With some irregularities, I have had some New Year’s resolutions. Since 2021, these have been inspired by Daniel Mietchen, not only publishing them publicly, but also doing continuous follow-up. This year, I had the basics done on the Eve, but at the last minute, decided to go into more details, with quarterly goals, and that took some more time. But now I am done, and have even done my weekly documentation twice. Perhaps it is not really resolutions in the traditional sense, but more of themes and projects fitting in them.
My themes for the year will be Sustainability, Openness Advocacy, Learning and Health. Each of them has several and more specific sub-themes, and each of those are broken down with quarterly goals. Find the full breakdown and dashboard on GitHub.
The documentation will be different from last year. Instead of monthly updates here, I will try to update the dashboard weekly (and as much as I can, with details in the code commits) and for each quarter write one summary blog post here with reflections and possibly even course corrections.
2024 is over and just like last year, it is time to reflect on the resolutions that I made. I must admit I totally forgot to use the resolutions page as a dashboard like I was planning. But I did do quite well with monthly reports (August and September were lumped together, but otherwise great). So with those meta questions covered, how did I do on my themes?
🔴 Sustainability
make efforts so that the Wikimedians for Sustainable Development becomes a vibrant, healthy and self-sustaining user group
I want to give myself a pass on the efforts made. However, it is clearly not a vibrant, healthy and self-sustaining user group yet. Some more activity has been seen, and a few more people have shown interest in the user group, but I think it is fair to say that it isn’t vibrant. Related to the health, the Wikimedia Affiliates Committee announced that they are considering some “health criteria” which we have started talking about in the group and included in the annual plan for 2025. More on that in my 2025 blog post.
promote the Fediverse by being an active and curious community member and role model
Even though my activity some months was low, I am giving myself a weak pass, as I think I have been quite vigilante in promoting the Fediverse in various ways. This includes exploring different parts of it and not only quitting X, but also being vocal about it. Now, I am pretty sure I haven’t moved the needle on any topline numbers, but at least I am fairly certain that people who followed me in other places and peeked into the Fediverse have been finding a lively and positive part of the internet.
This year was tough. I was sick a bit and had trouble with my calves. But thanks to a good start, and new shoes enabling a strong finish, I made my goal. The running in itself was just a few kilometers from reaching the average, and with the added hiking (where I only count a third of the distance) I was averaging 5.14 km every second day (or 5 km every 1.94 day).
We had a well attended meeting and managed in the end to agree on the annual plan. It’s our first, so I consider it a big success, even though the ambitions in it are fairly low. We didn’t get around to finalizing the strategy yet, though. That will be for early next year.
Newsletter
I did get a last newsletter of the year out, too. An interesting study there that gets on my reading list.
As previous months, I continued to share news about the Fediverse on Mastodon. One of the things I shared, and also partook in, was a research survey, and I think it is still open for you to answer it too if you like.
Plugin development
The issue described last month was resolved and was shipped in version 4.5.0. Pretty cool to see an idea bloom into a reality. It also felt like that, even though I didn’t build it myself, my most tangible contribution to the development of the Fediverse this year.
Loops.video
I created an account on loops.video, which will be some sort of short video platform for the Fediverse. It’s not fully connected to ActivityPub yet, but they got a grant to do it, so I expect it will happen. Find me at https://loops.video/@ainali
Leaving Twitter
I left X with OpenByDefault, the last of my own accounts that I had there. I am still researching how to self-host a server to get me an account on the Fediverse. So far, I am leaning towards a Linux server (VPS) at time4vps as they offer it with Cloudron which would make it fairly easy to get a server up and running. The possibility to host other open source software is also tempting. If you have any experience of them, Cloudron, or other similar setups that you could recommend, I would love to hear from you.
Again, there were over 500 finalists from the participating countries, and while it is an absolute pleasure to get the opportunity to look at them in detail, it is also a tough work ranking them against each other. After a first round, about one quarter of the images were left for a final round. The tooling was just as great as last year, and the organizers did very well in guiding us jurors in our work. And that got us to a result.
So once again I have the pleasure to see that twenty winners have finally been announced. Head over to wikilovesearth.org and check them out, there are some true gems there.
Certificate to jurors.
Of course, in a jury with 11 jurors, there will be some compromises, but as my favorite images made it to the top ten I am still happy with the overall result. My absolute favorite of them all was this stunning landscape.
A few months back, I stumbled upon a call for submissions to a zine by Climateverse: Futurescapes – Visions of Earth 2024-2100. They were looking for art or stories around the climate in a future setting. The way it asked for submissions for different time frames got me thinking about a problem I have been thinking about for a long time, namely how to reduce the amount of flying in the world. While there are systems with taxes, those quickly become unjust as the very rich ones just pay and keep flying. And systems with steep progressive taxes (like where the tax increases exponentially for each flight) need to track how much everybody is flying, and thus is a concern for the privacy.
But the problem remains.
And the last idea got me thinking. What if, if we somehow anyway need to forsake some privacy, instead of tracking where people go, have an agency that decides if you are allowed to go somewhere in the first place. And it makes that judgment based on the necessity of the flight in light of the harm the flight itself causes. Basically, reframing it by treating flying as such a pollutant that you need an exception from the baseline of flying not being allowed, and you will only get permission if you can prove that the flight will bring some kind of benefits for humanity. The purpose of the agency would be to reduce carbon emissions.
On the website, there is a form for applying for permission to make a flight as the landing page. The form is really meant to show that there needs to be good cause for a flight and that pleasure is not an option to base travel on.
After working on flight permission form and the website for a while, I felt that there is more to explore in this space. I want to expand this site to both be an experiment of radical ideas and a showcase of good steps in the world.
Therefore, I will be adding news as I find them, and I would also love if you help me out if you see good and previously radical ideas implemented. Send them to me at ideas@carbonomission.org or make an issue or pull request on GitHub.
And on the more provocative side, I will keep adding ideas that an agency could do. Here, too, I would be thankful for any ideas that you have. Use the same email or GitHub to share them with me. The purpose of this is to show what an agency could do, increasing the Overton window in the public discussion, perhaps finding solutions that are going in this direction.
We did have a tiny but constructive user group meeting (minutes) in November which brought up one good new idea about exploring new media and coordinating that work. I added it to the strategy which is starting to come together to the point that I think we can use it for 2025 and then incrementally improve it. As the year is quickly coming to an end, I also set up a page for our annual plan for next year to start collecting some tangible ideas.
Newsletter
The newsletter came together this month too, and this time also with a new contributor which was nice.
CEE catch-up call #8
The Central and East Europe hub have catch-up calls and for their 8th I was invited to give a brief introduction to the user group. It was recorded but neither the video nor the slides (I added mine to their slide deck) have been uploaded to Wikimedia Commons yet.
As previous months, I continued to share news about the Fediverse on Mastodon, in particular I enjoyed this analogy to Fediverse being vegetarian, organic, locally produced food and other social media being ultra-processed food by giant corporations. I also enjoyed this personal and educational explainer of the Fediverse:
This month I also encountered a lot of comparisons to Bluesky. While planned to be decentralized and federated, I read enough now to know that it isn’t yet.
Deactivating Twitter
I guess the biggest news is that I finally deactivated my personal Twitter account, @Jan Ainali. Taking the plunge was easier when I figured out how to share my archive, and you can find it on aina.li/twitter. Similarly, I published the much smaller archive for @openbydefault on openbydefault.se/twitter. What is left for me in this regard is to deactivate that account and figure out where and how to start a new Fediverse account, preferably using my own domain.
Streaming and podcast improvements
I continued to do some live streaming on Everything video. Unfortunately, there seems to be something causing to video and audio to lose sync after a few minutes. I think I need to file a bug report somewhere.
On the more fun note, I got into a conversation with the developer of the WordPress ActivityPub plugin on Mastodon and got some tips to make the audio file from our podcasts playable directly in the feeds. That’s a really nice step forward.
Europeana has this fun challenge every year, GIF IT UP, which is about modifying a public domain image in one of the connected collections in some creative way. I have thought about doing something for it several times, but never got around to it. But this year I finally did. My entry below, I call Beach Level Demise, and it builds on the painting Summer evening on Skagen’s Southern Beach by Peder Severin Krøyer. If you like it and have the time, please vote for it.
The meaning is probably quite obvious, a remark about the rising sea levels due to climate change. When I made this, I had no idea about the Danish TV series Families like Ours, but now it feels even more fitting.
