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Comment by tw1010 | Hacker News Reader

Small sub-cultures, like this one, do experiments all the time in their little corner of the web. Some of the cultures die after a while, and some grow into something else, something bigger, something that starts to percolate on the mainstream surface, albeit possibly only tangental to how it started. I'm not sure I'd predict this movement will grow into something that reaches mainstream tech, but let's say I'm wrong, just for fun. Can anyone here think of a potential narrative that would describe how the current state of this experiment could possibly be perturbed and squeezed into a form that the mainstream soaks up as the next big (or medium-sized) thing?

I'm just curious to know how my prediction that this won't grow any larger than it is today could be wrong.

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I think the article hits on the key problem:

"Less than 100% reliability is essential for the sustainability of an off-the-grid solar system."

IMO, this can only become mainstream once there is no longer an expectation of "100%" uptime for websites in general.

It's far-fetched, but I can imagine it becoming mainstream if mesh networking becomes popular, or if the Internet were to become a widely self-hosted platform (e.g. people had their own "clouds" running in their homes). In such situations, 100% uptime would no longer be an expectation, so the perceived cost of using an off-the-grid system would be reduced.

Having been in the “mesh” space for years, there’s a ton of this techno-primitivism fantasy floating around. The reality is that people want to access the internet and they want it to work well.

This article is a perfect example. This solar powered server which does not have 100% uptime for artistic reasons is probably sitting in someone’s kitchen next to a refrigerator which uses many times as much power and definitely has 100% uptime.

They seem to be working on that as well: https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2016/05/how-to-go-off-grid...

The solar webserver is another step towards that goal.

> refrigerator which uses many times as much power and definitely has 100% uptime.

Except that the making-cold mechanism of fridges have nowhere near a 100% duty-cycle. You probably wouldn't notice if it didn't even meet two "nines" of uptime.

In fact, that's how frost-free freezers work, by taking advantage that fact to run a heater(!) for some number of minutes several times a day. A defrost timer that does 10 minutes every 8 hours reduces compressor uptime to 98%.

A refrigerator is not 99.999% available (power outages). Maybe 99.9% if you live somewhere without trees and snow.

Maybe the webserver sits in a hut like Joey Hess' with a fridge that is also solar powered https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/fridge_0.1/

You'd be able to get to normal levels of uptime by putting backup solar servers in e.g. the Sahara and northern Australia, then taking them out of your DNS rotation when they dropped below 5% battery, surely.

Though transmitting data that far might be against the point of the art project.

I think it will more likely come when the true cost of high energy consumption is factored into our decisions, and people are forced to trade off high availability for low power consumption.

>IMO, this can only become mainstream once there is no longer an expectation of "100%" uptime for websites in general.

I welcome that day.

Why can't you do some non-linear optimization with your resource routing? Power grids have been doing this for ages.

Could well not happen, but the most likely driver of slimmed down websites, anyway, would be a desire to make them load better in India, Africa, parts of Latin America and eastern Asia that have low connection speeds. Not saying that's how it will go, but it's feasible that to get to the second and third billion internet users, you need to be slimmer.

Smaller Web pages would be nice on my phone in Massachusetts when I've got spotty service, honestly.

But how are they going to sell you the product AND sell you as a product at the same time? WE NEED DATA!

It's still kind of a niche, though. People who don't live where decent internet access is readily available also tend to not have enough disposable wealth to make great business targets, especially for social media and other sites that sell eyeballs rather than widgets.

On the other hand, one of the first things people with disposable income want today is good internet access, so as income grows for the middle five billion (and it's growing rapidly), there's tremendous market pressure to supply them with faster internet - maybe not up to the standards of the top billion, but not "low tech" either.

While unlikely, I could see more wide-spread adoption of this concept if a large online company began using the approach. If Twitter for example decided to cut out all their bloat, simplify served graphics and assets, and invest in sustainable energy, I could see other high-profile internet companies following their lead.

Just my 2¢

They would be getting rid of their product, which is to analyze and selling their users.

I can see more wide spread adoption when people pay 2/mo for twitter and 3/mo for facebook.

It seems to me that it would eventually be possible, to build a relatively cheap system that can both soak up power and transmit/recieve data without any external wiring.

You could hook up a raspberry pi to a solar system, weatherproof it, then deploy it in the wild. Add a wireless "router" of some sort, and then you have a mobile broadcasting station.

Imagine a world where such systems are very cheap to build. Also -- imagine that they could be "networked" if they are in range. Finally, imagine hobbyists building out that network for fun. Maybe in neighborhoods, public parks, etc.

Imagine the technology greatly improves and gets even cheaper. These are plastered everywhere, by everyone. They can transmit and receive data very quickly, over reasonably far distances.

Maybe it becomes an off-grid anarchist internet. :)

If you plaster random devices in public places I think you'll get something like this happening:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Boston_Mooninite_panic

See "brutalist" websites. At the start it was very similar in spirit with this website: raw, functional, rejecting looks for something you appreciate in a different way. Now: ugly, full of js, heavy.

Its what I did with beatsaver: https://beatsaver.com

1.4MB (most are thumbnails) and kept to stock bootstrap 3

You made Beatsaver? Love your site, makes finding songs so much easier!

Maybe there's a niche there for environmentalists:

1. If there was a way to show others:"i'm saving energy while browsing the web"

2. People using those sites could use this as a tool for telling themselves a story about themselves

3. site builders would choose this from similar reasons

Maybe the user community that will form around this will be interesting, so it would be worthwhile to join, for the sake of people and content.

Option 1 has been done before:

http://www.blackle.com/

(In this case, the tangible benefits are highly debatable, especially since we moved on from CRT monitors - although I'd be interested to see data from OLED displays)

well, if the sub-culture takes off among young people then it could supplant selfies as the means by which people broadcast what they are doing 'right now' ... interestingly that would drive down interest in going viral as a sudden spike in visitors could kill someone's site until the next day

if it ends up being very easy to run a solar powered website- i.e. if it turns out the process can be refined and simplified nicely- then lots of places would do it since its cheaper and cool. but im sure lots of typical business constraints (uptime for instance) would dictate that lots of companies will never do it.

Seems like plenty of organizations optimize for 'cheaper', and this is one means of doing so.

  Can anyone here think of [...] 
  how [...] this experiment 
  could [be] squeezed into 
  a form [...] as the next 
  big [...] thing?

This is definitely firmly in the "Internet of Things" genre of niche interests. Remote power monitoring and other system diagnostics for systems designed to account for expected faults, and manage their own capacity to operate, for sure are useful for internet managed consumer appliances.

Right now we only think in terms of wi-fi routers and phones, but when 4 out of 5 useless gadgets (oh boy! internet-enabled shampoo bottles that also can advertise hair gel! yaayy!) have a battery and 5G internet, an RSS/JSON/XML feed of their status will be abundantly relevant.

To... someone. Probably not me, but I'm sure someone will want this.

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