I have an ac1900 wifi router that isn't in use and had support dropped by the vendor. My home network is already set up, so I don't have a need for it – otherwise, I'd probably flash OpenWRT on it. Any ideas for what I could use it for?

I used to really like youtube for all the interesting content - especially tutorial videos of all kind. Lately I have become very tired of watching moving images for content that could be delivered in text form - where I can choose to read and take it in at my own pace, in silence.

I agree that not all content can be delivered in this way, videos are incredibly helpful with a lot of stuff, but I wish more stuff could be (also) readable instead of watchable, or even listenable. Is in part an autism/accessibility thing, but also plays into my thoughts about the appropriateness of resource use for information recording/presentation/transfer from an Solarpunk computing perspective.

What do you think?

These two groups exist:

• !permacomputing@lemmy.sdf.org
• !permacomputing@slrpnk.net

Both are small but it looks like slrpnk.net has more traction. IMO both might want to consider mentioning the other in the side-bar so folks know to cross-post.

One or two AA or AAA batteries can power a 1980s pager for a whole year without recharging. This is because most pagers of that time period are one-way. Since it only listens, it avoids the energy cost of constantly transmitting to all towers in range. So it’s even better than a feature phone (dumb phone). The beneficial side-effect: you’re untrackable apart from being in the service area.

It’s not a good state of affairs in the US though. All but 2 pager service providers have gone out of business. It’s a duopoly and last time I checked you can only get annual contracts for a price that’s higher than prepaid mobile service. You also can no longer buy new pagers because no one makes them (apart from POCSAG hobbyist varieties which then require you to build your own transmitter). This means you’re limited to whatever still exists in the 2nd hand market for hardware.

So it sucks in the US. Is it better anywhere else? In principle pagers are still important for first responders because they’re more reliable than SMS, so they should really still exist everywhere at least to the extent that competence prevails.

Now that the web is rich in garbage I try to think of how the UX can be made tolerable again. Consider this scenario:

Bob sees an article of interest and decides to share it. I have no idea why Bob’s experience was decent enough that he feels the article is worthy of sharing, but I’m getting tor-hostility, CAPTCHAs, popups, dysfunction that requires JavaScript perms, etc. In short, Bob’s link goes to a shit hole.

So how can we fix this?

What if Bob copies the full text of the article and creates an archive of sorts in the fediverse? That solves the enshitification problem but it risks harassment from copyright police. Or does it not? The fair use doctrine specifically permits a work to be quoted for the purpose of commentary. It’s also easily justified because the web has become so exclusive (e.g. Tor blocking) that a case can be made for including a copy of the article along with Bob’s commentary. Because what happens now? Alice the Tor user gets blocked from the page and can only read people’s comments which have no context because the web is broken. Bob copying the original text enables Alice to appreciate Bob’s work (his commentary).

I also wonder if bilingual people can go a step further in mitigating copyright harassment. Suppose Juan reads the English article, machine translates it into Spanish, then corrects the flaws because he’s fluent in Spanish, and then posts the Spanish version. Do copyrights survive translation? If Juan comments in Spanish, then surely the Spanish translation is critical to non-English speakers understanding Juan’s post.

I think this idea would benefit the permacomputing movement because avoiding web enshitification is a way to access content with less resources. The original poster may have to run a shit ton of heavy JavaScript to reach the text, but then everyone attending his thread can function with a simple text client.

#askFedi #lawFedi