The thing a car replacement requires is weatherproofing. Otherwise you’ll take the car when it’s cold, when it’s raining, when it’s snowing, when it rained the night before. where I live, that means you can’t ride a bike for 9 months a year more or less.

Someday I’d like to build a recumbent electric bicycle with a heavy tarp shell to protect from wind and water. If it’s street legal and cheap enough, I think it could completely replace cars for a lot of people who don’t really need a big expensive thing that requires gasoline and oil changes and insurance and licensing and plates.

Unlike recreating the automobile, you could get away with a relatively inexpensive battery so if it dies you just replace it, and instead of burning energy to heat the battery all the time, you could just bring it inside when you’re not using it.

For extreme weather you can even go one step further and put in a drill battery powered heater to make the enclosure tolerable in the winter.

Brilliant.

Our society has turned decadent, and so a lot of people have a bunch of skills that only makes sense within a deeply abstracted existence far from any relation to the fundamental stuff we need to live.

I think that across the board there’s a thirst to recover those skills, to learn how to be self-reliant without depending on an omnipresent and sinister machine.

Extremely interesting work, it probably isn’t easy getting so much stuff together to pull data out of so many different types of software.

For obvious reasons, I wish more places would migrate their communities to something that supports activitypub. FediBB looks pretty interesting for people who are used to phpBB.

Hopefully it ends up supporting porting to platforms that support ActivityPub in the future!

“It will come later to ejabberd Community Edition.”

That would be a game changer – I’m running a matrix home server beside ejabbered, but I would probably shut it down if my xmpp server could do what I wanted anyway!

After my experiences self-hosting, I think every house should have a low electricity server people do most of their stuff from. Not having to ask permission to use your own services is a liberating feeling.

I live somewhere that solar isn’t an option for about 9 months a year, but it would be awfully cool running my hardware using directly collected renewable energy for those 3 months a year!

True, repurposing low energy systems like those is a clear win.

A lot of people buy Raspberry Pis for projects that just need a cheap computer. To me that’s a shame, because there’s a lot of cheap fanless computers out there that are as good or better for the purpose of being a computer.

Really? No Multi User Chat?

I am highly critical of electric cars as they exist today. We are building an electric version of an internal combustion engine car and in so doing we’re using tons of materials and the like building a simulation of something that exists.

For me, this is closer to what I think makes sense. We need to step away from the assumptions of the automobile, and start looking at what options we have available once we’re working with batteries and motors. I suspect that 90% of transportation could be taken care of by a small, light, enclosed vehicle with a relatively short range that sells for less than $5,000.

Something like that could revolutionize and democratize transportation more than even the automobile did. Get the price, and the parking requirements, and the insurance requirements, and the licensing requirements down, and suddenly people in lower classes who were never going to be able to buy a car could get 4-season transportation they have full ownership and control of. Even better, despite having many more cars on the road, stress to roads would be less, less material would be used overall, less energy would be used overall.