Each month, we create a post to keep you abreast of news and happenings regarding the server, discuss recent events, and to act as town square for the community.
🌟 Community Highlights 🌟
- !Audiobooks@slrpnk.net - Share and discuss interesting books of an audible nature!
- !Lunar_punk@slrpnk.net - Explore the darker aesthetics of Solarpunk.
- !Soilscience@slrpnk.net - A science based community to discuss and learn all things related to soils (Get all up in that dirt! Woah, hold up, okay that’s like maybe too much dirt- Oh you’re eating it. No that’s cool, I’m chill with it now).
🏵️ Meta Post Image Breakdown: Cempasúchil 🏵️
Cempasúchil, also called marigolds, is the flower traditionally used to honor the dead during Dia de los Muertos. Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is a multi-day Mexican Holiday. It is celebrated the first two days of November, with November 1st dedicated to the remembrance of dead children.
⛔ Defederation from MAGA.place and HillariousChaos.com ⛔
We briefly broke our habit of not commenting on electoral political developments in !meta in December 2024 when we reported that the United States had elected a fascist government. Our characterization of Trump’s regime and the MAGA movement as a US-localized version of the regimes of Mussolini, Franco, and Hilter has only been proven more and more prescient, as masked government agents attacking and kidnapping protestors, citizens, and immigrants in defiance of the rule of law. Trump’s regime builds expensive concentration facilities and gaudy palatial vanity projects while pushing working Americans deeper into poverty.
We’ve joined instances from DBZer0.com to Lemmy.world in adding maga.place to our blocklist, defederating SLRPNK.net from the servers entirely. This prevents them from attracting new users by federating our posts and comments, and prevents their users from harassing SLRPNK members. The maga.place instance joined the Fediverse one month ago, and appeared on our radar when the admin began appearing in SLRPNK posts and communities.
We’re not the first to block Hilariouschaos.com either, which also hosts fascist content and tolerates right-wing trolls. We’ve been side-eyeing this server for a while, but the eager collaboration between HC users and maga.place has made the fascist trends on HC unambiguous enough to take action.
This is consistent with our defederation standards. We’ve always encouraged good faith discussion between a spectrum of ideological and political positions, and stood up for our members to moderate their communities according to their politics, even when it contradicts our own. We have also ejected members who consistently engage in trolling, bad faith argument, and spreading demonstrably false information. When an instance has cultivated a significant culture of trolls and bad faith actors, we have defederated from those instances. We’ve blocked Hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml on that basis.
Our blocklist is not limited to instances that tolerate modern forms of fascism, but all fascist instances belong on our blocklist. Fascism is a fundamentally irrational political position, and is impossible to defend rhetorically with good-faith argument. Reality is the source of ideological truth. Among people who hold these positions, this relationship is flipped, and ideological truth is the source of reality. This is why they so easily dismiss evidence out of hand that contradicts their narrative, and the admin of maga.place’s reliance on claims of ‘fake news’ regardless of the source and credibility illustrates this point.
Several servers we federate with do not block maga.place. This means maga.place won’t see your posts or comments on these servers, and you won’t see content posted from maga.place to these servers either since we began the block. It also means members of these servers will see content from both us and maga.place, and may encourage more fascists to join these instances to get around the block. Posts on these servers will appear alongside posts from blocked servers, despite there being no other interaction besides proximity.
We encourage other admins to add maga.place to their blocklist as well to prevent cultivating a fascist audience. Trolling is a form of censorship, a performance of irrationality intended to frustrate people engaging in good faith and drive them away from platforms that tolerate this behavior. The casual dismissal of scientific consensus without evidence and other irrational antics takes a much darker turn once the political power of trolls is great enough to make their critics disappear. Incarceration, deportation, and murder for political thought are all much more significant forms of censorship in comparison to federation blocks.
While most instances institute these blocks without comment, others engage in a form of internal comment or debate. Sh.itjust.works engaged in a public discussion, and is currenly voting on the issue (only SJW members should participate in the vote thread). A similar discussion occurred on Lemmy.ca, and they ultimately decided to defederate.
The politics of voting on the Fediverse probably deserves its own discussion; at SLRPNK, we wear our ethos on our sleeve, and we feel acting within the bounds of our server’s ideals should not require a bureaucratic process. We are committed to transparency and open discussion, hence we walk a middle ground between seeking a formal public mandate and silent executive action.
Due to the nature of our server, most of what I’ve said is probably taken for granted by most of our members. Solidarity and coalition building are powerful tools in resistance to fascism. I’ve dedicated a large portion of this meta post to this discussion in solidarity with all of the members of other platforms who are also calling for their admins to defederate from instances that encourage fascist trolls. I’m tagging the admins of several instances who still federate to welcome them to join the conversation here and on Sh.itjust.works as well.
⚡Solar-powered Servers ☀️
Since we are getting into the dark months of the year again here is a quick update on how our solar-power production is going: In October it has been rather rainy at our server location (due to several Atlantic storms passing by), therefore only 67% of the total electricity needs could be covered by the solar panels. The average over the last three months was 83%, with the downward trend starting in September (88%). The additional grid-power was mostly wind and geothermal energy and the good news is that this nearby geothermal power-plant is currently being renovated and expanded (and will include a modern thermal spa soon as well, yay).
📡 Technical Updates 📡
We did a quick server OS update earlier today, which went smoothly, so there isn’t much to report on. Overall we have still some pending hardware changes to reduce energy consumption a bit, and those will require some unscheduled server restarts. We also discussed the updated plans for the potential Piefed migration in the server upgrade thread here, tl;dr: the main blockers should be gone now, but we need to set up a Piefed test instance and investigate the database structure for creating a migration script. As a preparation, we already have a working object storage setup on our servers now, which should make media storage easier to expand in the future. The first test case for it is a new PeerTube instance that our hosting organization f-hub.org recently added.
💬 Open Discussion 💬
Now it’s your turn to share whatever you’d like down below; your thoughts, ideas, concerns, hopes, or anything related to the server. If you have a new community you’d like to shine a spotlight, shine away! If you’re a new user wanting to say hi, feel free to post an introduction :)
SLRPNK Community Resources:
- Community Wiki - Moderators, you can create your own Wiki here for your communities!
- Movim Chat - Open to all members (use your SLRPNK login credentials)
- Etherpad - Collaborative document editor
⬛ Union Resources 🟥
These are unions from around the world who can train you to become an effective organizer to form a grassroots union with your co-workers!
While lemmy admins do technically have ultimate authority over all the possible actions on the site, which can be used as an iron-grip to control an instance (as seen on a handful of some other instances), in practice, we admins at slrpnk self-limit our use of administration powers in almost all applicable cases, and 99% of the time, just use those powers for what are effectively janitorial duties that don’t require horizontal decision making.
In the day-to-day, the admin powers I use are to accept or reject user applications (rejecting spam/AI accounts, accepting applications that don’t give some sort of red flag), and ban spam or harmful off-instance users (and the rare slrpnk bot-user who manage to get through our curation). Neither of those tasks particularly lend themselves to collective decision making (though I faintly recall that Piefed allows for granular powers to be given to users, so there could potentially be more people who have the ability to accept or reject applications, but I might be misremembering that).
Anyone can create a community and become a moderator, and we’re perhaps unusual compared to other instances in that we allow our moderators to curate and moderate their communities as they see fit as long as it doesn’t do something egregious or against the site rules. That means mods do actually have meaningful power to shape or govern their communities in unique ways, which reduces the need for us admins to wield our power (we pretty much only step in if a moderator seems completely absent).
Besides writing the base rules of the instance, defederation powers are the only other thing mods or regular users don’t have access to. It’s so rarely used, that it has not been invoked in all the time I’ve been an admin on SLRPNK until now (coming up on two years), and is realistically the only power that could lend itself to a collective decision.
While it’s ultimately up for others to judge, I like to think we’re not terribly rash admins. If we were to put forward a proposal to defederate, we’re all pretty damn convinced that the instance in question poses a legitimate threat either to our users, the greater fediverse, or even society itself. Our task would then be to present the best possible evidence to our user base that defederation is a good idea so we can enact it. For MAGA.Place, that would be a fairly quick task, as they’re so blatant in their fascism. But for instances who are trying to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing, like HC, it would not be trivial.
I really want to emphasize how time consuming of a task it would be to gather up the best examples of evidence (I could send you some in a DM, if you want), give a compelling case as to why it’s worth defederating over, potentially needing to explain the techniques used by them to seem more moderate than they really are, etc. And bear in mind this is to be done by volunteers who would most likely wish to be doing anything but scrolling through right-wing communities with nuggets of racism and bigotry in their free time to assemble a convincing, well reasoned and carefully considered case.
We’re lucky that there are (so far) very few instances that would even need this consideration. If there were more like HC, and we needed to put together a strong public case for each of them… Speaking for myself, it would suck all of the joy out of administering this community, as I really don’t want to be spending the time I put into here like that. I want to browse, comment, and have fun just like anyone else here, I just don’t mind doing the janitorial work in addition to that since I care about what this place provides to the people who visit it, the ideas it (hopefully) spreads to the wider world, and the desperate need for citizen controlled media.
If you want to have a greater involvement in this particular power we admins have, then I do honestly feel poVoq’s suggestion that gathering evidence as to why we should or should not re-federate with Maga.place or HC would be a fairly effective way to horizontally spread the burden of that required research & case-building into the community, instead of it being an additional unwanted task purely on the admin’s shoulders.