I wonder if one could not make an aggregation of the posts in a collection of communities (I think piefed has that? I dont use that feature) but where the votes would be weighted by participants. So a post with 100 vote on the 10k users /c/PoliticsUS would have the same visibility as a 5 votes post on /c/EverythingSwahili with 500 users.

This actually makes total sense!

I agree. Solarpunk is a lot about thinking globally and acting locally.

Steps can be taken against nationalism, regionalism and xenophobia without forbidding local communities.

Re: No borders, no nations

Just before reading this paragraph, I jumped quickly into /c/immigration@slrpnk.net as it is an interest of mine, and quickly opted out when I saw it only talks about US.

The reason why I like have a national community, is because it also allows to talk about politics without it being only about Trump and US politics.

I hate nationalism very much and would love to have a more global hub to learn about the important political subjects that dont crop up that much in French (my local one) or US media. Sadly, I never see such a thing. National communities are a bad solution but to a very real problem, which is that global themed communities end up being US ones. There needs to be a solution to that, and it is not clear to me what it should be. Quotas per country/continent? split into US/non-US communities? Language-centric communities?

About languages, this is also something that could require a bit of discussion. Of course I love that internet as a de facto lingua franca, which is English. But that is also pretty exclusionary for non-speakers. I know there is an understandable dislike of “AI” tools here, but this is one case where automated (and optional, and clearly labelled as such) translations are something that could help bridge communities and cultures. I wonder how difficult and expensive putting together an automated translation system could be.

The critics of these policies have been unironically almost on that level.

We have one that wants to bring back cars and considers that there are many elders afraid to cross streets because there are too many bikes.

Honestly they are embarrassed a how popular this policy turned out to be. For years they have lambasted the chaos caused by the many changes and public works that blocked accesses but now that the results are there, they are hard to argue against.

I guess Metropolis solar?

I like tech and I want sustainability. We “just” need to get rid of capitalism and finish the transition out of fossil fuels but all the tools are there.

We have anticipated China’s coal plateau several times already. I agree it will come at one point, but let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. Contrary to Trump’s administration, the Chinese one is promoting a green transition and tends to be overly optimistic.

‘Free’ as in ‘paid collectively by taxes’ works for me.

Robots. This is a serious answer.

(Mainland France) When I was a kid, my parents decide to move to a big ancient house with thick stone walls with a lot of repairs, we talked a lot about these things. back then, in the 90s, stone walls were considered superior than average insulation, as it was mostly inexistant at the time.

Nowadays, it is much inferior and you really need to add insulation to be a bit efficient.

If you have more thermal mass, for example in caves or underground structures, you can have the mean temperature of an entire year.

Yep, here 13-14°C is the temperature of all the caves (that are not high in the mountains, altitude is a factor) and incidentally the temperature considered ideal to keep red wine.

This can be used with heat wells: have a way to exchange deep heat, with circulating water for instance, and in winter you can pre-heat your home at 14°C before adding energy. It is heavy work though to bury these pipes, and the efficiency of heat pumps nowadays makes this a bit irrelevant, but it is a nice low-tech possibility.

It sounds like a technical problem but it is a political one. You need an entity that is independent from the malicious actors wanting to use surveillance for control. Once you have that, giving that entity able to manage all aspects without bleeding private information is a technical problem, but if you don’t have one to begin with, it is without hope.

If some people have the right to enter any building and any computer to sniff data without restriction, you can’t have privacy. It is a political problem.

People do care. But there are a lot of people. Not everyone does.

When one does things, you end up with other people who do things. Won’t be your neighbor, won’t be your colleagues (unless you do the Good Thing™ professionally) so do not waste time trying to convince them.

Do your own thing. Life is short and there are billions of people out there. Spend it on the millions that want change, that’s a big enough crowd.

I participate in a lot of real world communities that are more horizontally organized and many do have a similar dynamic, but a key difference is that there are many levels of involvement and the more involved you become, the more influence you have.

Thing is, on the fediverse, one should not confuse involvement with the act of using it. Involvement means participating in communities moderation and running servers. If mods of a 100 users community come to slrpnk.net saying “you know, hexbears users have been really helpful in setting up the /c/solarpunkbigepicstoryline” they will have a saying. But a random user that may be a bot or the alt of a banned troll is certainly not going to get the same weight.

In theory we could vote, but there is a technical impossibility: organizing reliable anonymous votes online is simply not possible.

Mods have a bit of authority but rarely have any process for weighing the views of individual users

Indeed, they have more of an editor power: they make editorial decisions, subjectively listen to feedbacks and see how their communities evolve.

The difference between these is pretty large in terms of skill and time required, and it’s quite difficult to move between them.

In terms of skills, a mod is a regular user, that’s it. And time requirements can vary, but being part of a decently sized mod team is not a huge time commitment. Thing is, I feel it fair to say that people willing to put extra effort in community managements should not necessarily feel forced to take into account the decisions of everyone not willing to do it.

I mean, if I offer a free service because I believe in volunteer work and gift economy, and users vote to complain that it lacks a feature that would double my amount of work (like federation with known toxic communities), I think it is fair for me to deny it.

If I were offering a paid service and getting a wage from it, the dynamics would be different. We are too used to corporate systems where the crucial resource is money, and paid users satisfaction is the most important. In FOSS, the crucial ressource is devs/volunteers motivation, and anything that increases it is what you want to maximize.

(disclaimer: it is a hypothetical, I am not running any lemmy instance)

I like thinking of the fediverse as a do-ocracy rather than a democracy: people who do the hard work get the say. Volunteer moderators that have to sweep the sewers of comments are the ones to decide what to defederate. If I am unhappy with some decisions, I may start my own instance, which is actually relieving some work from the other volunteers and making the overall ecosystem more resilient.

Opinionated moderation decisions are a feature I feel.

Gaza is a religious war. It is actually bad for business. It is yet another level over the stupidity of capitalism.

At one point we had a long back and forth with my cousin, a post-apo fan, about the credibility of various scenarios, various shortage, various technological regressions. My conclusion: if humanity loses the ability and the knowledge to make CPUs, then CPUs are not the first thing you will miss.

It would have meant that a generation-long obscurantist crusade would have purposefully destroyed that knowledge.

I don’t see anything natural nor a human-made disaster that could durably erase all knowledge and industries on a global scale. You would need an intelligence geared at destroying knowledge specifically.

Uh…

These obvious things are why solar power CO2/kWh estimates are not zero. And I personally think that counting these indirect costs should not be automatic and is even fraudulent in some cases. For instance, in the picture that this guy denounces talks about what pieces of tech are part of the jigsaw of a sustainable future. For these, indirect costs do not matter. For all intent and purpose, electric cars and photovoltaics have 0 g CO2/kWh of direct emission.

Mining needs to become renewable, transport needs to be renewables, and electric vehicles are a part of that.

Actually, when you want really heavy mining machines, thermal engines do not cut it anymore, you need to go electric.

It is actually a good trick to assume that when a renewable “innovation” happens in the US, it has already been deployed somewhere else already. I love this 2012 picture of the Indian project:

Yes, my last link points to a discussion about this very article and why one needs actually a bit more nuance. The guillotine is indeed both the symbol of revolution but also of the death penalty by an oppressive state. It has a double meaning and one must know both and be careful when handling that symbol.

Live reports (in French) with several pictures: https://www.mediapart.fr/journal/economie-et-social/100925/bloquons-tout-la-journee-de-mobilisation-du-10-septembre-en-direct