe a bot ‘tag’ would help
It has the ”B" tag for bot and you can configure your profile to hide bot posts, but that is really not much different from individually blocking it.
There was an outage of the server tonight caused by a failure of one of the backup drives in the system. It is a bit strange that this caused the service to go down, but it will need to be replaced. It was actually the newest drive in the system, so likely we can get it replaced under warranty, but lets see.
The server did again have some issue this morning and did not cleanly reboot automatically. I’ll need to investigate further, but I am starting to think it might be better to move this instance to somewhat newer hardware 😐
funny that, i just noticed that i lost an hdd just a few days ago, hopefully its not all some bad omens… i don’t browse here often since i’ve taken a bit of a break from social media, but i just wanted to say i do appreciate this space o n the inter net
Movim was upgraded just now. You can find the release notes here. The story feature works, but has a slight issue with it requiring camera permissions and failing when it can’t find a camera on a desktop PC that doesn’t have one. Hopefully this will get fixed in an upcoming release.
Ok, the camera issue was already fixed in Movim and I made this small update right now. It will now show a camera missing sign and a small icon to upload a photo from your desktop.
Small reminder that we host an Etherpad instance. You can even use it with this nice Android app.
And it’s great! Really the hardest part is remembering that we have it to use.
We’ve used it over in the writing community to share snippets of stories we’re working on.
