Thank you for the update!

I don't see why we should restrict "regional" communities. Maybe when Lemmy gets bigger this can be done, but now, if creating more regional-specific communities bring more people to the Fediverse, I don't see a problem. Surely you can enforce moderation standards if required?

There may be factors about solarpunk that for some reason only apply to regions, and supporting other languages might not be a bad idea surely? Ideas and good articles will bleed through to other communities eventually, surely?

"This is awful, but what can we do?"

er, I can think of a simple thing to do about it....

Haha! I reported it to ebay. Man that was a faff, there's no category to report dangerous / lying listings. The chat system was crap too. I had to say "I want to speak to a human", and it put me through.

Not sure how Porn = Terrorism. Sounds like mission creep to me.... Oh well, I guess it makes a change from using Anti-Terror laws to stop people putting the wrong things in wheelie bins: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/3333366/Half-of-councils-use-anti-terror-laws-to-spy-on-bin-crimes.html

no kidding. Even 35A is enough to melt a 12v plug spring into the plastic surround.... don't ask me how i know....

He may have a point, but as someone else pointed out, a lot of these self-hosted services are running on out of date equipment that wouldn't be used for anything else.

I run all my Fediverse stuff on an old Dell R620 that a friend gave me. Mine is totally specialised for hosting.... Yes, it is overkill for my ~10 users, but hopefully more friends will join. Also, it's not the most efficient way of doing it - the device is probably 10 years old and uses ~130w 24/7. A newer NUC or equivalent would probably only use 40-50w. However, who else is going to use this machine? No company would touch it, "everything" is going cloudy, so it would either be stripped for parts and the rest dumped either in landfill or sent to some 3rd world country.

You can claim it's a waste of electricity to use it, but a lot of energy and materials were used to create the server in the first place, and most of that will be lost, even with recycling.

People run Fediverse (and other services) on a Raspberry PI - fine for a couple of users, but too restrictive for my use. These things only use 5-20w, which is amazing.

My electricity supply is from a "green" supplier, and I have a local SolarPV system that powers the system when there is enough sun. Last summer I managed to run it for over a month using my local system only. There's no reason that we can't build more renewable sources of electricity. Here in the UK there's a proposed 140 DCs in in the planning phases, which is ridiculous, all for AI BS.

Self-hosting isn't for everyone of course - not every household should do this, but there's no reason why groups of friends, families or "activity" groups couldn't do this effectively.

It's absolutely optimized for the long term - how many Google services have been discontinued when there are still users, just not enough to be profitable? Self-hosted services can run as long people are interested. A mail server created 20 years ago is still compatible and useable today because it uses ratified, slow-moving standards.

yeah, welcome to the new order :(

Still, it would be nice to see. Nothing wrong with second hand hardware - most of my setup is second hand. Here is a rather rubbish diagram and short explanation of how it is set up: https://mammut.gogreenit.net/@chewie/113075530030174991

Sorry! Added 😊

I've never seen that connector in a car......

Looking at nature in our garden, helping my other half grow vegetables and herbs (not enough to ever be self-sufficient, but it feels nice to eat the results). Trying generate as much solar power as possible (which again, isn't enough to be off-grid, but enough for an emergency). Watching our rabbits grow and interact with each other ❤️ Finding interesting people on the fediverse, and trying to get other people to try it (which isn't very effective at the moment!)

Edit: We are watching Clarksons' Farm, which is entertaining, but also raises important points about our food system.

There's an old thread about someone doing it here: https://diysolarforum.com/threads/replace-apc-ups-sla-batteries-with-lithium.25424/ but sadly he doesn't give any details, or any updates.

It's wierd. APC do a really crappy small one for telecoms cabinets, but none for servers. I would love to replace my APC batteries with lithium ones.

Let us know what ones you chose in the end.

Done, but I feel there could have been more questions about the sustainability aspect.

Just "will your instance be running in 12 month's time" wasn't really granular enough imo

I wish I could recommend Fairphone. I bought a "2" new a few years ago as my first smart phone, and while it worked, it wasn't very robust. I had to replace the "bottom module" (USB charging port and microphone) because it broke, which is ok, these things happen. Then, about a year ago, it went wrong again. I went back to the online shop, and the bottom module was there again. I went to buy it.... "out of stock"... "please try asking on the forums"... seriously? Go to the forums, loads of people wanting a replacement module, nobody selling theirs.

Soon after I get an email saying, "good news, android is now available for the Fairphone 2", and they were singing and dancing about how it was a load of hassle etc. etc. to port. Great, but no use to me if I can't get spares.

Much to the annoyance of my other half, I bought a Fairphone 3. After a while that started going buggy and not charging. There were a few other issues with it, so I thought I would send it back to get fixed. When I read the details of sending it back, they said to make sure it was backed up as it will be wiped "due to GDPR".. wtf??? That has nothing to do with GDPR - that's your poor data hygiene.

My Fairphone 3 isn't rooted, and I don't use google accounts, so it would be very difficult to back it up properly. I understand, if it's totally broken, there may be no way to retrieve the data, so you might loose it all, but that has nothing to do with GDPR.

I've not bothered sending it back, so it's yet another chunk of e-waste. A mate gave me his old Samsung s20, so I'm going to use that until it breaks.

I really want the company to succeed, but at this rate, it's cheaper and probably better for the environment if I just buy a second hand old "flagship" phone instead.

I am never buying Fairphone again 😢

Got a link? that name isn't very unique :(

Yes, I first found out about MorningStar when I was trying to find a charge controller that had a proper network port and didn't need a stupid app to configure it. I bought one and I really liked it, so I have 4 of the now.

I've spent a couple of years trying to find a decent inverter (eg. not cloudy and supports standard protocols), and it has been hard work. So far so good with this one, although their modbus support is buggy :(

I like the MorningStar brand, but they aren't cheap. I wrote a review here if you're interested: http://www.gogreenit.net/index.php?page=morningstar-tristar-60a-mppt

It looks like even the forum is gone now, and generates 403 errors for me 😞

Sounds good. Maybe some sort of forum system, like https://github.com/hometown-fork/hometown (activitypub-based) or https://karrot.world or even an instance of lemmy ? Nextcloud is good as it has a lot of plugins for sharing photos and chatting etc. Video conferencing It would be worth looking at something like https://www.freedombox.org/ as it's all self-contained, and might be easier to set up. at least as a proof of concept?

I’m not sure what you mean about “alternative process” for updates. In the chart you posted, the US got 466227 updates in 1 day which is about 14 million per month if that happens every day. If they are 100 bytes each (no idea if that is realistic), that’s 1.4GB a month for the whole US. Right now a new map download is something like 1.1GB for California alone. California is the biggest US state (not in terms of land area but certainly in terms of roads) but the whole US might be 10x or 20x bigger.

Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean by that.

I’d say OM is less in need of new features than of getting its existing features working solidly, warts ironed out, etc. The one major feature improvement i could see is getting the voice directions to include street names, but in practice it’s not that important, at least in my usage.

Fair enough

Google Maps has a sometimes useful feature that an offline app like OM can’t possibly get, which is routing and ETA calculations based on realtime road and traffic conditions. I don’t rely on that very often, but on occasion, it really helps. Unfortunately I suspect that much of the traffic data comes from the devices themselves phoning home with their locations, and only Google and Apple have enough devices out there to usefully do that.

Yes, that's exactly how it works. I get tracked enough without adding my location data, so however useful it is, I can live without it.