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 🌟

  • !immigration@slrpnk.net - Discuss migration, immigration, emigration, deportation, & expatriation, here.
  • !community_community@slrpnk.net - learn how we can make communities better - create the ones we would like to see in the world, and improve the ones we happen to be in.
  • !foraging@slprnk.net - come together to explore the bountiful wonders of the natural world and share our knowledge of gathering wild goods!

🏚️ A Call for Moderators! 🏡

Every so often, we check the health of our communities to prune inactive or abandoned ones, and to hopefully save active ones where the moderators have become absent. We’ve found 5 communities in need of new moderators:

As a moderator, you’d be in charge if handling user reports on posts or comments within the community, and occasionally checking it ensure there’s no spam posted. Most of those communities are very laid back, and won’t require much input. Pleasant Politics will likely require a bit more attention due to its subject matter.

If any of those sound appealing to you, and you’d like to help keep them alive, let us know in the comments below! Stepping up to moderate is a great way to help out the instance :)

🔇 Defederation with Lemmy.org 🔕

A Lemmy.ca admin has recently brought to our attention that Lemmy.org is actively being used as a platform for vote manipulation, likely due to their lax sign-up requirements. Unfortunately Lemmy.org’s admin has been unresponsive weeks after they were messaged about this issue.

Due to the extra workload this places on admins to effectively prevent or moderate, Lemmy.ca has chosen to defederate from Lemmy.org. We have also chosen to defederate from Lemmy.org, at least until their admin returns and takes effective action against the issues raised.

Lemmy.org is a small instance with only one active community, and it is unlikely this defederation will effect any of our users. You can check to see if you are subscribed to any of their communities via looking at the subscription list in your user profile settings.

🌽 Meta Post Image: The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson 🐾

Published in 2021, the novel The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson tells the story of several generations of Dakota / Sioux women who fight to preserve their way of life against encroachment by colonialism and forced integration. ‘Seed Keeper’ refers literally to people who sewed seeds into the hems of their garments as they were forcefully displaced from Minnesota so they would still be able to grow their own food.

Diane Wilson is the former Executive Director for Dream of Wild Health, an Indigenous non-profit farm, and the Native American Food Sovereignty Alliance, a national coalition of tribes and organizations working to create sovereign food systems for Native people.

Solarpunk the social movement and solarpunk the literary movement are inseparable, and we’re proud to host and feature several budding writers and their books on our shared platform. Check out !writing@slrpnk.net community, Solarpunk story and world-building elements on our wiki, !fiction@slrpnk.net, and collaborative storytelling games like !fullyautomatedrpg@slrpnk.net by SLRPNK members @JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net and @andrewrgross@slrpnk.net.

🌍🌐 No borders, no nations! New community rule? 🚧🛑

We have been mulling over introducing a new rule in regards to community creation here on SLRPNK. As a thematic instance we naturally try to keep things a bit on topic although obviously that can be subjective and the boundaries of what is and what isn’t on-topic are intentionally somewhat fuzzy.

One theme has cropped up now and then though and that is country specific communities which we feel are a bit out of place on SLRPNK. Not only because they usually focus on country (or region) specific political topics, often in a language that is not commonly spoken by our members, but also because Solarpunk is an international and explicitly migration friendly movement. Of course, a country specific community is not automatically xenophobic, but a certain level of nationalism is almost unavoidable and frankly speaking the very notion of nation states is something we as Solarpunks should strive to overcome.

Or to put it a bit differently: In an ideal Fediverse world you would open a solarpunk community on region specific instance and not open a region specific community on a general solarpunk instance. But we are still a bit away from this…

So what do y’all think about this? Should we restrict the creation of such communities here on SLRPNK and ask existing communities previously created to slowly move elsewhere? We would be of course also happy to give advise how to host a Piedfed or Lemmy instance yourself for a language or region specific instance.

🔋 How to Support SLRPNK.net 🌱

If you’d like to donate to SLRPNK to help cover Internet, electricity, and domain name costs, you can now send a one-time or reoccurring donation via our F-hub donation site: https://contribute.f-hub.org/

We also offer Librapay as an option for those who already have an account there, which supports reoccurring donations: https://liberapay.com/F-hub.org/

(Note: the Librapay option supports the broader F-hub project, of which SLRPNK is a part of. If you’d like all of your donation to go toward SLRPNK, use the alternative F-hub donation link, and select ‘slrpnk.net’ in the ‘reason’ drop-down instead)

💬 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
🗃️ Meta Archive 📰

Our Monthly Meta posts are sometimes home to more in-depth sections written by our admins. Many of our newer members may not be familiar with some of the past guides, so for those interested, we’ve compiled a list below.

  • December 2024 - How to Prepare for a Fascist Regime
  • February 2025 - How to avoid Big Tech and maximize your digital security & privacy
  • June 2025 - A brief guide on Security Culture & Adopting FOSS as prefiguration
  • July 2025 - How to build community with fun projects!
⬛ 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!

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netMEnglish
    11·
    13 hours ago

    The wiki and Movim is temporarily unavailable, will try to fix the issue tomorrow.

    Edit: should be back and hopefully I fixed the issue. Edit2: seems like it is still going down from time to time, but no time right now to investigate the deeper issue.

  • keepthepace@slrpnk.netEnglish
    2·
    3 hours ago

    Re: No borders, no nations

    Just before reading this paragraph, I jumped quickly into /c/immigration@slrpnk.net as it is an interest of mine, and quickly opted out when I saw it only talks about US.

    The reason why I like have a national community, is because it also allows to talk about politics without it being only about Trump and US politics.

    I hate nationalism very much and would love to have a more global hub to learn about the important political subjects that dont crop up that much in French (my local one) or US media. Sadly, I never see such a thing. National communities are a bad solution but to a very real problem, which is that global themed communities end up being US ones. There needs to be a solution to that, and it is not clear to me what it should be. Quotas per country/continent? split into US/non-US communities? Language-centric communities?

    About languages, this is also something that could require a bit of discussion. Of course I love that internet as a de facto lingua franca, which is English. But that is also pretty exclusionary for non-speakers. I know there is an understandable dislike of “AI” tools here, but this is one case where automated (and optional, and clearly labelled as such) translations are something that could help bridge communities and cultures. I wonder how difficult and expensive putting together an automated translation system could be.

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netMEnglish
      1·
      20 minutes ago

      Language specific communities are definitly ok, but are probably also better found on an instance that is primarily that language. Maybe once we switch to Piefed it becomes a bit more realistic with the LibreTranslate integration that it has.

    • SargonOfACAB@slrpnk.netEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      I hate nationalism very much and would love to have a more global hub to learn about the important political subjects that dont crop up that much in French (my local one) or US media. Sadly, I never see such a thing. National communities are a bad solution but to a very real problem, which is that global themed communities end up being US ones.

      This strikes me as they key point. While I seriously doubt any community based on where I live (Belgium) would be very active, it would be really cool to have conversations about things happening near (or near-ish) me or about region-specific subjects.

      The example you give about immigration is a really good one, since the challenges with the EU’s border regime are meaningfully different to what the US is facing.

      No idea what the best way to approach this.

      Country-specific communities chafe ideologically and might just not be active enough to be worthwhile. Language-centric ones make some sense, but run the risk of seeing the same problem as English ones (namely, being mostly centered on discussion about the largest or most culturally dominant nation state using that language). It’d also (potentially) divide countries that aren’t linguistically monolithic.

  • LobsterJim@slrpnk.netEnglish
    2·
    19 hours ago

    Re: region-and-country-specific communities. Is it possible to merge communities, retaining the post histories of each under one bigger umbrella? If the users/mods of a particular community are for it, I think that is preferable to migration.

    This is difficult for more “local” communities (though I’m not sure many exist here currently).

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netMEnglish
      3·
      13 hours ago

      There is no merge functionality that would retain the time stamps, although I think Piefed has an experimental server move feature for communities.

      Typically the best is to cross post the interesting ones in another communities when you want to close a community.

  • NightFantom@slrpnk.netEnglish
    4·
    1 day ago

    I like the idea of opening solarpunk communities on regional servers, but maybe that’s a long term goal and not a short term one? Maybe just a “regional” community on this server is okay? Then people can still get together showing what their region is doing (a bit of pride is good motivation, and visibility matters), without making it about their country or whatever arbitrary borders? Then again each post that would fit should probably fit better in another community…

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netMEnglish
      8·
      1 day ago

      Our main Solarpunk community is not so busy. If you have some interesting regional activity you can easily post it there.

  • Chewie@slrpnk.netEnglish
    10·
    2 days ago

    Thank you for the update!

    I don’t see why we should restrict “regional” communities. Maybe when Lemmy gets bigger this can be done, but now, if creating more regional-specific communities bring more people to the Fediverse, I don’t see a problem. Surely you can enforce moderation standards if required?

    There may be factors about solarpunk that for some reason only apply to regions, and supporting other languages might not be a bad idea surely? Ideas and good articles will bleed through to other communities eventually, surely?

    • Andy@slrpnk.netEnglish
      4·
      21 hours ago

      I will add my reasons for being strongly in favor of allowing regional communities.

      I think a common and erroneous tendency is to equate pride in a place with hostility towards outsiders. The opposite of xenophobia is not attempting to extinguish taking pride in places, though: it’s wanting to enthusiasticly share your love of your land with visitors and immigrants.

      I think a rise in nationalism has coincided with a component of globalization in which media treats places as interchangeable, and obscures the joy of taking pride in local culture.

      My town is awesome, and my neighbors – regardless of tenure – are awesome. I love r/Oakland on Reddit, especially the way it helps transplants integrate into our community irl. I don’t think slrpnk.net has enough traffic to support a city level committee like that yet, but if there were a community for talking about news and culture in the Bay Area or about California state politics I would love that.

      I think identifying closely with your town and region is often an antidote to nationalism. That said, if Germans or Spaniards find a community based on those identities valuable, I’m fine with that too.

      Places and their diverse cultures rock, and I passionately want to promote a healthy version of that!

      • keepthepace@slrpnk.netEnglish
        1·
        3 hours ago

        I agree. Solarpunk is a lot about thinking globally and acting locally.

        Steps can be taken against nationalism, regionalism and xenophobia without forbidding local communities.

  • solariplex@slrpnk.netEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    I’m generally positive with regards to not having country/region specific communities on this instance, opting instead to keep an internationalist focus.

    Most struggles are local, but they’re all part of a wider international context of similar struggles.

    • The Quuuuuill@slrpnk.netEnglish
      7·
      2 days ago

      Yeah I almost wonder if national communities shouldn’t be retained but transnational ones should. For example I am in Appalachia which spans the United States and Canada. We are ultimately one people divided by an arbitrary border. At the same time though my cousins in the maritimes have different bullshit to deal with than I do down on the coalfields because their flag tastes like maple syrup and mine tastes like clown pants

  • The Quuuuuill@slrpnk.netEnglish
    7·
    2 days ago

    thank you once again for such a great space! regarding the updates i’ve given of late relating to organization work in Appalachia and what i’ve seen here on lemmy as the general consensus about what to do about the rising tide of authoritarianism across the globe:

    • understand that the world oligarchs are trying to build an open air prison, similar to the concept that israel has inflicted on Palestine. anywhere the surveillance state incurs is somewhere this is being implemented. of particular note are eastern Ukraine, rural America (basically any city with less than 300k people that has a walmart is an active target, though based on the ubiquity of ring doorbells, it’s also already a major factor of urban life as well), and border of India and China
    • nowhere on earth is completely devoid of people seeking the answer to freedom. our goverments represent the oligarchy, not The People
    • be cognizant of that it is more important to help others than it is for your peers to see you as helpful. i see people all over lemmy telling people in other regions that they’re not doing enough. this is broadly true everywhere so long as the imperial projects of the northern metropoles continue to extract wealth from the global south to subjugate the people everywhere. what is more valuable than proving to a random internet stranger that you are helpful is helping someone in need
    • with that in mind, be cognizant of how you appear to the people you are trying to help. your community is made up of people who have complicated relationships to the things you call liberating. my politics are anarchocommunist in nature. my neighbors are from post soviet states. any term with the subword “communist” is an istant nonstarter for them. similarly, if you are engaging in community defense projects be aware that certain symbols like the hammer and sickle may not communicate to the people you want to help what you mean to
    • with THAT in mind, go out and meet the people who want to help the people in your community you want to help. listen to them. and work to address the problems in your community with a sense of empathy, care and respect. you may find that the things you originally theorized were central to what you thought needed doing are less critical than you thought.

    okay. that’s all the advice out of the way. now for what every appalachian loves most: stories

    • there has been a rise of observers in our communities. especially at the grocery store. the purpose of these projects is to disrupt and eliminate ICE’s ability to operate how they prefer in rural America. in minneapolis, chicago, and charlotte the aim they’re targetting is to be as visible as possible to create terror in all americans. in rural communities they operate more covertly, snatching people where they can’t be seen. the grocery store is a vulnerable place, so helpers are making sure they have eyes on their neighbors
    • one of my neighbors was telling me how in her view european leftist philosopies like anarchism and marxism (particularly marxist-leninism) fall short because there is no mention of responsibility to the land in their core beliefs, and that this doesn’t sit right with her, an indigenous woman. to her, a leftist movement must center itself on how the people hold eachother accountable to their responsibility to protect the land. the irony to me was that from my perspective she was describing a form of anarchism, but i think this is a failure with me to see more of what she sees. i suspect a new strain of leftism is fermenting in these current times that will rise from green party politics but with a little less pacificism as a virtue and more pacificism as a social contract