Meta (slrpnk.net)

I wondered about the robots.txt

I can see the case for it, I could also see the case for allowing at least Google to index the site.

Has there been some discussion about this previously?

I've had to click on the huge Lemmy banner four or five times to make it go away now.

Is there a way to make it permanently go away?

During this week or the coming weekend we plan to upgrade the server that runs some of the supplementary services like the XMPP server and Movim client, so expect some downtime of those.

Furthermore there is a strange, but hopefully minor issue with the SSD disks on the current server that runs our Lemmy instance that we can't investigate while the instance runs on it, so we plan to move it to another server. As a first step we will move the Pictrs image host, so images might fail to load for a short while and some image uploads might get lost if they happen shortly before we move the process over. Moving the main database will require a somewhat longer downtime, so it is likely that we postpone that to another time.

You can follow the various technical announcements on the new and improved service health dashboard of our host.

Edit: The wiki will be also affected.

The main landing page mentions XMPP but gives no overview. Nor does the wiki. The sidebar for meta says:

Our XMPP support chat: Movim or XMPP client.

Is there a slrpnk.net xmpp server that our creds work on? Or is this just an XMPP channel for getting support?

At first I was imagining some slick gateway of sorts that would stream realtime Lemmy activity into an XMPP channel, but I think my instincts might be wrong on that.

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

Likely Saturday, 1st of November.

We need to do some server OS upgrades and a some other things that will cause a few hours downtime.

Maybe I will already start with some smaller things this week, that should only cause a short down-time for reboots.

Once that is done, I will look into running a Piefed test instance to investigate how to do the database migration from Lemmy. If everything goes smoothly, we might be able to do the Lemmy to Piefed migration end of this year or early next year.

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 🌟

• !riotporn@slrpnk.net - Showcasing and celebrating resistance against regimes.
• !sea@slrpnk.net - A community for Southeast Asia.
• !firefly@slrpnk.net - A place to discuss the shiniest damn place in the 'Verse.
• !outland@slrpnk.net - Community for the vintage comic strip Outland, a left-leaning comic for its era.

2️⃣0️⃣0️⃣0️⃣ Solarpunks!

We were so close, we nearly announced this last month, but since the instance's founding in March 2022, 2000 accounts have been created on this server. That number doesn't mean much beside being big and round, but it's still fun to celebrate.

The most important numerical statistic is active users, where we're coming up on 400/month. More important than all of that is the kind and quality of your activity on this server and across the Fediverse. We're extremely proud of the quality of posts and level of discourse members of this server are contributing to our shared and distributed social media experiment. Thanks so much for joining us on this adventure.

🧙‍♀️ Meta Post Image Breakdown: W.I.T.C.H. ✊

On October 29, 1969, officers of the court bound Black Panther leader Bobby Seale in rope, chained him to his defendant's chair, filled his mouth with gauze, and wrapped it tightly around his mouth and jaw. He had demanded his constitutional rights to speech and to be defended by a lawyer. The bigoted, racist, and fascist judge's order shocked the world, inspiring outrage and protest. That Halloween, women dressed as witches organized an impromptu act of guerilla theatre:

Slowly, solemnly, the Witches filed around the Federal Building in Chicago's Loop, faces painted white, staring straight ahead, flowing black capes swirling around them. "Our sister justice lies chained and tied," they chanted. "We curse the ground on which she died."

This was one of the many hexes for which the ephemeral organization known as W.I.T.C.H. is famous. The post image is a frame from the Documentary She's Beautiful When She's Angry (2014), of a coven in Washington D.C. performing a hex on U.S. president Richard Nixon's inauguration on the steps of the United States Capitol building.

W.I.T.C.H. most often stands for "Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell," but could just as easily mean "Women Inspired to Tell their Collective History," or "Women Interested in Toppling Consumer Holidays." This seasonal political theatre has seen a recent resurgence, adding "Welcoming Immigrants & Their Children Here" to the auspicious name.

While white facepaint and black masks were integral to the theatre in the 60's and 70's, a thick black veil has become popular during recent events.

The Wikipedia page for Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell is a good jumping off point if you'd like to know more.

🗃️ Into the Meta Archives 📰

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!

💬 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

The UI is a disaster as of today. Were there any changes?

For a few days prior to today, the UI went downhill.. many icons did not appear and I had to mouseover where I expect them to be and read the mouseover text to know what I am hovering over. Today it’s trashed.

I tried Alexandrite as a refuge, and after the antibot screen it just goes to a blank screen.

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 🌟

• !abop@slrpnk.net by @oppression_abolisher (new community, help them get it started ♥️)
• !smolweb@slrpnk.net - Dedicated to non-commercial, lean websites and its ideals. A concept becoming ever more appealing as the mainstream web tightens the noose with further enshittificiation.
• !selfhosting@slrpnk.net - Goes hand-in-hand with smol web principles. Learn how to self-host your own websites and services for a more distributed and decentralized web!

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

World Car-Free day is 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:

• !urbanism@slrpnk.net
• !utilitycycling@slrpnk.net
• !publictransport@slrpnk.net
• !TacticalUrbanism@slrpnk.net

📡 Technical updates from the servers 🧑‍💻

Not many updates from the technical department, but the consistent memory leak issue returned in Lemmy 0.19.12 that forces us to regularly restart the backend which always comes with a short 2-3 minute downtime (and if we don't catch it on time it sometimes crashes the database with causes issues with the XMPP auth integration).

There have been some nice improvements on our Movim instance though (OMEMO e2ee and image uploads should be more reliable now, and you can do full-text search in your chats), and we started experimenting with a XMPP server module that added Unified Push distributor support (so that you can use an XMPP app like Conversations to receive privacy preserving push notifications). Movim also added support for small group video calls (incl. screen-sharing), but we need to improve our STUN/TURN setup a bit for the connection establishment to be more reliable.

Last but least, some updates on the planned Piefed migration: The main blocker for re-using the bcrypt hashed passwords from the Lemmy database was resolved in Piefed which opens the path to start doing some testing on how to migrate accounts to the Piefed database. Don't expect immediate progress though, as time is limited to work on this right now. In addition the Hanubeki Lemmy theme we are using is also migrating to Piefed, so we will have a nice continuation of our color schemes.

💬 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

I got a popup from my browser saying i might lose some functionality on slrpnk.net unless I clear the data. Then it brought me to the cookie settings. I’ve never seen this behavior from a browser before.

I could see that the cookie is nearly 10mb. But the (shitty) browser gives no way to look at the cookie contents and I’m not immediately motivated to track it down on the hard drive. Any idea what I can expect to find in there? IOW, what do I lose by clearing it?

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.

This August, we’ll be keeping it short, as you are probably enjoying the summer time ☀️

🌟 Community Highlights 🌟

• !ancienthistory@slrpnk.net - A community to discuss ancient archaeology, history, philosophy, etc.

• !dumpsterdiving@slrpnk.net - One person’s trash is another's treasure! A community around the topic of rescuing things thrown away.

• !unschooling@slrpnk.net - Letting go of the ideas of conventional schooling and instead letting the child lead by following their own interests.

• !smolweb@slrpnk.net - Community for the appreciation of the small web / the indie web / or even the non-www internet (gemini, gopher, etc).

🔌 Technical updates from the servers 🪫

As promised in the last monthly update, we started to look into ways how to improve the resilience of our servers against DNS issues and other unexpected problems. For now we got a nice RasberryPi based hardware KVM that allows to remote control and restart a server even when completely stuck in a failed state and will attach it to our new main router and firewall server once we have finished migrating all the services over.

We also found a less buggy option to automatically update the DNS entries should a similar problem occur as earlier last month, but we still need to test and deploy it.

As for future upgrades: the new router will allow 10gbit connectivity and native IPv6 support in the future, should we decide to upgrade our main connection.

🥄 Piefed migration status update 🥧

We are still committed to eventually migrate our Lemmy instance to Piefed, but so far there has been little change in the main blocking issues identified last month.

However, the very nice Photon frontend got experimental support for Piefed, so people using our local copy of it will feel right at home even on Piefed. There are also a few other frontends and apps experimenting with Piefed API support, but the API is still under construction and far from complete.

🎒 Aiding those in need with Direct Action 🫂

Housing costs skyrocketing across the globe due to an epidemic of mega-corporation landlords has left hundreds of thousands of individuals and families without access to housing, who are ultimately left to twist in the wind as the corporate landlords march ever onward with price fixing and gentrification, all for the profit of the dear shareholder.

While government programs and non-profits can offer some help, punks like us rendering aid with direct action is still incredibly beneficial to those in need. Here are some ways you can help:

Most cities often have a group that renders mutual aid directly to those most in need, and they would love your help. Food Not Bombs is the most well known, and they have an index you can search to find one local to your area.

If you don't have one in your area, perhaps due to being in a more rural area, you and some friends could start your own Food Not Bombs chapter instead! Alternatively, even if you're not religious, a local church may be a good place to render aid with an existing group.

For people in need while on your way to work or the grocery store, assembling Care Packages can allow you to immediately render useful aid. The contents of a care package will be determined by your area and the needs of the people you're looking to give them to. Chatting with a person in need and asking them what would be most helpful to them is one of the best ways to narrow down the essentials, and avoid things that won't actually be of much use.

But there are generally a few universal things that will always be appreciated.

💬 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

I am currently in the process of rebuilding some servers for slrpnk.net / f-hub.org and usually go for second hand hardware. I have most of the equipment already, but optionally I was thinking to add a GPU for image scanning and maybe video conversion for a future Peertube instance.

While browsing for parts, I thought why not ask if anyone here got some old spare hardware they are willing to donate?

For me specifically I am basically only thinking about the above mentioned GPU, something like a Geforce 1660ti or newer would be ideal (it needs Nvidia CUDA support for the Lemmy image scanner, for video conversion another brand would do I think).

But if you have some other hardware to offer (doesn't have to be professional server grade), feel free to reply as well. However really old stuff (>10-15 years) is usually very power inefficient and personally I would not recommend using such hardware for servers that run 24/7.

Due to shipping / customs issues, I am only interested in offers from within the EU, but maybe someone else wants to cobble together a Lemmy server here? Might be fun to discuss 🤓

Edit: we got a nice GPU donation 🫶

I am not a native english speaker but I have no problem reading articles or even books in English. Even if a person does not fully understand what is written, now any browser has an automatic translation built in. The problem is that I still cannot send such articles to my friends who don't know english at least at an intermediate level, because it simply makes it difficult to perceive the information.

Imagine a person who has never been interested in such things, never thought about such things and the language barrier as one of the reasons not to learn more about it.

So I decided to ask you about sources in other languages.

I'm search for resources on russian and/or ukrainian but all other languages are welcome!

I hope this thread will help me and you'll to attract more people to our community and bring more people's attention to environmental issues 🌿

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.

This July, we'll be talking about the SLRPNK Outage, the upcoming 50501 Protest, and fun projects to do with others to build community.

🌟 Community Highlights 🌟

• !Foraging@slrpnk.net - A new foraging community, where we come together to explore the bountiful wonders of the natural world and share our knowledge of gathering wild goods!
• !TacticalUrbanism@slrpnk.net - A community about implementing urbanist improvements Via direct action
• !Signs@slrpnk.net - A community celebrating clever and inspiring anti-fascist art at demonstrations.

🔌 The Great SLRPNK Outage of 2025 🪫

Last month, SLRPNK went offline on the 4th of June, and lasted a total of 7 days; the longest downtime since its creation.

The length of that downtime was due to multiple unexpected and unfortunate circumstances, all intersecting at once. For one, our main Sysadmin, poVoq, had taken on obligations that took him outside of the country for an extended period of time (3 months). In addition, the other sysadmins that had physical access to the server coincidentally also had taken on responsibilities or had gone on vacation, which prevented them from being able to access the server as well.

As the server seemed to be working perfectly fine for a long period of time, it didn't seem like it would be much of a risk to leave it unattended for that duration. Unfortunately, things chose to go wrong after everyone who could attend to it, now couldn't..

The primacy cause of the outage was a recent change in IP assignment by our ISP, in addition to what looks like an very recent bug in our firewall software (IPfire).

Previously, our ISP would assign new IP's to us slowly, 3 times a year. But recently they have been assigning them more frequently. IPfire normally catches this, automatically changing the Dynamic DNS to the new IP, and all was dandy. However, before the trip, IPfire was updated, which introduced a new and yet unknown bug, which ultimately prevented it from automatically updating the DNS when a new IP was assigned. All other fail-safes previously put in place by poVoq to notify him of this problem also failed, which lead us to assume there was a hardware failure in the Firewall, preventing us from being able to access the server remotely.

However, a few days later, poVoq received signs of life in the form of an automated e-mail sent from the server, indicating that the it was still running, meaning something else was preventing access. They would have to find out what the new assigned IP was manually to access it.

With the help of a friend, they were able to help track down the new IP by performing a port-scan on over five hundred thousand IP's in a subnet that was known to contain our server, narrowing it down to 20 possible IP addresses by looking for open ports that are used by XMPP servers (as we also host an XMPP chat messaging service). After trying each one, they finally hit pay dirt, and were able to log in for the first time since the outage! By the 11th of June, we were back up and running.

We'll be taking many lessons from this event to bolster the reliability and accessibility of the server to hopefully prevent an outage of this scale from happening again, such as:

• Switching to a new and hopefully more reliable Firewall/Dynamic DNS software & adding additional out of band notifications on IP change
• Installing a KVM on the main firewall that is connected to a separate IP to make it possible to connect to it directly, giving us the ability to reboot and troubleshoot remotely even if the main connection is lost.
• Experiment with a Wireguard tunnel on a rented VPS, which could allow for a more stable connection, and could be used to host essential services like our XMPP, which would help it remain accessible even if the main server went down.

As unfortunate as this outage was, due to the efforts of poVoq and his friend, it was thankfully far, far shorter than it could've been, and we're extremely grateful to have such a dedicated admin hosting our little corner of the web. Three cheers to poVoq and his friend! :D

📢 Good Trouble ✊🏿

Last month on June 14, millions took to the street in strategic non-violent protest. News about the results of past protests, and announcements of new direct actions are welcome in all of the localized communities at 50501.chat.

While protests are good for demonstrating unrest with the regime, they are also extremely potent milieus for sharing information with like-minded individuals. It is typical to find political and labor organizations distributing information from xeroxed flyers to printed newspapers. If you feel inclined, we encourage you to invite people you meet in the streets to join the Fediverse. If you come up with flyers or zines to help do this, we'd love it if you shared it in this month's meta to help others do the same.

John Lewis was a civil rights leader who eventually transitioned to become a United States politician. He is famous for saying, "Speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America." This July 17th, organizations across the world are mobilizing for a sequel to the wildly successful "No Kings" protest, called "Good Trouble Lives On" in honor of the five-year anniversary of John Lewis' death of cancer at 80 years old.

While this protest movement is nominally for the United States, the trend towards authoritarianism as the climate crisis worsens is a world problem. Mobilizations have already been announced in Florence and Dublin. This is not a 'US' problem, it's an 'us' problem. If we hope to push back authoritarianism, we must do it together through solidarity. The signs in the streets remind us that we are part of a world-wide resistance movement - from Ukraine's resistance to Russia's imperialism, Palestine's struggle to be free from the tyranny of the IDF, to the barricades that just went up recently in Belgrade, Serbia. We are all connected.

🛠 Fun Projects to Build Community 👩🏾‍🏭

Meeting your neighbors, fostering goodwill, and having a real sense of community is a powerful thing. It's the main building block that all other actions we have in our arsenal rely upon. Without it, we're far less able to build the vision we all share of a more hopeful future, and less capable to resist the darker visions others have for us.

With summer here and hopefully some good weather gracing a good amount of us, now's the time to bust out some tools (maybe from your local library if they have a tool section!), gather some friends, heed the primal call, and do some solarpunk style community building with direct action!

In the clickable drop-down below are a few ideas to get started. I'm hoping more of you chime in with your own in the comments as well! :D

🗣️ 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

Hello, should I consider my application rejected if I haven't received an email after 24 hours? :(

Some context and history on the topic.

I wanted to ask if there is change in opinion on this topic, while slrpnk was down I had account federated with Hexbear and it didn't seem that bad. Yet I way be just propagandised enough to not see the problem.

What do you think?

slrpnk.net is currently experiencing an unplanned outage. the main admin has shared the following information:

Due to what appears to be a hardware failure of the main firewall router, all servers hosting slrpnk.net and related services are currently inaccessible remotely. Sadly due to work related committments the main admin can't physically access the servers for some weeks which makes it extremely hard to fix.

due to the instance being down, this post will currently only be visible from lemmy.world.

see also https://feddit.org/post/13613230

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.

This June, we'll be discussing Security Culture, as well as the importance of Free & Open-Source Software in building the world we want to live in. And let's give a shoutout to Pride Month of course! 🏳️‍🌈

🌟 Community Highlights 🌟

!Cooperatives@slrpnk.net - All things about democratic businesses that serve their communities first

!Zines@slrpnk.net - A place to share tiny, self-published texts (usually small printable magazines)

!Abc@slrpnk.net - News about incarcerated anarchists & resources for prisoner support.

🏳️‍🌈 The First Pride was a Riot ✊

The month of June is widely celebrated as Pride Month because of the Stonewall Inn riot on June 28, 1969. Just yesterday, videos are spreading across the internet of an ICE Raid on the Buona Forchetta restaurant was pushed back by a crowd of San Diego's South Park residents. It's important to reflect on the lasting systemic change that can be achieved through community cohesion and spontaneous revolt.

As transgender people are currently being specifically targeted by the current fascist wave, I'd like to draw attention to Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera - two prominent participants in the Stonewall Riot that created Pride. Pride has always been and must always be trans-inclusive. Attacks on transgender people are an attack on our communities, and if the attacks succeed, other sections of the queer community will soon follow.

To all our fellow solarpunks, happy Pride!

🤐 Security Culture 🛡️

Sometimes benign seeming efforts can turn into unexpected personal data collecting traps. Like an obscure website for exchanging contact info with other students turning into a global ad-tech surveillance network (Facebook), or innocent seeming online personality tests being use to harvest character profiles. Even Etsy, Reddit, Tinder, and Duolingo are feeding information to US Government Agencies like ICE.

Security culture is commonly used to describe the general awareness of such potential traps and how it can affect groups or entire communities. This goes beyond mere individual privacy efforts, as without joint efforts these often fail to work.

Especially in activist circles, security culture is paramount. For opsec reasons not everyone in the group might be aware of what clandestine efforts others are involved in, but with a general security culture many potential data leaks can be avoided.

Movements are made by the volume of their participants, and the easier and less dangerous it is to participate, the more people will get involved. As more people get involved, individual involvement becomes even less dangerous, creating a virtuous cycle.

Perhaps you, dear Solarpunk reader, could help boost that cycle by sharing your own examples of best practices, lessons learned, or traps to watch out for online in the comments below. Security culture is a collective effort, so our best defense is sharing our knowledge with others!

We'll start it off with some

But we're excited to see what ideas, suggestions and advice you may have for safer patterns of behavior to use online. :)

💽 Free & Open-Source Software as Praxis 🖥️

I think it’s safe to assume most of us grew up surrounded by proprietary software, it was simply what software was. Normal. Cozy. Familiar.

Our current reality is anything but normal, with our lives dominated by exploitative, invasive, insecure software, and much of it damned difficult to escape after dedicating years or even decades to committing it to muscle memory. But part of being a solarpunk is choosing to stare the failings of our society in the face and saying “No more. There has to be a better way.” Despite how difficult it may be to change our current habits.

Free & Open-Source Software (FOSS) is a candle in the dark, and luckily for us has never burned brighter than today. It gives us a pure example of mutual aid in action, built with the cooperation of tens of thousands of individuals who offer their work, often for free, to all who wish to use or build upon it. We won’t be able to achieve a solarpunk future without it, and any victory it achieves is a tangible step toward prefiguring the world toward our shared vision.

So how can we help it along its way? The first step is to use it! Let’s give some examples of alternatives to popular software you may use or even rely upon (click the spoiler below to expand it):

I dont know why? I didnt post anything there.

When someone has the blue OP or green M or red A by their username, hovering over the icon shows what it means, but this is not the case for the red shield. What does it mean?

Each month, we create a post to keep you abreast of news and happenings regarding the server, discuss recent events, and to act a town square for the community.

Bring it on, May.

⚡ Solar & Blackouts ☀️

You might have heard of the huge blackout that hit the Iberian peninsula earlier this week. Causes are still being investigated, but it looks like it was caused by an extreme weather event, made more likely by climate change. Despite our servers being technically located in Portugal, we were not directly affected as the Azores have a fully independent and quite resilient power-grid. But since our internet gets routed over mainland Portugal, it could have caused connectivity issues, which luckily wasn't the case.

And even if there would have been a local blackout (which sometimes happens during heavy storms), we are quite well prepared with a solar PV system acting as a UPS for our servers that can easily supply power for several hours or even days if the sun shines.

As forecasted in the last solar-power update in January, there has been a significant increase in our local power production in the last three months. While February was still a bit dark with only 66% of the power used provided by solar PV, March (92%) and April (95%) looked much better already. This will obviously stay good in the coming months until at least October or November.

If you haven't looked into getting your own small solar-system yet, don't hesitate any further. You can even get nice small portable ones to directly charge USB devices which might end up very useful to have in the case of an emergency.

🌟 New Community Highlights 🌟

We have some new communities on our instance this month, be sure to give them a visit and a sub if you find them interesting!

• !fruit@slrpnk.net - Discussion of fruit trees, fruit forestry, fruitarianism, and all things fruit-related.
• !smolweb@slrpnk.net - Appreciation and sharing of links, resources, and culture of the smol web
• !Trainhopping@slrpnk.net - Discuss hopping freight trains, figuring out where trains are going, and how to get on them safely.
• !unsustainable_products@slrpnk.net - Calls out products that fail early, use anti-repair tactics, or make you needlessly dependent.

🎊 New Lemmy Instance Highlights: Lemmini Elettrici & 50501.chat 🎉

When Lemmy was still in its infancy, the programmers offered free hosting for a year for people willing to administer a Lemmy server that would federate with them. SLRPNK.net is one of the oldest Lemmy instances due to @ex_06 taking them up on this offer. He lost interest in administration and passed the torch to @poVoq, who is primarily responsible for the stability, performance, ethos, and vibrant community it has today.

We're grateful to @ex_06 for the seed of SLRPNK.net: the name, and acting on the idea that Solarpunk is an essential part of federated social media. He has since returned to SLRPNK.net as a member, and we're grateful for the positive contributions he has added with his presence.

We're excited to announce that he has founded a new Italian Solarpunk instance: Lemmini Elettrici. Solarpunk is an international idea, and LE is the newest addition to the localized Solarpunk communities in French on JLai.lu (!solarpunk@jlai.lu) and Polish on Szmer.info (!solarpunk@szmer.info). We're pleased to endorse his new project. If you speak Italian, we encourage you to check out the entire instance, and !solarpunk@lemminielettrici.it specifically.

50501: 50 protests, 50 states, 1 movement (originally 1 day) is a nationwide United States grassroots activist network that coalesced over social media. Reddit is the primary forum for the movement so far, which causes problems because 1) our ongoing blackout of content from that platform, 2) the interests of Reddit's owners are counter to the interests of the movement, which incentivizes Reddit admins to abuse their power and engage in sabotage. Still, non-Reddit 50501 media has made it to !inperson@slrpnk.net, and we're eager to see the movement thrive and grow.

We hope the movement continues to spread on Reddit, but the natural primary home as a decentralized federated movement is on a decentralized federated social media ecosystem. 50501.chat is the 50501 movement's Lemmy instance, and we're excited for the potential this has for both the growth of the movement and the development of the Fediverse. We've also endorsed their instance on Fediseer. We encourage you to explore, comment, and post on 50501.chat to help it grow into greater force in the 50501 movement.

They are looking for additional moderators. If you have experience moderating communities on SLRPNK.net, your skills are very much in demand on the new instance.

With the US government's new executive order possibly leading down the road to martial law, publicly visible resistance demonstrations like 50501 are going to be more important than ever to help encourage others to also stand up, that there are hundreds of thousands of others who will join them in the fight. A large part of Nazi Germany's success in taking over the country was a lack of massive public demonstrations against the new regime, making people feel helpless and afraid to take a stand..

If you're a new member of slrpnk.net, we wrote about some other ways to prepare in a previous monthly meta post.

✊🏾 May Day! ✊

On this day, 139 years ago in 1886, U.S. workers and unions called for a general strike in support of the 8 hour work day. While many answered the call in New York, Detroit, and Milwaukee; Chicago was the one to show up on a mass scale, numbering over 400,000 strong, a large amount of them Anarchists.

The mere threat of a strike of that size prompted many corporations to capitulate immediately, with as many as 45,000 workers winning an 8-hour workday overnight, a tremendous victory.

However, on the third day of the strike, police fired wildly into the crowd of striking workers, killing at least one, and injuring numerous others. Anarchists called for a mass meeting the next day in Haymarket Square to protest the brutality. Though the meeting was peaceful and naturally began to disperse on its own, police once again gathered themselves, 180 strong, and confronted the meeting workers to demand they disperse immediately (and unlawfully). At this moment, a bomb was thrown into the police column, by who, history hasn't revealed, but it prompted the police to open fire into the crowd once more, this time killing 4 workers, alongside 7 police deaths to friendly fire.

What followed was a mass terror of warrantless police raids against union shops, meeting halls, printing presses, and private homes. One group quickly became the target of blame, and without evidence, a sham trial was conducted against 8 Anarchists. The jury (composed of businessmen) were told “Law is on trial. Anarchy is on trial. These men have been selected, picked out by the Grand Jury, and indicted because they were leaders. They are no more guilty than the thousands who follow them. Gentlemen of the jury; convict these men, make examples of them, hang them and you save our institutions, our society.”

One was sentenced to 15 years, the other 7 sentenced to death. A global protest campaign resulted in two more being spared the noose in favor of life sentences, the others weren't so lucky. Nearly half a million lined the roads leading the their funeral, and as many as 50,000 attended in honor of what are now known as the Haymarket Martyrs. We now remember them on May 1st. May Day.

This day is often chosen to host protests, rallies, and other activist events, and today is no different. Groups like 50501, NoVoiceUnheard, BuildTheResistance, and many more decentralized organizations across the US (and even Canada) will be protesting the current regime in honor of our fallen from so many years past.

But there's another thing we can do to not only honor those past heroes, but to bolster the current resistance as well; Unionize.

Not only does unionizing your workplace bring almost immediate benefits to you and your co-workers (a living wage, benefits, more time off), it also lets us fight back against the regime with an effective general strike, just as it worked in 1886 (they wouldn't have fought us so hard if it didn't).

Below are some resources to Unions from around the world who can help you become an organizer and form a grassroots union with your co-workers:

• 🌍 Global: IWW (Français) - (Español)
• 🇦🇷 Argentina: FORA
• 🇦🇺 Australia: ASF-IWA
• 🇧🇷 Brazil: FOB
• 🇧🇬 Bulgaria: ARS, CITUB
• 🇩🇪 Germany: FAU
• 🇬🇷 Greece: ESE
• 🇮🇹 Italy: USI
• 🇳🇱 🇧🇪 Netherlands & Belgium: Vriji Bond
• 🇪🇸 Spain: CNT
• 🇸🇪 Sweden: SAC
• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: UVW

🗣️ 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

Movim Chat - Open to all members (use your SLRPNK login credentials)

Etherpad - Collaborative document editor

Something broke. I think there was no problem when I last visited a couple days ago. Today all posts have only a down arrow for the spillover actions, no icons. If I move the mouse above where the icons /should/ be, the pointer turns into a finger. So the actions are still available but just invisible.

(edit) when I use Firefox and enable displaying images, only then can I see icons. I normally use Ungoogled Chromium with images disabled (images dramatically increase my Internet costs). So I wonder if someone tried to get fancy and install images instead of icons from fonts.

I get "Instance is not registered" when trying to look up a local community here:

https://lemmy-federate.com/

Is there a reason that slrpnk.net is not listed?

Anyone else running into this issue?