Solarpunk and the Fediverse.
Eco-Animalist Socialism Conference.
Manning Community Centre, Boorloo, Perth.
2nd March 2025.
Blair Vidakovich.
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Introduction.
Good morning.
My name is Blair Vidakovich.
I was asked to prepare this presentation by Timothy Green, one of the organisers of this conference.
I first met Tim at the 2023 May Day rally at the Fremantle Esplanade.
I am a member of the Socialist Alliance. The Socialist Alliance is a left wing activist political party. It has its origins in the 1960s and -70s with what was then called in Australia the Socialist Worker's Party (SWP). The SWP, then, in turn, developed into the Democratic Socialist Party. Finally, the Socialist Alliance was formed in 2001.
My party has a long and proud track record of embracing political movements very early on. This is especially true of ecological and environmental struggles. It is also true of our involvement in the feminist movement in Australia.
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What is Solarpunk?
I have been asked to speak on the topic of solarpunk.
One of the best ways of introducing something is to explain what that thing is not.
Solarpunk could be thought of as the reverse of the idea of "cyberpunk". Cyberpunk is a kind of social subculture, artistic aesthetic, science fiction genre, and probably also some kind of philosophical thought.
Solarpunk, like cyberpunk, is also all these things. But instead of imagining a dystopian world, it asserts one of a utopia.
Solarpunk is both an attempt at interpreting the world as well as changing it. Cyberpunk is this too, but its outlook about the future is intrinsically cynical and pessimistic. Instead, solarpunk, as a movement, refuses to exclude happiness, equality, community, and empathy from its system of ideas.
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When I think of solarpunk, I imagine something like the Academies or Lyceums of the ancient Hellenistic world.
In a solarpunk utopia, people would live in communities who are in touch with the land that they live on. There would be a far different understanding of how humans fit into planet Earth's ecology.
I imagine there still to be cities, but there would be no dominance of the town over the country. The whole mode of production--the politics and economics of a solarpunk society--could be said, very seriously, to be something like proper full communism.
People would indeed return to the land, and return to a much more agrarian mode of life, but solarpunk is not to be confused with primitivism. There would, yes, be a return to the land, but one could also say that "the computers would be coming too".
My first introduction to solarpunk was in the online hacker community.
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The solarpunk movement exists online and it is because of the internet that it has, and continues to flourish. In many ways solarpunk grew out of the hacker community, and all these people have been profoundly inspired by its influence.
Solarpunk exists among other hacker movements and concepts that are closely related to, as well as allied together with its overall vision and goals.
These movements are:
- Permacomputing.
- Computer- or Digital Minimalism.
- the Low Tech movement.
- the Offline First movement.
- the concept of "Digital Gardens".
- and the "Tilde" community, the online community centred around social UNIX servers.
In this speech I will talk about the technological aspects of solarpunk, and its connection to digital computing. This is not well known, and the way technology combines with radical environmentalism in solarpunk is, truly, quite mind-blowing.
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The Fediverse.
One of the best ways to learn something is to do it.
If you would like to learn more about what solarpunk is, I would suggest first that you get an account somewhere on the fediverse.
The fediverse is a social media network that developed out of the global hacker community. It was standardised internationally in 2018 by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This was the organisation that the creator of the web, Tim Berners-Lee, founded in 1994 when the world wide web was first released.
The fediverse is different from other social media by first, deliberately excluding every type of content suggestion algorithm, and second, by adopting a model of resource structure and system administration which is federated, not centralised.
This means that, in the former case, all posts on the fediverse are ordered chronologically. You will only ever see the
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most recent discussion at the top of your social media feed. There is no intermediate processing or re-ordering of any content on the fediverse. All post filtering, muting, blocking, and moderation is done either by the server hosting a fediverse account, or through one's own account themselves.
There is a "clone" of every type of mainstream social media platform on the fedi. For Twitter there is Mastodon, Pleroma, and Misskey. FOr Youtube there is Peertube. For Instagram there is Pixelfed. Reddit also has an analogue in the form of Lemmy or Kbin. Spotify--Funkwhale. Medium or Substack--Writefreely or Plume.
The total number of users is currently around 12.5 million. Of these, 1.3 million are active every month. The entire network runs on just over 17 000 individual servers worldwide.
70% of the fediverse runs on the micro-blogging software known as Mastodon.
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The next largest software in terms of the number of users is Pixelfed at 19%, and then Peertube and Lemmy with around 4% each.
I will now explain how to learn more about solarpunk by accessing the fediverse.
The Fedi and Solarpunk.
I first came into came into contact with the concept of solarpunk on the fediverse. There are entire fediverse servers dedicated only to the topic of solarpunk--once of the oldest and most influential is the Mastodon instance called https://sunbeam.city . There are many others.
In a very fundamental way, the fediverse itself is an expression of the spirit of solarpunk. A significant amount of people on the fediverse practice and embody solarpunk every day. The server admins and the developers--the people who maintain, extend, and invent new infrastructure on the fediverse--are all engaged in an experiment of seizing back the modern web from the destructive forces of
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Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and other corporate tech firms.
People run entire online communities out of their bedrooms. Any connection to the internet, no matter how pathetic, will do. People dumpster dive hardware and then set that e-waste to work hosting services for the hacker community.
But I also want to mention some of the explicit solarpunk communities and projects that exist within the fediverse. Of these I will bring up just three:
- The Gemini Protocol.
- Devine Lu Linvega and their community.
- The SDF Public Access UNIX System.
The Gemini Protocol
- Alternate hypertext protocol to WWW and HTTP.
- No client-side code execution.
- Has an RFC.
- The whole community exists for the purpose of escaping or replacing the modern internet.
- When the protocol standard was finalised, servers and client were built and almost everyone left the web.
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The Gemini Protocol project leader is known as "Solderpunk", and they famously went AWOL, disappearing from the whole community. They returned, and many people were relieved. During their mysterious seclusion, it turns out they had been working on valve audio amplifiers.
Devine Lu Linvega
- Lives permanently on a boat.
- Runs an entire community with an extremely poor internet connection.
- Goes offline for long stretches while crossing entire oceans.
- A very real chance they could die every time they do long journeys sailing around the planet.
- Their main computer workstation is a raspberry pi.
- They created something called "Uxn", which is a "virtual machine". It was done from first principles. It is as if Uxn were an actual piece of digital silicon inside your computer.
SDF
- "Super Dimension Fortress Macross".
- Established 1987, before the mass consumer internet.
- Biggest NetBSD installation in the world.
- Serious old school UNIX culture.
- Probably the best way to throw oneself into the hacker community.
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Conclusion - Lessons about Solarpunk from the Fediverse.
The fediverse provides many examples of actually-existing communities online practicing and promoting the solarpunk worldview.
From computer cooperatives, to experimental art movements, to game developers, the fediverse is one of the pillars of the solarpunk movement.
Most of the communities on the fedi are true underground movements. Almost all of them are passionately anti-capitalist, and intent on improving the way internet services can be democratised.
Almost every fediverse subculture, the solarpunk movement included, is steadfast in its commitment to have digital technology and the internet brought under community control and transformed along ecological lines.
Ecological virtues, hacker culture, and community activation come together to make solarpunk a powerful and popular force in the world.
Call to Action.
Plug for Socialist Alliance.
Plug for Friendly Computers.
Fediverse solarpunk communities.
*
Thank you.
Blair Vidak.
1492 words.
Spoken, 10 - 15 minutes approx.
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