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 🌟

• !foxtrot@slrpnk.net - A comic strip written and illustrated by Bill Amend.
• !relationshipanarchy@slrpnk.net - For all those that live relationship anarchy and those that want to learn about it.
• !outdoor@slrpnk.net - Hiking, camping, nature photography etc.

✊🏾 May Day! ✊

On this day, 140 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.

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. 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). You can find resources to help you unionize in the Union Resources section of this post.

📸 Meta Post Image: The Desplaines Street Haymarket Memorial in Chicago 🎞️

Revealed in 2004, the Haymarket Memorial sits on Desplaines Street near the original site of the events that inspired May Day.

🚦 Lemmy.World Defederation and Refederation with Anarchist.Nexus 🚦

Recently, Lemmy.World’s primary administrator MrKaplan defederated from Anarchist.Nexus and threatened to defederate Lemmy.DBZer0.com, two large anarchist Lemmy instances. After significant feedback and discussion he has since refederated Lemmy.world with Anarchist.Nexus.

SLRPNK is not an anarchist instance, anyone who feels affinity with the Solarpunk movement to create a better world is welcome here. That said, I and my fellow admins are anarchists. I think I speak for most other anarchists who have found a home on SLRPNK as well when I say that we can’t help but view MrKaplan’s careless behavior as an attack all people who share our moral and political convictions: what is happening in Palestine is a genocide, and Zionism is the ideology that fuels it.

The Fediverse is a collection of small social media servers that through coordination build a grassroots network of human connection that is growing to rival centralized corporate social media. Despite the political diversity across this network, we share a common value – decentralized social media is important. We would like to see this network continue to grow, and that means adding more servers to our federation and nurturing the ties that we already share. Defederation means a severing of all communication between two servers. This is a blunt tool that instance admins should be careful to wield, and it should certainly not be done in anger or over a bruised ego. It is however a tool that we do deploy for various reasons from time to time, be it for reasons of federated feed curation, more technical reasons like preventing abuse coming from unmaintained instances, or in rare cases due to severe ideological misalignment. Especially in the last case we are careful to ensure that none of those decisions are taken lightly or in anger and we typically document our reasons for each in either our monthly meta posts, or in their own separate post on c/Meta. We have and will continue to take the issue of which servers we federate with extremely seriously, and listen to our members for their feedback on this topic.

These events are extremely recent and we’re still processing the news. Further discussion is welcome in the comments.

• LW banned me and defederated AN over “Murder all zionists” in my display name
• Lemmy.world Admin MrKaplan rages over anti-Zionism banning users and defederating instances
• Update: anarchist.nexus has been refederated
• Join the Pledge to boycott lemmy.world!

🔕 Defederation from Poa.st 🛑

Poa.st is a Soapbox instance (a Mastodon-like microblogging software) which was used in a now debunked disinfo attempt to paint Dbzer0 and Anarchist.Nexus as being the target of entryism by a group of antisemitic Nazis.

While that specific doctored conversation did not take place, that group of individuals on poa.st was likely chosen due to displaying nazi behavior elsewhere on that instance, which enhanced the credibility of the disinfo attempt. For those same reasons, we have chosen to defederate from Poa.st on the same ideological grounds that we defederated from Maga,place and HilariousChoas (which you can read here in last year’s November Monthly Meta).

As it is a Mastodon-like instance, it hosts no communities that our users would’ve followed, which means it should not noticeably effect any of our users. Instead, the defederation will effectively only block poa.st users from directly interacting with posts on our 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/ (Note: Your contributions work, but due to an annoying bug they are currently not shown in the summary)

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)

Currently f-hub.org is getting a combined 46€/month in donations, which is covering a good portion of our recurring expenses. Thanks!

💬 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

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:

• !inperson@slrpnk.net - A community for sharing information about ways to get involved with real world activism to make the world a better place.
• !pleasantpolitics@slrpnk.net - Politics without the jerks.
• !naturalphilosophy@slrpnk.net - A community for anyone interested in big questions and meta-questions pertaining to the natural world.
• !water@slrpnk.net - A space to discuss all about water, water reuse and its waste.
• !publictransport@slrpnk.net - Everything about public transportation!

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

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

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