So there are a few topics that came up lately that I think would be nice to discuss with members of this community.
Basically this is part of writing a Code of Conduct for our instance and I think we need to talk about some specific type of posts:
Doomers
Naturally the themes discussed in our communities are attracting a lot of climate doomer comments and I would say we also have a significant number of “recovering doomers” here as community members.
Earlier this week I considered closing the /c/collapse community on SRLPNK, because it is not actively moderated and attracts a lot of these types, even though ex_06 (who asked me to have their account re-activated, but not as an admin) originally intended it to be more of a psychological self-help group for people trying to get to terms with the likely loss of many things that defined their life so far.
While the typical doomer could probably need some psychological support, they are usually still in a stage of grief that makes them lash out and not engage in a constructive exchange how to make the best of the current difficult situation we sadly find ourselves in.
Mostly I have been doing temporary bans for such doomers to cool down and not spread their doom and gloom endlessly in our communities, but I think we need to come up with a common idea how to deal with this better.
Discussing civil disobedience
aka Direct Action or the other man’s “Eco Terrorist” (yeah right…).
Obviously this is a topic many climate activists find themselves more and more confronted with and you might already be involved with a group engaged in such actions of civil disobedience. And lets not forget about the punk in Solarpunk either :)
However, obviously this is a public web-site and thus easily monitored by law-enforcement and other people that might be interested in reporting such discussions to the local authorities. Thus to protect this service and also our users from themselves we can’t really allow planning discussions with specific targets or generally calls for action against specific persons to happen here out in the open (or in the semi-public direct messages).
Obviously, we can never condone violence against persons, but aside from that please be careful with discussing climate activism on the clear-web and rather use fully end to end encrypted means with people you can trust!
However this has obviously a large grey area and people might have stronger views on what should and should not be discussed here.
Absolute Vegans
Vegans are obviously welcome on SLRPNK and I think we can all agree that strongly reducing the consumption of animal products is a worthy goal.
However, there are some very opinionated (online) Vegans / animal rights activists that (intentionally or not) are indistinguishable from trolls and generally very toxic to deal with. Please don’t feel personally attacked by this, but I think we need to come up with something regarding this in our code of conduct.
So these were the three topics I had in my mind lately, but feel free to discuss others as well.
I am looking forward to your thoughts on this!
I started drafting some ideas for the code of conduct here: https://wiki.f-hub.org/books/slrpnknet/page/code-of-conduct
Feedback appreciated.
Down-vote etiquette is well-neigh unenforceable. You can encourage people to do the right thing, but aside from catching brigading, you’re going to have a really hard time doing anything with it.
Anything encouraging people to use end-to-end encrypted communications needs to give examples, as many people really don’t know what that means.
I added a section to remind people that votes are fully public on Lemmy ;)
I have it on my todo to write a basic environmental activists online communication guideline or to try and find a good one that we could copy into our wiki. Tips and suggestions are welcome.
You’ve got me curious now. How are votes publicly viewable here?
I had heard that was the case on kbin, but thought that wasn’t so on lemmy. Is it just the admins that can see that, or is there a way that users can see that too?
The Lemmy UI hides it, but it is all in the database of every server you federate with and it’s trivial to write a script to query this.
Is it possible to get those information via the API or can only those with access to the database get those information?
I don’t think there is an API endpoint for it, but since anyone can spin up a small Lemmy instance and start federating, they can easily have it federate into their own database and look it up there.
even without the visibility, the point of “etiquette” isn’t strictly that it’s enforceable it’s just stating good manners
I think these are solid - I might add a mention to the section on End-of-the-world pessimism that Solarpunk is built on both realism and hope. We need to see things how they are, but we also need to keep looking for ways to make things better. This is kind of the last place to encourage people to give up.
The gatekeeping one (the issue I was more involved in the discussions about) seems workable to me. There’ll be disagreements over what’s disrespectful vs realistic, but the emphasis on making it a welcoming space should be enough.
Thanks again for all your work on this space!
About the “Discussing civil disobedience” section: Maybe its possible to mention more types of actions. Because I feel like I does not make sense to discourage civil disobedience and not mention other types of criminalized activism like direct action, sabotage etc. But besides that I really like this section because explains the “why” very clearly.
I would love to have small definition about what respectful for us means included or to use a different word. I feel like “respectful” often gets used to tone police those that are rightfully angry / emotional about something or to dismiss their concerns. I dont have a concrete proposal tho
Hmm, to me those other types all fall under the more general and also more positively connotated “civil disobedience”, no? Also I hope this doesn’t come across as discouraging it, just that concrete plans for it can’t or rather should not be discussed here openly.
As for “respectful”… yeah I am aware of the “tone policing” sound of it, but the alternative of not being “intentionally offensive” like I explained elsewhere in this thread is probably even more subjective and thus open to misunderstandings. As seen here in the thread and elsewhere there is a real risk that people will think this doesn’t apply to their “rightful indignation” but only to the indignation of other people. Edit: I reformulated it a bit to make it more obvious that this isn’t meant to be “tone policing”.
What’s said below I agree with and think should be the line drawn in the sand on doomerism here
But ultimately, being collapse-aware is what brought me here. I’m not one to give up without a fight tho and I love the hopefulness and optimism here. But I still often find myself being pessimistic. I would hate for other people that may have some fight in them too to feel that a grim outlook on things might make them unwelcome.
The way I see it sometimes is that, yes, we are kinda fucked at this point but we should still be working to save whatever we can and to learn/teach how to be more resilient for what’s likely to come.
Yeah, that is kind of what I was trying to get across. Recovering doomers (even with the occasional relapse) should not be discouraged to participate here, but I hope this place can help them to overcome this self-defeating mindset without flipping over into unrealistic optimism or outright denial.