Didn’t plan on publishing my solarpunk novel this week. But it feels like the time for a story that’s radically hopeful.

We outlive capitalism. In a post-scarcity society, people do things not out of desperation but for joy. Xavi loves nothing more than putting on a silicon tail and swimming as a mermaid. She performs for children. Xavi encourages them and their parents to protect the clean water of the city’s canals. A community treasure, she is the first person who comes to mind when excited doctors develop a surgery to turn someone into a merperson. Xavi pioneers it, pushing the boundaries of transhumanism.

Then the mermaid goes missing.

A local citizen detective discovers Xavi had texted them “help” the night before, when their devices were silenced. The Citizen Detective Society mobilizes across the globe. They hope to crowdsolve the mermaid’s location and soon. Every passing hour reduces the probability they’ll discover her alive.

You can find the ebook on this indie site as well as the two more mainstream ones.

What is Lemmy?

Lemmy is a self-hosted social link aggregation and discussion platform. It is completely free and open, and not controlled by any company. This means that there is no advertising, tracking, or secret algorithms. Content is organized into communities, so it is easy to subscribe to topics that you are interested in, and ignore others. Voting is used to bring the most interesting items to the top.

Changes

This release took a long time to complete due to a major performance problem which brought lemmy.ml to a crawl every time we tried to deploy the new version. It took a lot of testing (in production) to narrow it down to a single commit, and finally fix the problem.

The release itself contains numerous bug fixes and minor improvements:

Lemmy

Enhancements

• Parallel federation sending by @phiresky in #4623
• Reduce CPU usage for generating link previews by @phiresky in #4957
• Switch from OpenSSL to rustls by @kwaa in #4901
• Increase max post url length to 2000 characters by @dessalines in #4960
• Increase max length of user bio to 1000 charactes by @dessalines #5014
• Reduce maximum comment depth to 50 by @nutomic #5009
• Resize post thumbnails by @nutomic #5107/files
• Add category to RSS feeds by @nutomic #5030
• Allow users to view their own removed/deleted communities by @dessalines in #4912
• Add backend check to enforce hierarchy of admins and mods by @dessalines in #4860
• Do pictrs transformations for proxied image urls by @dessalines in #4895
• Enable more build optimizations by @nutomic in #5168
• Calculate "controversial" ranking with exponent instead of multiply (just like Reddit) by @dullbananas in #4872
• Automatically remove tracking parameters from URLs by @dessalines #5018
• Relax timeout for sending activities by @Nothing4You in #4864

Bug Fixes

• Fix admin notification for new user registration (fixes #4916) by @Nutomic in #4925
• Allow community settings changes by remote mods @flamingo-cant-draw in #4937
• Fix problem with connecting to Postgres with TLS @FenrirUnbound in #4910
• Fix bug when commenting in local-only community by @dessalines in #4854 and @abdel-m in #4920
• Fix scheduled task to delete users with denied applications by @Nothing4You in #4907

API

• Return image dimensions and content type in API responses by @dessalines in #4704
• Adding a show_read override to GetPosts. by @dessalines in #4846
• Add show_nsfw override filter to GetPosts. by @dessalines in #4889
• Require authentication for site metadata fetch endpoint by @dessalines in #4968
• Add the ability to fetch a registration application by person_id by @dessalines in #4913
• Order community posts by published data, not id by @dullbananas in #4859
• Throw error when non-mod posts to mod-only comm or when URL is blocked by @flamingo-cant-draw in #4966
• Add option to search exclusively by post title by Carlos-Cabello #5015

Database

• Approve applications in transaction by @Nothing4You in #4970
• Use trigger to generate apub URL in insert instead of update, and fix query planner options not being set when TLS is disabled by @dullbananas in #4797

Lemmy-UI

• Fix full-size post images. by @dessalines in #2797
• Fix modlog ID filtering. by @dessalines in #2795
• Allow Arabic and Cyrillic characters when signing up or creating community by @SleeplessOne1917
• UX - Swap "Select Language" and "Cancel/Preview/Reply" button locations around in commentsReverse order of buttons in Reply TextArea
• Fix jump to content by @SleeplessOne1917
• Fixing peertube and ordinary video embeds. by @dessalines in #2676
• Changing sameSite cookie from Strict to Lax. by @dessalines in #2677
• Remove show new post notifs setting. by @dessalines in #2675
• Fix memory leak around emojis on server render by @makotech222 in #2674
• Enable spellcheck for markdown text area by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2669
• Pre release dep bump by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2661
• Add ability to fill magnet link title on post creation. by @dessalines in #2654
• Registration application view by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2651
• Add torrent help by @dessalines in #2650
• More moderation history by @dessalines in #2649
• Fix tribute related bug by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2647
• Remove min and max length from password input when using login form by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2643
• Remove trending communities card from home. by @dessalines in #2639
• Set data-bs-theme based on the presence of "dark" in theme name by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2638
• Fixing modlog filtering to allow admins and mods to filter by mod. by @dessalines in #2629
• Fix issue from logo bugfix by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2620
• Make more post params cross-postable by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2621
• Fix wonky comment action icon button alignment by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2622
• Prevent broken logo from crashing site by @SleeplessOne1917 in #2619
• Add rate limit info message. by @dessalines in #2563
• Fix getQueryString by @matc-pub in #2558

New Contributors

• @abdel-m made their first contribution in #4920
• @johnspurlock made their first contribution in #4917
• @FenrirUnbound made their first contribution in #4910
• @kwaa made their first contribution in #4901
• @Daniel15 made their first contribution in #4892

Full Changelog

• Lemmy Backend
• Lemmy-UI

Upgrade instructions

This upgrade could take as long as ~30 minutes for larger servers, due to needing to recalculate controversy ranks for all historical posts.

There are no breaking changes with this release.

Follow the upgrade instructions for ansible or docker.

If you need help with the upgrade, you can ask in our support forum or on the Matrix Chat.

Thanks to everyone

We'd like to thank our many contributors and users of Lemmy for coding, translating, testing, and helping find and fix bugs. We're glad many people find it useful and enjoyable enough to contribute.

Special shout out to @SleeplessOne1917, @phiresky, @dullbananas, @mv-gh, @Nothing4u, @asonix, @sunaurus, @flamingo-cant-draw, and @Freakazoid182 for their many code contributions and helpful insights.

Support development

We (@dessalines and @nutomic) have been working full-time on Lemmy for over five years. This is largely thanks to support from NLnet foundation, as well as donations from individual users.

If you like using Lemmy, and want to make sure that we will always be available to work full time building it, consider donating to support its development. A recurring donation is the best way to ensure that open-source software like Lemmy can stay independent and alive, and helps us grow our little developer co-op to support more full-time developers.

• Liberapay (preferred option)
• Open Collective
• Patreon
• Cryptocurrency

This essay by Tim Wu exposes insightful concepts essential to the solarpunk movement. Six pages is only too inconvenient to read for those who are most trapped by convenience.

The importance of Solarpunks reading the ToC essay became starkly clear when someone said they ticked a box in a voting booth and essentially said: I’m done… I give up. They got ~75+ pats on the back for this hard work whilst condemning taking further action (activism).

Voting in an election is the bare minimum duty expected of everyone. It’s not even activism. In some countries that much effort is obligatory (Belgium). Tim Wu covers voting in his essay, speculating that younger generations stand in lines less than older generations had to, suggesting that this inconvenience might be attributed to lower voter turnout among the young (2018, so pre-mail-in ballots).

From the solarpunk manifesto:

4. The “punk” in Solarpunk is about rebellion, counterculture, post-capitalism, decolonialism and enthusiasm. It is about going in a different direction than the mainstream, which is increasingly going in a scary direction.

Convenience is the beaten path of the mainstream. Convenience zombies don’t even have to be cattle-herded because our corporate adversaries have designed the infrastructure to ensure the path of least resistence automatically leads the masses to feed them revenue. Solarpunks resist. We do not accept the path of least resistence. We bring resistence because we understand that convenience is the enemy of activism more often than not.

But not everyone is on the same page. More Solarpunks need to become familiar with Tim Wu’s essay for their own benefit and also for solidarity and empowerment of the movement. We need to get better at recognising tyranny of convenience when we see it.

The perceived inconvenience of boycotting puts many people off especially if they have not absorbed the concepts of the ToC essay. The slightest change to their lifestyle is likened to living in a cave and triggers people to think about a meme where a guy pops out of a well. Boycotting gets progressively easier. It can also start in baby steps so it’s less of a sacrifice. As someone who has been boycotting thousands of companies and brands for over ten years and consciously choosing the hard path for longer than the age of Wu’s essay, it feels less like a prison to me and looks more like those trapped in the cult of convenience are the ones in a prison of sorts. A useful task by the solarpunk movement would be to try to influence convenience zombies toward activism.

One quote from the essay:

Convenience is all destination and no journey.

It’s even worse than that in some cases. The destination can be wrong as a consequence of convenience. The convenience of neglecting the duty of an ethical consumer to boycott leads to a bad place -- financing and enabling adversaries of our values.

The NY Times article is inconveniently enshitified in a paywall. Since this essay is something folks would want to keep a local copy of anyway, I have linked a PDF instead of the original link. The text is also below for those who prefer to exand a spoiler over a PDF.

:::spoiler Tyranny of Convenience, by Tim Wu
“The Tyranny of Convenience”
by Tim Wu

Feb. 16, 2018
The New York Times (opinion)

Convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in
the world today. As a driver of human decisions, it may not offer the
illicit thrill of Freud’s unconscious sexual desires or the
mathematical elegance of the economist’s incentives. Convenience is
boring. But boring is not the same thing as trivial.

In the developed nations of the 21st century, convenience — that is,
more efficient and easier ways of doing personal tasks — has emerged as
perhaps the most powerful force shaping our individual lives and our
economies. This is particularly true in America, where, despite all
the paeans to freedom and individuality, one sometimes wonders whether
convenience is in fact the supreme value.

As Evan Williams, a co‑founder of Twitter, recently put it,
“Convenience decides everything.” Convenience seems to make our
decisions for us, trumping what we like to imagine are our true
preferences. (I prefer to brew my coffee, but Starbucks instant is so
convenient I hardly ever do what I “prefer.”) Easy is better, easiest
is best.

Convenience has the ability to make other options unthinkable. Once
you have used a washing machine, laundering clothes by hand seems
irrational, even if it might be cheaper. After you have experienced
streaming television, waiting to see a show at a prescribed hour seems
silly, even a little undignified. To resist convenience — not to own a
cellphone, not to use Google — has come to require a special kind of
dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism.

For all its influence as a shaper of individual decisions, the greater
power of convenience may arise from decisions made in aggregate, where
it is doing so much to structure the modern economy. Particularly in
tech‑related industries, the battle for convenience is the battle for
industry dominance. Americans say they prize competition, a
proliferation of choices, the little guy. Yet our taste for
convenience begets more convenience, through a combination of the
economics of scale and the power of habit. The easier it is to use
Amazon, the more powerful Amazon becomes — and thus the easier it
becomes to use Amazon. Convenience and monopoly seem to be natural
bedfellows.

Given the growth of convenience — as an ideal, as a value, as a way of
life — it is worth asking what our fixation with it is doing to us and
to our country. I don’t want to suggest that convenience is a force
for evil. Making things easier isn’t wicked. On the contrary, it often
opens up possibilities that once seemed too onerous to contemplate,
and it typically makes life less arduous, especially for those most
vulnerable to life’s drudgeries.

But we err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a
complex relationship with other ideals that we hold dear. Though
understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience
has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it
threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give
meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on
what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us.

It would be perverse to embrace inconvenience as a general rule. But
when we let convenience decide everything, we surrender too much.
Convenience as we now know it is a product of the late 19th and early
20th centuries, when labor‑saving devices for the home were invented
and marketed. Milestones include the invention of the first
“convenience foods,” such as canned pork and beans and Quaker Quick
Oats; the first electric clothes‑washing machines; cleaning products
like Old Dutch scouring powder; and other marvels including the
electric vacuum cleaner, instant cake mix and the microwave oven.

Convenience was the household version of another late‑19th‑century idea,
industrial efficiency, and its accompanying “scientific management.” It
represented the adaptation of the ethos of the factory to domestic life.

However mundane it seems now, convenience, the great liberator of
humankind from labor, was a utopian ideal. By saving time and
eliminating drudgery, it would create the possibility of leisure. And
with leisure would come the possibility of devoting time to learning,
hobbies or whatever else might really matter to us. Convenience would
make available to the general population the kind of freedom for
self‑cultivation once available only to the aristocracy. In this way
convenience would also be the great leveler.

This idea — convenience as liberation — could be intoxicating. Its
headiest depictions are in the science fiction and futurist imaginings
of the mid‑20th century. From serious magazines like Popular Mechanics
and from goofy entertainments like “The Jetsons” we learned that life
in the future would be perfectly convenient. Food would be prepared
with the push of a button.

Moving sidewalks would do away with the annoyance of walking. Clothes
would clean themselves or perhaps self‑destruct after a day’s
wearing. The end of the struggle for existence could at last be
contemplated.

The dream of convenience is premised on the nightmare of physical
work. But is physical work always a nightmare? Do we really want to be
emancipated from all of it? Perhaps our humanity is sometimes
expressed in inconvenient actions and time‑consuming pursuits. Perhaps
this is why, with every advance of convenience, there have always been
those who resist it. They resist out of stubbornness, yes (and because
they have the luxury to do so), but also because they see a threat to
their sense of who they are, to their feeling of control over things
that matter to them.

By the late 1960s, the first convenience revolution had begun to
sputter. The prospect of total convenience no longer seemed like
society’s greatest aspiration. Convenience meant conformity. The
counterculture was about people’s need to express themselves, to
fulfill their individual potential, to live in harmony with nature
rather than constantly seeking to overcome its nuisances. Playing the
guitar was not convenient. Neither was growing one’s own vegetables or
fixing one’s own motorcycle. But such things were seen to have value
nevertheless — or rather, as a result. People were looking for
individuality again.

Perhaps it was inevitable, then, that the second wave of convenience
technologies — the period we are living in — would co‑opt this
ideal. It would conveniencize individuality.

You might date the beginning of this period to the advent of the Sony
Walkman in 1979. With the Walkman we can see a subtle but fundamental
shift in the ideology of convenience. If the first convenience
revolution promised to make life and work easier for you, the second
promised to make it easier to be you. The new technologies were
catalysts of selfhood. They conferred efficiency on self‑expression.

Consider the man of the early 1980s, strolling down the street with
his Walkman and earphones. He is enclosed in an acoustic environment
of his choosing. He is enjoying, out in public, the kind of
self‑expression he once could experience only in his private den. A
new technology is making it easier for him to show who he is, if only
to himself. He struts around the world, the star of his own movie.

So alluring is this vision that it has come to dominate our
existence. Most of the powerful and important technologies created
over the past few decades deliver convenience in the service of
personalization and individuality. Think of the VCR, the playlist, the
Facebook page, the Instagram account. This kind of convenience is no
longer about saving physical labor — many of us don’t do much of that
anyway. It is about minimizing the mental resources, the mental
exertion, required to choose among the options that express ourselves.
Convenience is one‑click, one‑stop shopping, the seamless experience
of “plug and play.” The ideal is personal preference with no effort.

We are willing to pay a premium for convenience, of course — more than
we often realize we are willing to pay. During the late 1990s, for
example, technologies of music distribution like Napster made it
possible to get music online at no cost, and lots of people availed
themselves of the option. But though it remains easy to get music
free, no one really does it anymore. Why? Because the introduction of
the iTunes store in 2003 made buying music even more convenient than
illegally downloading it. Convenient beat out free.

As task after task becomes easier, the growing expectation of
convenience exerts a pressure on everything else to be easy or get
left behind. We are spoiled by immediacy and become annoyed by tasks
that remain at the old level of effort and time. When you can skip the
line and buy concert tickets on your phone, waiting in line to vote in
an election is irritating. This is especially true for those who have
never had to wait in lines (which may help explain the low rate at
which young people vote).

The paradoxical truth I’m driving at is that today’s technologies of
individualization are technologies of mass
individualization. Customization can be surprisingly
homogenizing. Everyone, or nearly everyone, is on Facebook: It is the
most convenient way to keep track of your friends and family, who in
theory should represent what is unique about you and your life. Yet
Facebook seems to make us all the same. Its format and conventions
strip us of all but the most superficial expressions of individuality,
such as which particular photo of a beach or mountain range we select
as our background image.

I do not want to deny that making things easier can serve us in
important ways, giving us many choices (of restaurants, taxi services,
open‑source encyclopedias) where we used to have only a few or
none. But being a person is only partly about having and exercising
choices. It is also about how we face up to situations that are thrust
upon us, about overcoming worthy challenges and finishing difficult
tasks — the struggles that help make us who we are. What happens to
human experience when so many obstacles and impediments and
requirements and preparations have been removed?

Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a
constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all
destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from
taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We
are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We are at
risk of making most of our life experiences a series of trolley rides.

Convenience has to serve something greater than itself, lest it lead
only to more convenience. In her 1963 classic, “The Feminine
Mystique,” Betty Friedan looked at what household technologies had
done for women and concluded that they had just created more
demands. “Even with all the new labor‑saving appliances,” she wrote,
“the modern American housewife probably spends more time on housework
than her grandmother.” When things become easier, we can seek to fill
our time with more “easy” tasks. At some point, life’s defining
struggle becomes the tyranny of tiny chores and petty decisions.

An unwelcome consequence of living in a world where everything is
“easy” is that the only skill that matters is the ability to
multitask. At the extreme, we don’t actually do anything; we only
arrange what will be done, which is a flimsy basis for a life.

We need to consciously embrace the inconvenient — not always, but more
of the time. Nowadays individuality has come to reside in making at
least some inconvenient choices. You need not churn your own butter or
hunt your own meat, but if you want to be someone, you cannot allow
convenience to be the value that transcends all others. Struggle is
not always a problem. Sometimes struggle is a solution. It can be the
solution to the question of who you are.

Embracing inconvenience may sound odd, but we already do it without
thinking of it as such. As if to mask the issue, we give other names
to our inconvenient choices: We call them hobbies, avocations,
callings, passions. These are the noninstrumental activities that
help to define us. They reward us with character because they involve
an encounter with meaningful resistance — with nature’s laws, with the
limits of our own bodies — as in carving wood, melding raw
ingredients, fixing a broken appliance, writing code, timing waves or
facing the point when the runner’s legs and lungs begin to rebel
against him.

Such activities take time, but they also give us time back. They
expose us to the risk of frustration and failure, but they also can
teach us something about the world and our place in it.

So let’s reflect on the tyranny of convenience, try more often to
resist its stupefying power, and see what happens. We must never
forget the joy of doing something slow and something difficult, the
satisfaction of not doing what is easiest. The constellation of
inconvenient choices may be all that stands between us and a life of
total, efficient conformity.

Tim Wu is a law professor at Columbia, the author of “The Attention
Merchants: The Epic Struggle to Get Inside Our Heads” and a
contributing opinion writer.
:::

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last week's thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

The Social Web Foundation is pleased to announce the Social Web Devroom at FOSDEM 2025, and invite participants to submit proposals for talks for the event.

FOSDEM is an exciting free and open source software event in Brussels, Belgium that brings together thousands of enthusiasts from around the world. The event spans the weekend of February 1-2, 2025 and features discussion tracks (“devrooms”) for scores of different technology topics.

The Social Web Devroom will take place in the afternoon of Saturday, February 1.

Format

There will be two available talk formats:

• 25 minutes – for bigger projects, followed by 5 minutes of questions.
• 8 minutes – lightning talks on smaller or newer projects, in groups of 3, followed by 6 minutes of combined questions for the group.

Topics

The Social Web Devroom is open to talks all about the Social Web AKA the Fediverse, including:

• Implementations of the ActivityPub protocol or ActivityPub API
• Clients for ActivityPub-enabled software like Mastodon
• Supporting services for the Fediverse, like search or onboarding
• ActivityPub-related libraries, toolkits, and frameworks
• Tools, bots, platforms, and related topics

Important dates

• Submission open: 1 Nov 2024
• Submission deadline: 1 Dec 2024
• Acceptance notifications: 10 Dec 2024
• Final schedule announcement: 15 Dec 2024
• Devroom: 1 Feb 2025

Submissions

Submit talk proposals to pretalx.fosdem.org/fosdem-2025… . Select “Social Web” from the “Track” dropdown, and include the length of your talk (8/25) in the submission notes.

Code of Conduct

All attendees and speakers must be familiar with and agree to the FOSDEM Code of Conduct fosdem.org/2025/practical/cond….

Contact

Questions about topics, formats, or the Social Web in general should go to contact@socialwebfoundation.org.