I think that there’s a resistance to “technology for the sake of technology” in the Solarpunk ethos, but if we’re really talking about living with maximum comfort for minimal environmental impact, it’s hard to beat an internet.

Sure, tearing up the countryside to lay huge infrastructure, or flooding the skies with radio transmissions, don’t fit in with the solarpunk “feel”, but let’s not stream 4K video into every household. Plain text compresses amazingly well, and a network that could support hundreds of thousands of messages per hour, even with moderately-sized image attachments, could easily run over simple, slow links from town to town, on low-powered hardware that’s relatively easy to maintain and repair, drawing power from a couple of panels or a waterwheel. Your messsge might take a day or three to reach its destination, but it’ll still be faster and more reliable than most other options that don’t involve large-scale organization of people. Plus we won’t have to produce and recycle nearly so much paper and ink if everyone just stops by the designated postmaster’s house in town to log in and check their mail.

Packages, however, are a different matter :)