Introduction
Each month we pin a post to give all members an update on the state of the instance, as well as a place to direct public comments and discussions.
New moderators / communities
Anyone who accepts the responsibility outlined in the SLRPNK rules can start their own community on this instance. Several people have started communities in the last month you may want to check out:
- Anti-car living - !anticars by @wildcherry
- BreadTube - !breadtube by @ProdigalFrog
- Geoengineering - !geoengineering by Mambabasa
- Not voting (in your election) - !notvoting by @punkisundead
Also, @maanskyn of The Radical Storytelling Crew has set up shop on our instance, and while they have not decided how much participation they want from the rest of us, their community !thersc may be something interesting to watch.
Controversy Over !NotVoting
Anarchism is an philosophy of horizontal organization and consensus building. While anarchists have historically taken several positions on engaging in electoral politics, many have and still do view it as a distraction from the grassroots organizing that brings real change. The strongest expression of this tendency is to promote non-involvement in all elections.
Last month, a couple posts expressing this opinion in !anarchism have been downvoted and rage-posted in from accounts outside the !anarchism community. @punkisundead, a long-time contributor and valued member, created !notvoting to try and solve this problem. Whether it will help or merely compound the issue remains to be seen.
In addition to aspiring to be a space where anarchists feel welcome, we are also struggling with the dilemma of how to both encourage good-faith engagement and protect communities from out-group harassment. Lessons learned from @punkisundead’s moderation strategies may help us with other communities with similar problems. We recently closed !twoxchromosomes due to lack of moderators to respond to similar abuse.
As admins, we support @punkisundead in holding unpopular but principled positions, and have put the fate of !notvoting in their hands. They’ve volunteered to discuss their vision for the community with anyone with questions in the comments below.
User Stats
In the last monthly meta, I included a member-requested ‘user stats’ analysis. Because we switched to Lemmy 0.19 mid-January, the way that activity was reported changed, making the sudden inflection in the activity graph suspect. I thought it would be interesting to check in on that again this month.
Fediverse Observer continues to report an upward trend, though not as steep as it was in January when all the members who voted but didn’t post or comment were first added to the count.
The total post count continues its exponential growth pattern from last month, which I interpret as a linear trend of members becoming geometrically more comfortable with using the platform to share news.
As I said last month, our goal is not to be the biggest or best by metrics, but to build a healthy community of support and solidarity. You’re all part of an exclusive group. @poVoq has expressed the intention to limit membership at a certain point so that the community doesn’t get too big - so ultimately the success of SLRPNK will be judged by what its members are enabled learn and build with the help of this community.
It’s nice to see numbers going up, but what is important to us is mostly intangible. I’m pretty happy with the vibe of this instance, and your words of kindness and encouragement are well-received and appreciated.
Community Pruning
When gardening, it’s customary to remove weaker or redundant branches to give healthy branches more room to expand, and allow the crop to focus resources on growing bigger fruit with less plant. We’ve been doing this throughout our tenure as admins to local communities that are both inactive and unmoderated so that it is easier for people to find active and engaging communities on SLRPNK, and reduce our attack profile for spam and trolling.
Usually there’s some discussion in Movim chat, attempts to contact the moderators, and we’re now listing the communities on the Loomio forum so members can stay abreast of what communities are in the shears. The following communities will be pruned next month unless their moderators return or someone steps up to moderate them.
We’re also pruning some long-unmoderated communities that are significant enough that we considered them worthy of their own !meta posts:
Discussion of those communities future should happen in the CornelWest2024 pruning post and the TwoXChromosomes pruning post.
Open discussion
It’s now your turn to tell us what’s new! Any topic related to this community, our infrastructure, or the Fediverse at large is fair game. If you’ve created a new community, this is a great thread to tell us about it. All comments will get extra visibility up until the beginning of next month. Got questions? Ask’em!
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Hey I am the moderator of !notvoting, so this might a bit biased:
I would like to know how you feel about the !notvoting@slrpnk.net community and if you think it has a place on slrpnk.net. This has also been a topic in the moderators chat on movim.srpnk.net for a bit.
Discussions around voting and US politics in general gets pretty heated. Even on slrpnk.net where I usually expect good faith exchanges, I had a few situations where the hostility was really noticeable. So please try to be understanding and kind to each other.
A few words about the community by me:
I made the community about not voting. That can include anti voting sentiments (I understand that as “voting is bad”), but also aims at those just not wanting to participate and those not able to participate. I can see how this distinction might not make sense for everybody, so feel free to ask for more clarification :)
I don’t want to create unnecessary divisions or drama on slrpnk.net or with other instances, so I am definitely fine with shutting !notvoting@slrpnk.net down if it constantly leads to that. I can see how !notvoting@slrpnk.net showing up on the local feed can be annoying to some and might result in people commenting on those posts to voice their discontent with the community. I appeal to you to focus on the positions and goals we have in common instead of the differences. Because I believe that will result in a way better experience on slrpnk.net for all of us.
I’m personally very pro-voting as I see the argument that it’s a distraction from more important things kinda silly given how little time and effort it takes to cast a vote. That being said, I don’t mind discussion about not voting, though dedicating an entire community to the stance seems a bit much, and I’m not really sure what the intent is for such a thing.
Having a community to discuss how electoral politics relates to anarchism or solarpunk ideals however does seem nice to have, and I can see you moderating it and expressing your opinion there, so long as the opposite opinion is allowed to be freely expressed and civil discussion is allowed to be had.
Edit: I’ll add that I think making a notvoting community would inevitably lead to a provoting community being created and there being a rivalry between the two. I also think that will be bad for the instance, as we should be focusing on finding common ground rather than digging our heels in on very principled positions and fighting over petty differences.
dedicating an entire community to the stance seems a bit much
That’s crazy talk. There are so many dynamics to non-voting that I’m not even convinced that 1 community is enough. This one community has to accommodate:
- advocacy of not voting (Anarchy promotion)
- problems voting & countless forms of voter suppression (my situation)
- voter turnout discussions and consequences of not voting in nations where voting is obligatory (Belgium and Australia)
- hopelessness of voting in regions where voting merely legitimizes dictatorships (China, Russia)
- alternatives to voting (e.g. consumer actions)
- Non-voting as a means to compel positive change (e.g. 97,000 Michigan dems and pro-Palestinians threatening to not vote unless Biden changes his policy in Israel)
I’m not an anarchist but found it interesting to read their rationale for opposing voting and elections.
I’m personally very pro-voting
Then you should be very interested in the 2nd bullet. There are LOT of non-voters in the US and it leads to scumbags taking power (e.g. 2016 POTUS). You should want to see people discussing the low voter turnout problem that helps the republicans.
I get why you created the community and agree having a space for those discussions is important. I think maybe the name and narrow focus kind of encourage it to be a space that will attract a lot of negative attention.
Do you think a space focused on encouraging other direct actions could serve a similar purpose while avoiding some of the inherent antagonism of its current form? Maybe something like “beyondvoting” or “directaction”. Then even people who do vote are encouraged to go beyond 4 year single day actions. It opens the space for dicussing the limitations of american democracy while still looking beyond it at what else people can do.
