We're going beyond net zero
We’re pre-launching our Patreon page to test if the Patreon-Discord connection work as it should. Ask me for the link if you’re interested to have a look at the page or try it before we announce it publicly.
These two images are screenshots from within our Discord server:
We’re in the process of launching a Discord server and a Patreon page. This will enable people on mastodon.green to become club members. It’s still free to sign up and use mastodon.green, but membership gives access to the Discord server named “Mastodon.green”. There you can chat in a different format than with 500 character toots. It’s also possible to voice chat.
Club membership will also give you access to a members page. It can be seen as a page that extends the bio in your mastodon.green profile. We’re experimenting with this to see if it’s something that can be useful to you and other people in our community. Membership includes verification that you’re a club member. It’s a highlighted link of this type club.mastodon.green/@you
We introduce the concept of a Served region- and Language policy.
Albin Social is a micro-company and cannot afford to provide our services worldwide.
We make our services availabe in selected countries as described in our Served region policy. Due to limited moderation resources we also have a Language policy. It describes which languages can be used on public timelines and elsewhere in our services.
These two policies can change with time, depending on factors such as if we are ready to expand our services into new countries or have to retract from countries. If we get more moderators with specific language skills we may be able to add languages, and if moderators leave we may have to remove a listed language.
We invite people to contribute in making the www.mastodon.green website. It could have sections such as Help/Support, FAQ, Get started, About mastodon.green and other useful information. Apart from the website, there are other interesting things to do. You could become a volunteer moderator, help out with calculating CO2 emissions, or plan potential system upgrades.
We have set up some channels on the Discord server around some main volunteer topics:
We open up for the possibility of sponsors on the page www.mastodon.green/sponsors
Terms v2.0 lays the foundation for our new ways of collaborating. If you want to voice your opinion, give feedback or contribute to an improved version 2.1 you can ask for an invite to our Discord server.
Terms v2.0 take effect 2022-05-20. By choosing to become a club member or contributing to Albin Social projects before 2022-05-20 you accept these terms and in that case they take effect from the day you join as a club member or contributor to the projects.
Yesterday I spoken with a few people. We had some thoughts of the possibility of creating web pages for mastodon.green.
It would be nice to have some kind of “get started” guide for new people. Joinmastodon.org has documentation, but about half of it is highly technical stuff aimed at administrators and developers. Other social websites such as Instagram, Twitter, Clubhouse and TikTok doesn’t have “documentation”. They either have “help” or “support”. The newer companies seems to go with “support”. Documentation sounds like a book you read carefully when you’re an expert connecting one piece of software to another piece of software. Support and help sounds easier.
We also spoke about collecting and writing a Frequently Asked Questions for mastodon.green.
We could potentially create a WordPress based website and have sections on it such as
So the URL to the support section would look like https://www.mastodon.gren/support/
If you want to contribute in making the Mastodon.green website you can ask for an invite to our Discord server. We’re looking for people who want to volunteer with:
This is not decided yet. Just some thoughts and an initial conversation. We could do it in another way if that’s better, but in one way or the other it would be nice to have some texts, or even videos.
Imagine having some videos showing how to set up filters, make the language settings, switch to advanced view, switch to dark mode etc.
With 1000 new users joining mastodon.green we’re inviting you and others to contribute as volunteers. When you’re contributing, you’re helping to build a friendly community working together towards our goal of having climate-positive servers in the Fediverse.
We’re going beyond net-zero on mastodon.green and all Albin Social projects. Albin Social’s mission is to build services that remove CO2 from the air when you’re using them.
Volunteering may sound big, but it’s just like joining a small club and doing things together. If you want you can do tiny easy tasks, or advanced challenging stuff. No matter what your are or do, there could be something fun you could get involved with.
You can contribute in many ways. Maybe you’re an artist, good at communicating with people, writing interesting texts, working with climate-reporting, making websites, sysadm or good at pretty much anything.
We could form small groups around main activities.
Send me a direct message and you get an invite to our Discord server, @JohanEmpa@mastodon.green
A lot happened on the Fediverse in the last week of April in 2022. It started on Monday with an acquisition offer by a billionaire to buy Twitter. Twitters board of directors accepted the offer and people started joining Mastodon.
Some of them found their way to our beautifully coloured server, mastodon.green.
On Monday we had 779 users. It rose steadily until the server became slow and when user 998 signed up the whole thing crashed. I was looking at the numbers around that time as it’s quite a milestone to pass 1000 users.
It was definitely time to upgrade the server, so I did that.
At the time of writing this blog post we have more than 2000 users (2022-05-01 17:19)
The numbers are big from the perspective of our tiny Mastodon server. Clearly it was a peak of signups, but when one look carefully at the new users graph it’s flattening out at a much higher level than what we had the week before. The following image is from today 17:19.
Other servers had similar peaks, and the famous server run by the main developers had tens of thousands of users signing up. That server was already under heavy load. A server that had very similar graphs as ours was Fosstodon.org. They wrote a blog post about it https://hub.fosstodon.org/elon-twitter-post-mortem/
The following image is from Friday afternoon. To show what happened the last two days.
In other news the European Union entered the Fediverse on their own Mastodon server. I’m not sure if it’s a small or big step for them, but in my opinion it’s a big step forward for decentralized social media and the Fediverse. They seem to use #EUvoice as their name and tag.
A celebrity signed up, probably not the first one, or the last one. (Luckily not on our server, it would crash again). It was Jan Böhmermann from Germany.
Look at this image below. When I search for him. Mastodon displays four identical images and names on different domains. The profile that looks verified, isn’t verified, because anyone can add an emoji in their name field, and that emoji can be a fake verification mark. It’s not good – at all. Some people know about this, but there is no way tens of thousands of new users will know about it. As far as I know, the real person is on .social https://mastodon.social/@janboehm
Mastodon has another way to self verify your profile, but you must have your own website and be able to add your own rel=”me” link to it.
It’s looks good when you know what you’re looking for. In my profile you can see that albinsocial.com is highlighted. As an example for this blog post I temporarily added a normal link.
As a way to fund mastodon.green I’m planning to offer club memberships which will include a highlighted link to a page. It could look like this club.dentep.org/@user.
To begin with it could be the link only, but it would be possible to extend that in the future to a sort of member page. Where a member can choose to add an introduction, some hashtags with their interests, their city etc. That way it could be possible to browse around and find people to connects with. For example by looking at club members with tags #Paris #Jogging #Singing. So you could look at all members that likes #jogging if you want to follow such people.
Albin Social’s mission and vision. Version 1.
Our mission is to build a European based tech company providing CO2 negative digital products and services, mainly for people and companies in EU/EEA. To be a CO2 negative company we’re scope 1-3 net-zero and additionally using 2 % of revenue for CO2 removals.
Our vision is a world where the atmosphere has been restored to its natural balance. It’s a world where historical CO2 emissions has been removed so that the atmosphere is back to it’s pre-industrial level of 280 ppm.
Climate change has adversely affected both terrestrial and marine ecosystems, and is expected to further affect many ecosystems, including tundra, mangroves, coral reefs, and caves.
Increasing global temperature, more frequent occurrence of extreme weather, and rising sea level are among some of the effects of climate change that will have the most significant impact.
Some of the problem with current and predicted atmospheric CO2 levels are:
Some of this is already happening and it’s expected to get worse. A net-zero society in 2050 prevents it from reaching catastrophic levels, but it’s not solving the root problem. It’s simply too much CO2 in the atmophere.
To completely fix this problem the world has to become net-negative, that is to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. There are plenty of good and safe solutions to do it.
The world needs a better and more ambitious vision than net-zero. A restored atmophere is what the world should aim for. Net-zero is a milestone towards that goal.
Humanity has done some serious CO2 pollution for just about 110 years and it’s time that we set a goal to clean it up.
This blog post is adapted from the Wikipedia article Climate change and ecosystems and it’s CC-BY-SA 3.0.
When one remove more CO2 from the atmosphere than one emit, that’s being climate positive. Climate positive is a nicer sounding phrase than CO2 negative, but it means the same.
To keep things clear we have to separate the concept of “climate” from the concept of “CO2“. Both can be positive, negative or neutral.
It’s very easy, but it can be a little bit confusing first. When you remove more CO2 than you emit it’s good for the climate, and therefore it’s a positive thing for the climate.
Carbon negative refer to the result we get when we subtract CO2 removals from emissions. When we do the CO2 mathematics and get a positive result it is bad because it leaves CO2 in the air. If we end up with a negative figure it’s good because it removes CO2 from the air. When you remove as much as you emit you’re net zero.
It’s this simple:
Sometimes people in USA speak about being “carbon negative” which sounds like C negative, but what they really mean is CO2 negative. When we speak about being CO2 negative we also count other greenhouse gases by converting them to CO2 equivalents (CO2eq)
Counting and comparing CO2 emissions can be a tricky thing to do. Luckily there are reporting standards such as the Greenhouse gas protocol. They have three scopes:
If we want to compare companies with each other we have to check what they include when they say they’re climate neutral or net-zero.
Sometimes they only speak about scope 1 and 2. It’s easy for a company to stop there and ignore the large and difficult scope 3. Those indirect emissions happens outside of the company, so technically it’s not “their company”, but the emissions are caused because of the products and services the company provide.
That said, we shouldn’t be too hard on scope 3. In some cases those emissions can be too big to handle for a company, literally so expensive to remove that it would bankrupt the company. At the same time the company may be needed for the society to function. The best approach here is not to let the company die, but instead push for reductions by all companies through the value chain and set a realistic time frame.
Naturally we as consumers should choose a better product or company if those are available. One that already has become net zero or climate positive.
Albin Social’s objective is to become CO2 negative as soon as possible for all three scopes.
Being climate positive mean to remove more CO2 from the air than one emit. There is still no international standard on how CO2 accounting and reporting should be done before a company can call itself climate positive. Let’s look at two options.
One way to be climate positive is to remove, say 110 %, of CO2 emissions. If a company emit 100 ton CO2, then they would remove 110 tons. When that company succeed in reducing their emissions the following year and only emit 50 ton, they would remove 55 ton. So the positive impact on the climate during the first year was 10 ton removed and for the second year they removed 5 ton. At Albin Social we said, hold on, this approach mean that our positive impact decreases over time. Is there a better way.
Just to be clear, we’re not criticizing this method. It’s a good approach if the goal is a net zero society. We aim higher though and dream about a restored atmosphere.
Albin Social want to keep making a climate positive impact as our emissions goes towards zero. This is our proposed method:
1. We look at the previous year and analyse how much CO2 we must remove to be a net-zero company.
2. We remove CO2 and become net zero. Maybe we call this net zero removals.
3. In addition to this we use 2 % of revenue for climate positive CO2 removals.
If we reach a state where our emissions are close to zero, this method keeps removing CO2.
By basing our climate positive removals on revenue it also means that when our company grows, more CO2 are removed. A bigger company with bigger revenue leads to a bigger climate positive impact.
Some people say that no one should start a new company and grow it, that it would be better for the climate to stop using apps. We believe people will keep using social apps no matter if Albin Social exist or not. What we’re doing is to offer apps that are better for the climate. A climate positive app is better than a net zero app. As far as we can see none of the big app companies are net zero for all three scopes, they are still climate negative.
People are not increasing consumption by choosing Albin Social. All they’re doing is being on our app instead of the other apps. There isn’t even a need to fully switch, you can have two apps, but any time spent on our app will mean removed CO2.
