Ben Matthews

Zed, for the last few months, and happy with it (previously vscode) - I code in Scala, so Metals provides the complex hints / actions.

Nice article, many examples. Except that it’s not just mountain communities that depend on glaciers - those are a key source of water for the main rivers during the dry season, especially at the western (Indus) end of the Himalayas.
Of course India could be better prepared, but the government needs to show this is a priority, rather than temples and Hindutva.
Maybe regional state governments could do better ?
The article is right to say that 1.5C is only a political goal not deduction from physical-science, a target which the Indian government did not, afaik, explicitly support, despite pressure from all the smaller neighbouring countries which clearly did. India always emphasised equity in the climate negotiations, but too much from a point of view of equitable access to global atmospheric space (i.e. right to burn coal too, proportional to population). So they got lumped together with China which has hugely higher emissions (also higher per-capita than europe), rather than with the most vulnerable countries (especially in Africa) which will receive most of the adaptation funding.

Useful compact image to explain to people who don’t know the fediverse.
On the other hand, it makes me think - why are so many boxes necessary when we have activitypub? Why should anybody need to go to a different tool for each service, why no one-stop-shop software, at least for casual beginners?
(btw I’m aware mbin and friendica had that concept to some extent, but don’t try to cover everything, and I fear that if they did and it took off, scaling-up might be an issue with such php-based stacks).
So, instead of re-implementing 2nd-hand concepts from big-tech, fediverse “killer-app” should be that you just need one identity in one place - you still have to choose that instance, it’s decentralised, but it can do more than any of those big-tech services.

Maybe stupid provocations by US can galvanise climate cooperation by rest of the world. I remember COP6 in Den Haag - which failed due to miscommunication between US (end of Clinton admin) and EU (within which, FR and UK failed to understand each other). Six months later at COP6bis, with the US then led by Bush administration (after blocking recounts in Florida) and similarly pulling out of Kyoto protocol, the rest of the world united against US, the deal was done and the whole COP went for a celebration party cruise down the Rhine (yes the numbers were smaller then, but the boat did feel a bit ‘top-heavy’).
Now, compared to then, US controls much smaller chunk of total emissions and GDP, and the technology transition has momentum. The bigger questions are whether India will follow a similar coal+concrete pathway as China, and eventually how Africa will evolve.

Two thoughts:

• I’m subscribed to 160 communities, most very small, but see interesting stuff due to the Scaled option - also deliberately avoid the big news communities. Evidently, it takes time to join 160 small cs, so to get started it could be handy to have an all/local except list, and remove the biggest news /memes unless people tick a box saying they like such. Or make an algorithm that prioritises stuff related to what I upvote (which is how other social sites seem to get people started - e.g. i just tried rednote and it quickly learned i like mountains and trains) - but i guess that’s hard to implement as each instance would need to work out ‘related to’.
• 2nd point - there are other user-interfaces - I’m using Alexandrite which has a better layout than lemmy default, but how to make this easier (instructions suggest docker, how many casual users will do that …)?

I might try Friendica, although coming from lemmy I’d be more inclined towards Mbin, to combine topic-focus and people-focus.
However as a developer I first check the code repos and see that both are based on php, which seems rather old, and i doubt this would scale efficiently if the network really took off. Recall that twitter was once based on ruby (like mastodon is) and shifted to scala for such reasons. So I feel, these are exploring well the potential user-experience, but the code may need a fresh structure (if somebody knows this tech issue better, please say). It’s good to discuss these things, to help consolidate potential efforts.

It’s interesting that the rise at Mauna Loa is a bit higher than the global average. From such differences one gets a clue about the origins (useful as regional biospheric and oceanic sources and sinks are still hard to quantify precisely). I note also that they are predicting a lower rise in 2025. So, if I read it correctly, there’s a small sign of hope that the trend may get better, as the factors which contributed to this anomalous rise were more in the early part of 2024, related to the earlier El Niño. Unless the latter returns again soon - keep an eye on the pacific heat.

At the end I read: “I found my ideal social network … with the functionalities of Friendica, the UX/UI of Sharkey and the stability and reliability of Mastodon …” - so - please forgive me if I missed something, what does this combination, do we have to make it ?