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 🌟
- [email protected] - Share and discuss interesting books of an audible nature!
- [email protected] - Explore the darker aesthetics of Solarpunk.
- [email protected] - 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
⬛ Union Resources 🟥
These are unions from around the world who can train you to become an effective organizer to form a grassroots union with your co-workers!
I understand where you are coming from, but I also feel like this would put an undue burden of proof on what is often a decision based on a build up of smaller issues, private communication between admins and various off-site user/admin behavior in fediverse related chat channels that would require serious effort to document and also compromise confidentiality in many cases.
In addition, examples for such discussions on other instances usually meander aimlessly for quite some time (all the while the negative influence of the instances to be defederated continues), and if you force a vote on it, the results are usually quite unsatisfying, similar to our vote about enabling down-votes a while ago, which ended like 55% for enabling it, but with a low participation and somewhat dubious democratic legitimacy overall.
But I wouldn’t be opposed to having an community discussion on why an instance should be re-federated, and have considered starting one for the case of Hexbear, since their admins regularly accuse me of having made the defederation decision pre-maturely and only based on a hunch, but requiring a community vote in advance on what I consider mostly a curation and moderation decision seems counterproductive. And I can assure you that we discussed this internally and I am always the first to argue that we shouldn’t be too trigger happy when it comes to defederation (and I think our rather short defederation list shows this).
I was more advocating for a place to discuss the decision and share relevant information than a direct vote. If any of that information can’t be easily documented or shared then a brief summary or whatever can be shared would suffice.
Obviously we are limited by the way Lemmy is set up and the constraints of self-hosting but I really don’t like the top-down decision-making model that most Lemmy instances operate by. But since I’m not starting my own I guess I’ll just have to keep complaining haha. Maybe the best solution is to just spend less time online since we don’t really have the freedom here we once did anyway.
Well, what would be your suggestion how to do it differently?
Just discussing it on a /c/meta thread doesn’t seem particularly useful and a vote is unlikely to yield meaningful results as few people seem to follow these threads.
It is also a questions of who this impacts the most and therefore should have the most say. As others have already alluded to in this thread, defederation is to a large part a tool to lessen the moderation workload. Furthermore, for a regular user it isn’t particularly hard to move instance if they don’t like moderation or defederation decisions, but moving communities is much more complicated.
Thus we can and probably should ask about defederation decisions in our moderators xmpp channel, but in this case it didn’t seem particularly controversial or high impact, so we didn’t do that.
Well, I guess I disagree it wouldn’t be useful. It would give users a place to ask questions, share relevant information, etc. To some extent that’s happening now, which is good, but since the decision has already been made, it’s a bit late. It’s also harder to link to examples of bad behavior after the defederation has gone through.
In terms of who is most affected, sure that is true but I think this issue is somewhat already addressed by the nature of engagement. Those who care more and have put in more effort are more likely to engage and share opinions vs. the casual user who just lurks or whatever.
And yes, of course I (or someone else) could move instances. But there aren’t really any instances who do things particularly differently that I’ve seen.
Plus, I like you guys and think you make good decisions generally. I just think the process could be better and more open.
In terms of the full details of how to involve more users in decisions, well, I don’t have all the answers. I think the model I’m envisioning is more one of values than concrete processes, and I understand that makes my feedback less actionable. But I think it’s worth discussion, iteration and experimentation to make online spaces more collaborative and horizontal is all I’m saying.
AFAIK, the only difference between browsing HC through slrpnk vs. browsing it from the HC instance directly is that the former would allow for leaving comments or saving posts, but otherwise the experience of viewing it for examples of behavior from either instance should be fairly identical. (Tor can be used to mask your IP address from them, if visited directly).
From what I understand, Dbzer0 does things a bit differently. They have the ability to bring up matters to vote on via their Governance Community (here is the community where they vote on stuff, and here’s a more in-depth explanation of how it works).
That model gives voting privileges to users who donate to the instance, which I believe is intended to act as a filter to avoid randos from being able to disrupt the instance or manipulate votes, but unfortunately it also mostly limits power to those with the financial means to donate (+ up to 2 users that a donating member can vouch for, giving the vouched for users voting privileges too). Non-paying members can still vote, but theirs only count as 1/10th of a vote, requiring 10 non-member votes to equal a paying member’s vote.
They also have the ability to recall an admin in a vote, and have launched a Flotilla, where governance is shared amongst multiple instances.
I’m not entirely sure how I feel about the voting system. It does spread decision-making out, but with enough effort and disposable income, could potentially be gamed due to the anonymity of these services. I’m also not sure I’m terribly comfortable with the idea of a more financially-able group having more power than those without the means to contribute financially, even if I can understand the reasoning behind it.
It’s an interesting experiment overall, and one I try to keep abreast of to see how well it functions.
Likewise. I’ve always enjoyed reading your posts and comments over the years :)
You’re not wrong to want to be able to independently verify our reasoning. I think that’s part of the reason it took us so long to ban HC, as they used a absurdity, jokes, and ‘randomness’ to foster a fascist base. I feel it’s not difficult to see if you know what to look for, but the strategy works because it’s not completely obvious. Attempts to call them out are more easily cast as over-reactions to jokes, and people are more likely to view things from the stereotypical frame of power-tripping gatekeepers over-reacting to a joke, which is what it looks like on the surface to the uninitiated.
The conceit of HC is that it’s a ‘free speech’ zone, and that anyone can say anything, including things that happen to be fascist or support fascism. That’s not the case. Alice is the admin, this is her censoring criticism of Charlie Kirk’s deification documented in PTB. She enables her moderators to be just as censorious when it comes to pushing a right-agenda.
It’s worth reading up on the strategy of absurdity, particularly in regard to the banned Reddit community Frenworld. This is a community whose bread and butter was thinly veiled anti-semitic jokes and holocaust denial wrapped in cutesy images of fogs and clowns speaking in childish slang.
The impulse to give the benefit of doubt is a good one, to not ascribe to malice what can be explained by stupidity, but ultimately if nazis are at home on your platform, the end result is the same regardless of intention.
Do you feel that there is any merit to revisiting this matter in the time surrounding the PieFed migration? I lean towards downvotes being disabled.
I came to SLRPNK.net from Beehaw.org, and while I think they do a lot of things right, I don’t think disabling downvotes is one of them.
While Beehaw members can’t downvote comments and posts on other platforms, visitors to Beehaw are able to downvote posts and comments on Beehaw and made by Beehaw members. While people on Beehaw can’t see these downvotes, they are visible to people off-Beehaw all the same.
I think downvotes are a useful way of getting a temperature reading on a comment. With it gone, it puts more stress on other methods of responding to bad comments, those being reporting comments to the moderators, and replying to the comment with a statement of disagreement or rebuttal. Both methods of reply are moderator-intensive; moderators need to reply to reports in a timely fashion, and contradictory replies often devolve into slap-fights, which also require moderator attention. A social media experience is judged by its signal to noise ratio, so removing or dampening uninformative or irrelevant dross helps the gems to stand out. Moderation is key, and moderators are the weak point in any social media design. Good ones are difficult to find, moderator skills are difficult to teach, and it is an easy task to burn out on.
Beehaw does a good job of seeking out moderators and limiting their community list to keep the moderation task more manageable. Even with those in place, the moderation task is too great to keep up with the demands of federating with a site like Lemmy.world, which lead to them defederating from the largest instance early in their existence. I haven’t kept up with their internal discussion in a while, but I get the sense that it is still a constant struggle.
Allowing members to downvote takes some of the work off of moderators. Judging quality in posts is a difficult task, and downvotes can provide useful information. Downvoting permits a more nuanced access to the wisdom of crowds. Sometimes the best response to a comment is to downvote and move on. Even in cases where an obvious rule-breaking content is eventually removed, like in the case of a racist comment, downvotes provide not only censure to the commentor, but solidarity with the people and groups targeted by their attack during the interim before moderator action.
Downvotes can be abused, and can communicate confusing information, like when a locally-upvoted post is torpedoed by downvotes primarily from a single foreign instance. I think giving moderators access to granular voting information in their communities was the right choice for Lemmy, and I think giving public access to statistical breakdowns of vote origin in comments and posts that reach a threshold of votes could be useful as well. I think even without technical improvements to mitigate these drawbacks, removing downvotes causes more problems than it solves.
Truly, thanks for engaging and sharing your nuanced perspective. You’ve changed my mind about this issue.
I personally don’t have a strong opinion on that and would also need to check if that is an supported option in Piefed.