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Machine pistols require far MORE training to use compared to a standard pistol. They are downright dangerous to use without proper training, both for the user and the people around them.

I agree. Though unfortunately there have been reports of them slowly centralizing power away from community councils toward the military over time. Even still, it's offering far more freedom and diversity than any of the surrounding countries. I'm rooting for them to succeed.

They never collapsed from anything innate, though. They were always destroyed from outside forces. When your society represents actual freedom, you become the enemy of everyone, from capital to stalinism.

Centralization of power has so far made every society deeply flawed or even hellish. The three societies you mentioned are the only ones where power was purposefully decentralized, and that seems to be the most promising path forward that was never allowed to stretch its legs.

Society came very close to realizing the beginnings of a decent state in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. George Orwell faught in it, and wrote about what he saw that society achieving in his book, Homage to Catalonia.

Labor organizing is the only way for the working class to wield political power, as all political parties, and indeed the entire system, is corporate captured.

I think a better solution than a side hustle, is to gather your friends or coworkers to propose to create, collectively, a worker owned co-op (of whatever idea seems profitable).

As it's being done collectively, there's more of a chance of it getting off the ground, as people could take turns working on it in their spare time instead of a side-hustle dominating your time.

Once it's established, those people could then quit their job and work at the coop.

There are credit unions that could help with startup costs, as well as guides on how to structure it based on other successful coops.

Proton (custom WINE by valve) is so good now thanks to Vulkan, you generally only lose about 5% performance compared to Windows, with a 10% difference in rare cases.

It's very easy to be a hardcore gamer on Linux now, outside of a handful of online games that gave yet to flip the switch to let their anti-cheat run on Linux.

Linux can play most games now, it's quite viable as a gaming OS.

Solarpunk is firmly rooted in the anti-authoritarian camp. It's fundamentally inspired by Murray Bookchin's books on ecological anarchism.

The reason solarpunk aren't hopped up on nuclear is that nuclear is an incredibly slow process that requires governments to fund it, corporations only run it if it's profitable (the Vermont Yankee power plant was shut down due to not being competitive with the price of natural gas even though it was emission free), and there's just too much red tape and delays and lack of public goodwill in comparison to Solar, which in comparison scales down to where individuals can afford it and make a difference RIGHT NOW, without waiting for the stars to align with government funding or cost overruns, licensing, etc.

Solar with battery storage is the cheapest, quickest, and most effective source of power currently on the market, and it can reduce our emissions when time is of the essence.

That's not to say solarpunk would advocate to shut down existing nuclear plants or stop construction of ones already underway, but most in the movement have decided solar and wind as the most expedient and decentralized way of achieving energy independence and emissions reduction.

Moon colonization requires billions or even trillions of capital all at once, and can only be done by elite experts in a very specialized field, with no practical gain to society toward solving or global warming. It would be an expense almost impossible to justify, and only corporations building the parts would truly benefit.

Solarpunk, on the other hand, is accessible for an incredibly wide swath of people to contribute toward achieving, as a solarpunk life would actually save money while improving quality of life and mitigating global warming.

Solar panels are within the financial reach of most parts of society, bicycles are far more affordable than cars, better zoning laws are only a stroke of a pen, gardening your food or creating a larger communal gardening area creates food resiliency while saving money, and again is within reach of almost all economic situations.

It can be a big government program, but it scales down incredibly well compared to colonizing the moon, and I believe that is key to it being viable.

You can even skip storage in many cases, which brings the cost of an installation down dramatically. Low-tech magazine has a great article on the concept.

Housing co-ops would be incentivized to implement those features. Our society should make it easier for co-op of all types to be created and thrive (such as through taxes), but especially worker owned and housing co-ops.

Sustainability for large populations is kind've a cornerstone of solarpunk, alongside decentralization and horizontal power to empower individuals and communities against corporation and government control.

There's a lot of discussion on how to implement solarpunk in the here and now over on the fediverse, like Lemmy, but a condensed version of short term goals tends to be:

1. Switch to solar and wind on a mass scale, including personal solar such as the type described in low-tech magazine, combined with reducing energy use as much as is reasonable.

2. Embrace permaculture urbanism, where energy and food production take place in cities. The most well researched proposal put forward is by the Edenicity project.

3. Replace as many cars as possible by implementing more robust and far reaching public transport and bicycle infrastructure in urban and rural areas, more in line with the Netherlands.

4. Build new societal structures that are bottom up through mutual aid, to wean ourselves off corporatism and consumerism, and to develop community independence.

None of those objectives are too far fetched, and would lay the groundwork for even more positive change.

If you opt for Debian, try out Linux Mint's Debian edition, it's the smoothest option for desktop use.

There are more empty homes in the US than there are homeless. Housing is expensive because they have become an investment vehicle. Low income or affordable housing is not being built because the profit margins are not nearly as high as they are for luxury housing.

I truly believe the Fediverse is a viable solution. I've found Lemmy to be an extremely viable alternative to Reddit. The fediverse, more than any other centralized solution, seems equipped to avoid the hellish pitfalls that profit-motive behemoths seemingly must sink into.

There is no monetization, corporate decisions, manipulative algorithms; just self-hosted open source instances as far as the eye can see. Certainly there are rough edges and a perceptible decrease in dopamine from using them, but surely that's worth toughing out as they shape up if it means stopping the unfathomable destruction of society that we're experiencing in real time from big tech?

In Manufacturing Consent, Noam Chomsky makes a powerful argument that independent, citizen owned media is of critical importance if we're to pull society to a better, more collaborative place. It doesn't get more 'citizen owned' than a web of interconnected self-hosted servers.

I'm not sure what you mean by lacking a network effect, unless you mean they don't yet have sufficient users to draw in new ones?

I personally switched to Lemmy from Reddit after the API debacle, and I've found it to be an extremely compelling platform exactly -because it was federated. I can curate my feed from hundreds of large and small instances with nary a corporation in sight! It's self-hosting as far as the eye can see, yet it has enough interesting content and discussions to keep me coming back, without any ads or algorithm trying to manipulate me.

It feels like 90's internet full of webrings, and it's glorious.