Meta (slrpnk.net)

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