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.

And, crucially, security. It is far behind, on desktop and especially mobile. Process isolation aka sandboxing is superior on Chrome platforms. Unfortunately.

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. 🤓

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.

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.

I agree with this. Efficiency vs cooling the infrastructure and updating hardware after a maximum of 5 years. Still, I'm not 100% sure about statistics. Do you know of any comparative studies or the like?

Just one fitting side note. We had an interview with a local data centre manager and during the discussion, we somehow started talking about alternative setups, like a raspberry pi server. The interviewee reminded us of the efficiency of their virtual servers. He even gave us a tour through their digital dashboards and showcased the 1 watt used by a server (vs roughly 4 watts of a Pi, with much less performance).

This is not to say that low-tech is not the way to go. Less mining and hazardous work conditions are always good and need no measurement for emphasis.

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.

Informative and unfortunate. Economic growth is the single goal of the CPV and guarantees its power. Climate and ecological claims endanger the social order, so 👨‍⚖️

Perhaps for medium- to large-size solutions, for example: bundling multiple fediverse instances in one cooperative data centre. Virtuality allows for efficiently allocating resources where they are needed the most.

*Edit: Turns out I almost joined that particular instance. Awesome name, too. But Canada is quite far away from my home. And home-y it shall be.

That’s a (probably foolish) dream that could be compatible with exponential growth beyond what is available on Earth.

Sounds like a Solarpunk novel to be written. Let's put all incineration activities away. Yet, space colonization is here and serves capital accumulation, first and foremost. There's also the tiny part where rockets have to be shot to outer space with a little bit of energy and waste heat.

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.

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.

Haha, great response, I somehow knew that you were exactly on that line of thought. Preach

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

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.

Can you share the instance? I've also come across a few Mastodon instances that do the same.

Then I wonder how the material remains of hardware are addressed by providers. Or if virtual servers would be a better solution anyway.

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.

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.

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.

Wow, this is a bonkers project, love it!