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!
Hey I am the moderator of !notvoting, so this might a bit biased:
I would like to know how you feel about the [email protected] 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 [email protected] down if it constantly leads to that. I can see how [email protected] 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 find it dangerous to allow the existence of a not-voting community to continue because there is already such tragically low voter turnout that actual progressive local leaders who could affect change at the community level don't get elected, but right-wingers with rabid fanbases do.
We need to be encouraging people to get involved with local politics and voting in every election so that the government can actually function the way we would like to see it, and have them hold big businesses accountable. The way to do this is by supporting people-powered candidates who don't take donations from PACs and corporate donors. Grassroots organizing includes electing people-first candidates to positions where they can represent the grassroots.
Make no mistake, I also would like to see the dissolution of the state. A classless, stateless society is possible, but must be achieved by transforming the evil into something that works for all, then its necesity fades away as the infrastructure has been put in place. Unfortunately we are still in a phase in which we need the state, but we will eventually get to the point where we don't. For now, we need to vote to make it work.