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 🌟

  • !fixing@slrpnk.net - Celebrating/talking about repairing stuff, the right to repair stuff, and the intersection of tech and solarpunk ideals.
  • !selfhosting@slrpnk.net - Hosting your own services. Preferably at home and on low-power or shared hardware.
  • !reclamation@slrpnk.net - A place to discuss and learn about the restoration of disturbed lands to desirable end land uses

📸 Meta Post Image: Asante-Akim Center for Non-Motorized Transport 🎞️

People of rural Ghana organized a school for teaching how to chop, weld, and re-assemble bicycles to better meet the needs of rural Africa. The Asante-Akim Center for Non-Motorized Transport takes its inpiration from punk bike chopping groups in the United States and Europe.

These bikes not only look cool, but are better suited to the poor roads and Jungle environment. Photo from ratbikes.org.

🌏 World Carfree Day / In town, without my car! Events September 21-28 🚴

World Car-Free day is Tuesday September 22nd. At SLRPNK we’d like to draw a little more attention to this holiday, and see it celebrated even more widely and internationally. Like all good holidays, it has its roots in civil disobedience.

In 1961, Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She was one of the organizers of demonstrations that saved a popular public park in New York City from being turned into more road for cars. She was inspired by both the Garden City and City Beautiful movements before her, and her book and methods were internationally influential.

The Netherlands had seen the precursor to car-free days as a response to oil price shocks during the Suez Crisis, and anti-car sentiment has festered due to speeding vehicles in narrow city streets. Late one night in 1968, neighbors in Groningen took pickaxes and shovels to sections of their street to create intentional barriers that cars had to slow to navigate around. Despite official resistance, the civil disobedience movement to create “Woonerfs” or “Living Streets” spread, and in 1972 the first official Woonerf was constructed in Delft.

The Dutch lead the way in re-envisioning cities without cars through the 1970s, but the idea became internationally popular. People began organizing yearly car-free days, with the intention to explore other ways of organizing city life without the use of personal motor vehicles. Car-free days and automobile restraint in Urban planning goes hand in hand.

In one famous case in Jakarta, Indonesia, Car-free day is a weekly event. On Sunday mornings, several streets into the city are barred from use by traffic. They become popular paths for pedestrians and cyclists who come to the city for Sunday events. Initially it was planned to occur only 3 times a year in 2007, but as interest and infrastructure around the event grew, it became a weekly event only 5 years later. The streets used for this purpose have become more pedestrian-friendly as their use by pedestrians grew.

The most popular day for yearly Car-free days is September 22nd. In french-speaking countries, it is called “En ville, sans ma voiture” or “In town, without my car” - but the concept is the same. What ever the concept is called in your locality, we would like to boost it here as a Solarpunk holiday. Check out related communities for this event:

⛔️ Defederation with lemmy.devr.cc ⛔️

lemmy.devr.cc was abandoned by its admin and allowed for open sign-ups (no manual review of new applicants), resulting in it being used by advertiser bots and others posting illegal material, necessitating us defederating from it. As it’s a small instance with no active communities, the defederation is unlikely to effect any of our users.

🔋 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 (just select do not auto-renew) or reoccurring donation via Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/F-hub.org/

Currently, F-hub.org and thus SLRPNK is receiving 68.72€/month in donations from 13 people, which is covering most of our recurring expenses. Thanks a lot!

💬 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 (we are currently looking for an alternative for this as the Etherpad project has started to use LLMs for development quite heavily).
🗃️ 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!

  • Qapples@slrpnk.netEnglish
    2·
    4 hours ago

    hey folks! just joined today! :) i’m scott (he/him), a soon-to-graduate electrical engineering student specializing in power systems (with a sprinkle of green energy stuff) desperately trying to find a renewables job or anything vaguely solarpunk-adjacent haha. im interested in diy, self-hosting, and food growing at home (specifically hydroponics). i’ve also been getting into art/illustration as of late. been lurking for some time now and im looking forward to getting involved!

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netMEnglish
      1·
      3 hours ago

      Welcome here, and please share some of your projects on the respective communities you mentioned.

  • NightFantom@slrpnk.netEnglish
    1·
    24 hours ago

    Not sure if this is worth a separate post so asking here, does anyone know if this a slrpnk bug or a lemmy / boost bug? Note the hhttps in the beginning and the ttps after the proxy

    And in general things occasionally break with the proxy I think?

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netMEnglish
      1·
      22 hours ago

      Yeah, the pict-rs image proxy sometimes fails, but the above looks more like a client bug.

  • lilseitan@slrpnk.netEnglish
    3·
    2 days ago

    Thank you for another month of fantastic information. I’m learning a lot thanks to these communities, trying each day to reimagine ways to use things and self host. For the next two months I’m taking a course to install and maintain solar panels, something I was really looking forward to !!!

  • Jack@slrpnk.netEnglish
    6·
    3 days ago

    May have beed asked already but what is the relationship between f-hub and slrpnk?

    I see the donations are related, so is it hosted/maintained by the same people?

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netMEnglish
      10·
      3 days ago

      Yes. Well the history is that I (the current main technical admin here) was working on non-fediverse community hosting efforts mainly related to FOSS game development communities (since the early 00s). Sometimes in the late 10s we also started experimenting with fediverse software like Hubzilla, but it never got very far.

      But at some point the original founder of SLRPNK (who got free hosting from the Lemmy devs in the early days), wanted to shut down or hand over the site and as I was already helping out as a moderator since some months, we agreed that I would take over the site.

      Given that I was now administrating multiple sites with a much broader scope (also an unrelated Akkoma instance) and was interested in also hosting a federated git forge, the idea came up to start a more technical umbrella org that f-hub.org aims to be. Practically it isn’t anything official though and just composed of me and some occasional volunteer contributors. Maybe I will try to turn it into some sort of worker’s cooperative in the future, but that is unlikely to happen any time soon.

  • MidwestSolarpunk@slrpnk.netEnglish
    9·
    3 days ago

    Anyone taking any solarpunk actions this month?

    We’re excited to be getting a battery for our solar system installed, and just today I’ve made new connections through my community time bank (I’m going to be officiating a non-traditional wedding, and possibly getting a much-needed haircut).

    • MidwestSolarpunk@slrpnk.netEnglish
      7·
      3 days ago

      Also our tomato plants are popping off, new to gardening (first year getting anything usable out of it) and I’m DELIGHTED. Had some on a grilled egg and cheese sandwich with mayo for lunch today, it was edible art.

      • mbp@slrpnk.netEnglish
        5·
        3 days ago

        Hell yeah, tomato harvests are new to me as well, relatively. It’s been super addicting to maximize my garden yield in my small space as the years go by. I’m growing shit loads of San Marzano, Sweet 100, and red jewel varieties this year. It’s a good year.

        • MidwestSolarpunk@slrpnk.netEnglish
          4·
          3 days ago

          I forget the name of our variety but we got a bit of a late start this year so I chose a fast growing option. We have space to do more but it feels difficult to go from 0 to 100% garden with no experience. Hoping to keep ramping up year over year until we basically have no lawn and a full food forest.

          San Marzano are great! Are you growing anything besides tomatoes? We have handful of peppers. Hoped to do watermelons but they didn’t take off for some reason.

          • mbp@slrpnk.netEnglish
            4·
            3 days ago

            There are so many tomato varieties, it’s still a bit overwhelming to me.

            We began with a tomato starter when we moved to the pnw three years ago in our tiny backyard. It took over the entire porch by winter, lmao. I got hooked!

            The next year we ripped out all the bulb flowers and put them out front and grew a couple more tomatoes. They also did amazing, we had the best tomatoes ever for the entire harvest season and we’re spoiled with salads galore.

            This year we built some planters and trellises from scrap wood (non-cured) to get some more planting space. The neighbors see me biking to the grocery outlet for another bag of top soil constantly, it’s hilarious.

            We’re growing tomatoes, cucumber, lettuce, bok choy, sunflowers, snap peas, and trained hops to grow over our overhang. Also have some herbs and peppers in pots but the latter aren’t doing so hot, no pun intended. Far too small of fruits to be really usable. We’re going to grow tons of garlic and onion over the fall and winter. I think we’ll find ways to grow even more next year!

            • MidwestSolarpunk@slrpnk.netEnglish
              3·
              2 days ago

              That’s awesome, you’ve got a lot of variety! Do you plan to make beer with the hops, or is there another use I’m not aware of?

              We got a good deal on a small (6x8’) greenhouse, I’m hoping to try to grow something things over winter too. Winters in the Midwest have become much milder, with isolated deep freeze/snow events. Interested to see if it can keep its temperature above freezing, worried about the nights though.

              • mbp@slrpnk.netEnglish
                2·
                2 days ago

                We use it for beer, although we mostly donate them to a local brewing supply shop. It is super pretty when it’s flowering, smells great and provides shelter to some critters. Also, it has a well developed rhyzome so that shit can stay there forever, lol. We thought it was blackberry the first year we moved here but have since been embracing it when it grows back each spring.

                I’m so jealous of your greenhouse! The ground temps stay pretty low up here during the winter months so not too much will survive in terms of edibles. I’ve been using my garage and the bottom half of a curio cabinet equipped with grow lights to get a head start on the spring until I get a bigger yard to support a proper greenhouse.

                • MidwestSolarpunk@slrpnk.netEnglish
                  1·
                  24 hours ago

                  That’s awesome! I’ll have to look and see if there are any varieties that will grow where I live, I’d love to get into home brewing at some point.

                  RE: greenhouse. I put down a couple layers of cardboard, then a snap-together floor. I figured it was better than nothing in terms of insulation, and I intend to mainly keep plant containers elevated so there’s a cushion of air between them and the ground. So the ultimate test will be if the air temperature can stay above freezing with only the sparse sunlight and the thermal mass of the plants themselves.

                  I’ve also been meaning to set up some sort of indoor operation like what you’re describing, I imagine it could be helpful for starting seeds in the spring before last frost! In terms of yard space, if you’re not moving anytime soon, have you tried doing anything with vertical setups? I’ve seem some cool designs online with trellises, shelf-style containers, etc.

  • livligkinkajou@slrpnk.netEnglish
    12·
    4 days ago

    People of rural Ghana organized a school for teaching how to chop, weld, and re-assemble bicycles to better meet the needs of rural Africa

    That welder is as punk as it gets:

    • mbp@slrpnk.netEnglish
      3·
      3 days ago

      I bet you feel the hair raise on your skin being within 10 feet of that. It’s so cool

  • nocturne@slrpnk.netEnglish
    10·
    4 days ago

    I love the continuity highlights in the monthly discussions. I feel like I get a new community to subscribe to every month.

    Once again, thank you for running the place for us.

  • dillekant@slrpnk.netEnglish
    7·
    4 days ago

    Is there a solarpunk mini-fiction community? I was thinking of something like 365 tomorrows, but Solarpunk.