maybe the password has a special character that Lemmy can’t handle. In any case, it’s one that @tom might need to look at.

I guess the same thing that puts the energy imbalance required for lightning to happen, is being used here.

I also think based on the small scale this study was done, there would be a very small amount of electricity generated - enough to maybe power a sensor. We already have ‘energy harvesting’ buttons and sensors which generate electricity from what would otherwise be wasted (I have a battery free doorbell which gets enough electricity to transmit a radio signal - from the act of pressing the button). This might start out as another way to get electricity to these kinds of devices.

This will very quickly go the same way as IRC. The spirit of Eris lives again on ActivityPub.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFnet

IRC is a plaintext chat system which was originally decentralised and federated. Technically decentralisation and federation is still perfectly possible in the IRC protocol. Nobody does it so freely any more, ever since the Eris Free Net decided to go its own way because it made sense to do so.

It achieved this by blocking any IRC server that is connected to the Eris server.

In this case it wasn’t political - it was due to spam, flamewars, and organisational problems (what I just called ‘the spirit of Eris’). If you throw politics in there (or rather the fact that these days moderators are accustomed to seeing political views they already agree with on the Internet), I think it just will accelerate things towards defederation, or federation with only people we seem to agree with (read: easy to moderate).