Solarpunk and the Small Web

A speculative fiction genre and real-world political/aesthetic movement. Where cyberpunk imagines corporate dystopia and steampunk romanticizes industrialism, solarpunk imagines forward: decentralized communities, renewable energy, mutual aid, technology that serves life rather than exploiting it.

Symbol: a half-gear (technology compatible with nature) and a sun (infinite open potential).

The movement began in sci-fi and migrated into architecture, gardening, political organizing, and Internet culture.

• Who benefits from this technology?
• At what expense?
• Does it serve communities or extract from them?
• Does it distrust monocultures and scale for scale's sake?

These are the same questions the small web asks.

• Solderpunk — creator of Gemini — named themselves after the act of soldering: connection with heat and metal
• Bombadillo — developed by sloum on tildegit, a fellow tildeverse resident
• The tildeverse — shared Unix servers as a commons; home on the Internet without surrendering data or being the product
• Botany — a terminal plant-growing game on tilde.town; a small shared ASCII garden
• These protocols have no pipeline for data harvesting or intrusive advertising. They are structurally incapable of it.

Smol Pub charges $5 for a lifetime license. The attention economy's math is engagement, time-on-site, data extraction. The small web's math is different.

• Protocols
• Low Hardware Requirements of the Small Web
• Permacomputing
• Browser Monoculture
• tilde.town