![stefanlaser](https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/5112a16a-d1ef-4438-89bd-f6475c551504.png?format=webp&thumbnail=64)
Scholar of science and technology studies exploring ecologies of data centres. Intrigued by the lives and deaths of infrastructures.
Tools help, and because the Fediverse API is completely accessible, folks have already come up with awesome stuff.
- Populate your following list by finding friends, the Fedifinder still appears to work and helps find friends from Twitter on Masto: https://fedifinder.glitch.me/
- Now find friends of friends, the wider social graph. Followgraph works wonders: https://followgraph.vercel.app/
- Now you will likely miss posts, so try following updates of people if you really enjoy their content, plus of course pinning hashtags. PLUS. Up your game with an algorithm, either in the dedicated Mastodon app (trending posts) or with more customisation through the app Fediview: https://fediview.com/ Using Mastodon Digest (GitHub), you could also set up your own automation script.
- Folks have created lists and groups you can mass subscribe. The most successful one I know is from and for academics, perhaps there is a field for you in there. Journalists have similar stuff. See https://github.com/nathanlesage/academics-on-mastodon
- There are many awesome apps out there to access your content, improving the experience. I recommend Phanpy because of its unique and sleek design, see https://phanpy.social/. If you miss Quote Tweets and other stuff, try an app like Elk.
- Mastodon is only one option, if you want all of Twitter's tools and more cool stuff, try Firefish. You can migrate followers and posts. This way, you can skip many external tools.
And that's just the beginning.
Underrated comment. Posteo is awesome, cheap, and has all the tools you need for mail and calendar things. Proton may give you more, but that's a different query.
To hell with it, I would even say N+1 bicycles. Ride the shit out of every bike according to the various needs you and others have. Share. Built. Assemble for group rights. Have fun.
Yes, a while back, but it appears to be lacking key features, see here. This comes from the GrapheneOS circles. https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html
Not an expert though, updates or critique highly welcome.
And, crucially, security. It is far behind, on desktop and especially mobile. Process isolation aka sandboxing is superior on Chrome platforms. Unfortunately.
Used > new tech. The others are on point.
It's not us single consumers doing a difference, and sometimes you need a little bit more flexibility these days. How do your daily needs change the equation? A more recent used PC? Business laptop? This could also point towards the Pi, if you like fiddling and experiments.
This goes slightly off-topic, sorry, but I'm throwing in shared computer resources. A tiny PC plus a community/non-profit data centre with virtual machines helping with our work load/gaming/...this could be sweet permacomputing, right?
Wow, this is a bonkers project, love it!
Thanks, this is the way to go. Since my project is for research and testing purposes, however, I might check out multiple setups and compare results. A follow-up post sounds about right.
I need a bit of spare time to start working on that soon-ish.
Excellent, thanks for sharing your journey. Some servers could "never handle it" because of all the caching and redundancies?
Slowly I am becoming aware of the limitations of Mastodon, which are also closely related to the managament, it seems, shy of listening to the people. Rebased sounds like my favourite so far, although GoToSocial, as mentioned by @[email protected] (and folks on Masto) is also worth exploring.
Resource-efficient fork of Mastodon—or go for other Fediverse packages instead?
I'm looking for a customizable, resource-efficient Mastodon #fork. Somehow I cannot find a recent post on that. #Bonfire? #Rebased? Or go non-Ruby, like #Pleroma (nah), #Misskey #Calckey #Lemmy (hui)? This is part of an endeavour to host w/ a #RaspberryPi & #solarpower. #MastodonMigration Potenti...
I'm looking for a customizable, resource-efficient Mastodon fork. Bonfire? Rebased? Or go non-Ruby, like Pleroma (nah), Misskey Calckey, indeed, Lemmy (hui)? Any experiences?
This is part of an endeavour to host w/ a RaspberryPi & solar power. It will be a device to mess around, test, and share experiences.
Potential features:
- tweaking network traffic in various ways
- media options: off, auto compression, auto delete
- monitoring server metrics, energy flow, sharing data through a bot
- auto-off when battery low, sad emoji
Re-posting this from Mastodon w/ minor edits, because Fediverse and potential cross-interaction. I probably should have posted here first and then shared the link on Mastodon, but it's a Mastodon question, so I did it the other way around. Still not sure what's the best way to do this though.
I have a Chinese brand, ordered from Hanoi, so nothing special. In fact, I'm still chasing connecting cables. A bit annoying.
...not many daily EN newspapers, but a few weekly ones, and blogs like https://vietnamweekly.substack.com.
Sure and, naaah, I'm not in charge. The newspaper is very much neutral, so this is interesting on its own considering the not-so-open press world. There are other reports in the same edition on green matters, but no links are drawn.
I know what you getting at, my post was a little bit off. Not trying to give fuel to deniers. But I somehow did.
Still, it's an uphill battle. And there is so much potential in the region: many sunny hours, a long coast.
Looks like someone is trying to paint five exceptional years for coal divestment followed by an okay one (coupled with record heat waves, drought and a re-opening economy) as an increase in coal.
Thanks for intervening here, this was not my intention, but you can absolutely read it this way. I kept it too short, basically I would argue that more relative expansion of green energy would be great. The strong coal foundation is a problem, yet Europe and US etc. are much more problematic.
The statistics show a path forward, thanks again. It would be great to talk more concretely about responsibility and actors to move further, which is not easy here. Building new wind parks etc. can be a hustle, I learnt.
Vietnam: Coal supply for thermal power plants to increase
![](https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/01f6a01e-c7aa-4b6f-a9a8-74495a4fdaa8.webp?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
![](https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/01f6a01e-c7aa-4b6f-a9a8-74495a4fdaa8.webp?format=webp)
Following a call to share more non-Western themes, here is an article from local Vietnamese newspaper Viet Nam News, Saturday's edition. Reading between the lines is always key here, so I thought you might appreciate this piece.
Vietnam faces a power shortage this spring and summer. The solution is coal and more coal. There is indeed a new power development plan (PDP8) that puts a focus on green energy, but only relatively speaking, coal will grow until 2030. It's growth that matters. The G7 wants green growth, but that's only a side-hustle for the government, it seems. Wind and solar energy have a hard time, enforcement on the ground is falling behind.
So the question for this sub might be how to make green energy the only alternative.
Interesting, and apparently it's called Voyager now. Merci
I will have to google a few things here but that sounds next level. But quite fittingly, I will connect a Pi soon, running Mastodon as a test
To add a little bit of solarpunk to this: I'm charging my battery stack via solar power with a dedicated USB c in/out slot. It is smart connector indeed.
Haha, great response, I somehow knew that you were exactly on that line of thought. Preach
There is a nice book on this topic, Against Purity:
Why contamination and compromise might be a starting point for doing something, instead of a reason to give up.
https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/against-purity
But the last comment on the global south is odd, for many reasons. Empathy and support was on your mind, I suppose. 🤓
"Capitalism won’t deliver the energy transition fast enough...isn’t a task for your favourite ESG-focused portfolio manager or the tech bros"
"Capitalism won’t deliver the energy transition fast enough. [...] There’s too much to do, and given the urgency and the need to get the solution right, this isn’t a task for your favourite ESG-focused portfolio manager or the tech bros." Most of the people that follow me know that already but chec...
As discussed by the fellow fedi friend, this line is from the financial times. Remarkable. https://www.ft.com/content/86d71297-3f34-48f3-8f3f-28b7e8be03c6
Also testing how cross-posting across the fediversum works.
I agree with most of this. And our little Lemmy servers will certainly not count. We definitely should not care about individual consumers, or rather, it should not be about blaming people. It's more about experiments and learning. And fun.
However, what I would like to do is to complicate the data centre narrative. Yes, data centres are superply efficient. But this is a relative measure. Companies demand exponentially more computing and storage power; more capacity to process data for 'intelligent' applications and provide ads.
Ergo, the landlords of the internet build massive new data centres that do indeed need a considerable amount of electricity, water and all the new, resource heavy high tech chips were reading about in the news. Corporate social media platforms are part of this, too. 2 per cent of current global electricity demand comes from data centres. And scholars agree that this share is growing. But, yeah. This is an interesting field of research, because it's quite difficult when it comes to the concrete numbers.
So this post here is a typical "let's improve our society somewhat" contribution.
The environmental footprint of social media hosting: What about Lemmy and the like?
A growing body of literature on waste and discard studies has crafted a powerful critique of waste management and politics (Callén and Sánchez Criado 2015; Liboiron and Lepawsky 2022; Gille and Lepawsky 2022; Ek and Johansson 2020). In today’s dominant waste regime, waste is naturalized as a burden
![The environmental footprint of social media hosting: Tinkering with Mastodon](https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/fa34491f-b81b-46fa-85e9-c8eb8779136a.png?format=webp&thumbnail=256)
Social media platforms need a lot of computing and storage power provided by energy-hungry data centres that constantly have to upgrade their hardware, spitting out vast amounts of e-waste. This is particularly true of commercial platforms with their ML-driven ad systems. The fall of Twitter and Reddit would be beneficial in that regard.
But what about Fediverse systems? The link discusses Mastodon, but that's only one example. Would it be possible to host Lemmy instances in a sustainable way? With solar power? And what would it imply, materially and socially?
I have resources like the Low-Tech Magazine in mind, which uses solar power to host a website. The downtime is part of the adventure. Or we'd have to deploy a solar protocol to use the earth's rotation creatively and for cooperation.