Merri-bek Tech is kicking off 2026 with a great pair of talks on the internet we want, pushing back on big tech and supporting local communities.

These are the talks that Milly Schmidt and Jade Ambrose gave at #EverythingOpen this year (#EO2026) and together they give a great overview of some of the options for us as individuals, and also cover what we're doing as a community in Merri-bek this year to try and build something better.

https://www.meetup.com/merri-bek-tech/events/313073832/

If you're thinking of coming to one of our Solarpunk events in Naarm/Melbourne this year, this is probably the one to prioritise. We've got seating for up to 80, so it'd be great to see a bunch of folks there.

Are there any volunteer associations or local neighbourhood groups based in Melbourne or Victoria who have a presence on Lemmy? (I don't mean volunteer devs / admins / mods... I mean like sports clubs, conservation groups, community gardens, SES, foodbank, neighbourhood house, historical society etc.)

Hi, hoping to find out where to report this error. I tried to subscribe to https://lemmy.ml/c/lemmy Entered aussie.zone at the prompt and I got a single line response "Server error". I seem to have subscribed to other communities on lemmy.ml successfully. Thanks!

Hi, can anyone point me to discussions or e.g. working groups focusing on user experience aspects of Lemmy?

I'm new to Lemmy but have been working in non-profit tech for many years.

Currently, my day job is in UX, broadly speaking. As a volunteer gig I'm looking to help a local group that's investigating the pros and cons of spinning up Fediverse instance(s). My focus is on the question of how we could help people in our town get signed up and using these services fluently.

Lemmy seems like a good candidate platform (to me) for meeting some of our group's needs. So I'm keen to get up to speed with the state of play (current priorties, known issues, plans and work in progress) in terms of making it as user-friendly as possible. I may have also capacity to contribute skills and time to these aspects of the larger Lemmy project. Where can I read about the current goals and plans? Who are the people bringing UX tools and human-centred design to Lemmy and how can I reach them?

Thanks!

"Chevron’s Gorgon gas export plant in Western Australia received the equivalent of millions of dollars in carbon credits from the federal government last year, despite increasing its emissions.

The revelation in government data last week has sparked calls for changes to the safeguard mechanism, the government policy applied to the country’s 219 largest industrial climate polluting facilities.

The safeguard mechanism was introduced under the Coalition to stop industrial emissions increasing, but was not enforced as initially promised and emissions continued to increase".

[ACF representative] "Reynolds said the Gorgon development receiving a climate windfall after increasing its emissions was an “appalling example of a gas giant being able to game the system and financially benefit from its climate-heating emissions”.

Hi, I am new here! I have some newbie observations and suggestions, hope it's ok to post them here. It would be great to make high profile communities more obvious on the Aussie Zone home page e.g. on side bar, like they appear when viewing a post. Is this the place to chat about that?