Notices by Bastian Allgeier (bastianallgeier@mastodon.social), page 3

Yesterday, we talked about the absurd German tradition to watch „Dinner for one“ at NYE and a friend from Sweden and a friend from Egypt independently told me that a similar tradition for them would be to watch „The sound of music“ I honestly never heard about it before (don’t judge me) and so we watched it together today. I think I see why we didn’t turn that one into our German NYE tradition. But I guess the timing couldn’t be better to watch it.

„Suppose they published populist news and nobody shared them“

Our public discourse has been hijacked by an endless circle of shit. Populists post fake news and horrendous attacks and the majority shares it. Either because they fall for it or because they are in rage about it. Both sides help to promote it with the same effectiveness.

I really believe that we need to be aware that we are part of the problem if we participate with our rage - even if it seems like a fight for the right cause.

Reading the latest thread by Mastodon‘s CTO @renchap made me realize once more how small the team behind all this is and how they really try to listen to feedback and get it right.

It’s incredible what they‘ve achieved. It’s literally David vs Goliath compared to other social media platforms.

We should always keep that in mind when some things are not 100% smooth.

We get an ad-free, algo-free, tracker-free, lunatic-billionaire-free space in return 💛

@thomasfuchs With current advancements in battery tech, this is only a matter of time and my point already counts very much for cars. Especially if you consider an efficiency of more than 90% for an electric motor.

I’m always amazed by how poor the efficiency of fossile energy really is.

- A coal plant has an efficiency of around 40%
- A gas plant can get up to around 60%
- A combustion engine car can only translate up to around 25% into motion

Most of the rest is wasted as heat.

Getting rid of fossile fuels by electrifying transport and switching to renewables automatically leads to huge energy savings.

The leader of the German conservatives introduced the idea to collaborate with the far right AfD yesterday. He knows that he won’t get kicked out or replaced as the party leader. He will paddle back a bit after some backlash and that’s it. It doesn’t matter that he just meant on a community level either. The idea to collaborate with Nazis is now officially speakable without consequences. I feel sick!!

Holy shit. VanMoof ran out of money and is currently in a legal process to avoid bankruptcy. Their app to control bike settings is already stopping to work properly for some users. It seems that you can still lock and unlock, but this is a shitshow: https://mastodon.notsobig.co/@phill/110701490478043590

Smart home stuff, smart bikes, smart whatever tech that gets bricked because the company folds is just the worst.

A while ago, I read about the psycholgical effect that kicks in when someone tries to fight for a good cause, but then makes a tiny mistake.

We are very hard on hypocrisy because our brains like when things add up.

I.e. a climate activist with a plastic cup triggers much harder than Elon taking a 5 minute flight in his private jet every other day.

The first feels wrong, while the second just meets our expectations.

I can't stop seeng this everywhere ever since.

@thomasfuchs where do the 10% come from? The 3 degrees by the end of the century which we currently are heading for seem likely to kill a lot more than that.

What are your preferred ways to fight climate change anxiety and just pure frustration with climate politics? I feel like I got a lot better dealing with this in general, but sometimes I really get hit hard again.

@charlesroper "Control what you can control" definitely is key. Also a big fan of small, continuous changes. Thanks for the recommendations.

TIL that one of Germany’s biggest supermarket chains will stop producing printed marketing flyers this year. Their main argument is the climate and the numbers are insane:

Yearly savings:

- 390.000 m3 of wood
- 70.000 tons of CO2
- 380.000.000 kWh of energy

It’s the CO2 equivalent of roughly 60.000 ICE cars and the energy could power 100.000 4-person households for a year ?

https://www.rewe.de/nachhaltigkeit/unsere-ziele/projekte/klimaschutz/papierlos/

@tbroyer Depends on the model you choose. In our case it's more like "source-fully-available-and-as-open-as-possible-while-still-under-a-commercial-license" whereas I've seen other models that take it a step further.

To those who also plan to launch a software project. Taking money is fine. Open source (as in the source is open somewhere) does not have to clash with a paid license or any other form of monetization. There will always be negative voices. But there are also a lot of people who are happy to pay for your work when it has value to them. Nobody wins when you have to shut down your project because you can't make a living.

@paulca I agree 100%. I tried to collect my own thoughts about it a few weeks ago and the recent Twitter app disasters has just moved it forward. This could be huge. https://bastianallgeier.com/notes/network-effect

@paulca I'm pretty positive because of the people who already migrated. It seems like the right ones are really stoked about it and the buzz of activity around projects like @elk is quite amazing.

@RL_Dane Yep, it was pretty rough :)

Some people think Mastodon is too weird to become popular:

I joined Twitter in 2008. We had to put a "d" in front of a tweet to convert it to a direct message and every other day you had some embarrassing private moments exposed because someone forgot about the “d”. Hashtags were just a community hack, introduced by Chris Messina to somehow tag content. Search? Hah, you wish! Tweets via SMS were supposed to be a thing. Oh, and the daily meet and greet with the failwhale. Totally not weird.

@jmcs never thought about it that way. You are totally right.