Every month, we post an update on the happenings of the instance, as well as provide a sort of town square to share news and happenings in your own life.
With January comes a new year, and this time even a new quarter-century! While the last year brought with it many things to grumble about (to put it mildly), this new year brings new hopes as well; China’s emissions could peak this year due to solar installations being constructed at an unprecedented scale, The fall of Assad’s regime may bring a reprieve for Rojava, Unions are forming and growing at a rate we haven’t seen in decades across the globe, and mutual aid organizations are experiencing an influx of new people looking to help due to recent events.
So let us face this new year together, and continue to build up, piece by piece and no matter how small, the world we want to live in.
📡 Technical updates 📡
Not much to report for technical updates, other that we updated to Lemmy version 0.19.8 last month. For the coming month we plan an update to our Movim enabling so called “stories”, a form of time limited micro-blog popular on some other messengers.
Due to various reasons, we didn’t finish the prototype donation page yet, but it will be available soon. Due to the high amount of submissions we also did not yet hear back from Nlnet if our grant application for adding GNU Taler donation support has been successful or not.
⚡Solar-powered servers ☀️
Last month has been again rather rainy and cold at out server location, therefore only 41% of the total electricity needs could be covered by the solar panels we installed in early October. The average over the last three months was 50%, which isn’t too bad considering that these were all unusually rainy winter months. The additional grid-power was mostly wind and geothermal energy. It should be noted that these figures include the total electricity usage on the site, not only those strictly for the server that this Lemmy instance runs on.
🗣️ Open Discussion 🗪
Remember, this post is also a place for you! If you have something to share, a new community to show off, a thought about the instance, or a story to tell, then please do tell!
Happy New Year, everyone.
Also, yeah it is complicated. But there is one thing I like to radically simplify it to sometimes that I feel keeps getting lost in the noise : there is only so much oil in the ground, and society does not seem to be properly coping with that reality yet all things considered.
I think the reason people have lost interest is that most of the predictions from this movement proved to be very wrong. New technology opened up huge new oil reserves that weren’t accounted for in some of these amateur peak oil calculations. And, my understanding is that this, along with melting ice continue to allow access to new reserves today, unless I’ve missed some major change in trajectory.
The reality is there is no peak oil supply for the foreseeable future and we need to aggressively transition away from oil long before we’ll run out. This matters because I think the idea of peak oil did lead to some complacency for some people in thinking that collapse would come without a need for political change. There are other similar narratives today that people fall for–for people with extreme climate anxiety, it’s somewhat comforting. But the reality is there’s no future but the one that we fight for. We can’t rely on some prophesized collapse to stop capitalism, we need to do it ourselves.