I think it would be a good thing to have a tag for sustainability/“green computing” or something like that. Some example posts that would benefit from such a tag:
- PotatoP - A LISP-programmable laptop with battery life measured in years
- What might degrowth computing look like?
- How to build a Low-Tech website: Software & Hardware
- Scaphandre: Your tech stack doesn’t need so much energy
What do y’all think?
I think it would be a great idea. It could capture things like permacomputing, smol web in addition to what you posted above.
Likewise, I think that would be a wonderful addition to the tag cloud. I enjoy reading about these, and adding a tag would be a signal implying they’re welcome on Lobste.rs. There also seems to exist a subset of people who aren’t thrilled with these topics, and being able to filter them out would certainly be beneficial! Win-win.
IMO smol web could fall under either “culture” or this proposed tag depending on whether a submission is more about a social phenomenon or about the technical nature of using less resources/complexity. I think this is good because it leaves “sustainability” with a pretty clear role, rather than trying to come up with a word to capture the whole smol/perma/tilde/gemini/etc. zeitgeist.
I like it as well, because it refers to a topic adjacent to but not included in performance.
Bored at work so searched for “solar” here and found these results that might also benefit from this tag.
Specifically from domain solar.lowtechmagazine.com:
I don’t have a strong opinion on its necessity for categorisation, but I’m in favour on the assumption that having the tag will very slightly encourage people publishing more of it here. ❤️
I’d also like to see this tag because I think it’d help me learn more about this topic, which interests me greatly.
I don’t think “low power” and sustainability are synonymous - but the tag system is primarily for filtering out content, not finding it. These articles usually have keywords: degrowth, “battery life”, “low tech” etc., and so it really seems more like a tag for it’s own sake rather than a tag for the necessity of excluding content from your feed. I guess tag bloat is a silly thing to worry about but overtagging and hyper-specialisation of tagging doesn’t really seem to bring so many benefits vs. using the search system.
It’s also a way to indicate that such content is welcome - the story submission guidelines say that if there’s no suitable tag, you should reconsider your submission. Now they’re typically tagged with a tangentially related tag.
I am softly positive, however, I have a small concern: It might overlap with “sustainability” as a notion of sustainably running a FOSS project. It’s a niche topic here, but might be misunderstood.
Good point, I hadn’t considered that. I don’t think the risk of misunderstanding is big because when you add a tag, it tells you in the description what it means. For example, “performance” is also not about performance art or live coding and the description tells you that. But I am a bit concerned if the sustainability of running FOSS projects becomes more popular, there wouldn’t be a good tag left for it. So an alternative name for the tag under discussion would be welcome.
What about “eco - Environmental sustainability of computing”? “eco” is a bit slangy and maybe could be misinterpreted as “economics”, but at least “economics” (which could include financial sustainability of projects) has the distinct abbreviation “econ”.
I’m personally interested in the exposition of ideas or projects that revolve around low power consumption, recycled hardware, as well as general examples of accomplishing technical goals with minimal resources.
+1 would totes filter this
Yes please. Present day debate of such topics has been totally hijact by all sorts of greenwashing. Real sustainability efforts like the onesnin the example links are very hard to come by.
Another vote in favor of this idea, as it’s highly relevant to my interests as well. I also see stories like Building A Jank UART to USB Cable From Scavenged Parts as fitting into this category.
To tag submissions about carbon offsets by rich?
Please provide links to already submitted stories to proof your point or argue why in the future such stories are likely to be submitted. Otherwise you are just trolling :)