So there are a few topics that came up lately that I think would be nice to discuss with members of this community.
Basically this is part of writing a Code of Conduct for our instance and I think we need to talk about some specific type of posts:
Doomers
Naturally the themes discussed in our communities are attracting a lot of climate doomer comments and I would say we also have a significant number of “recovering doomers” here as community members.
Earlier this week I considered closing the /c/collapse community on SRLPNK, because it is not actively moderated and attracts a lot of these types, even though ex_06 (who asked me to have their account re-activated, but not as an admin) originally intended it to be more of a psychological self-help group for people trying to get to terms with the likely loss of many things that defined their life so far.
While the typical doomer could probably need some psychological support, they are usually still in a stage of grief that makes them lash out and not engage in a constructive exchange how to make the best of the current difficult situation we sadly find ourselves in.
Mostly I have been doing temporary bans for such doomers to cool down and not spread their doom and gloom endlessly in our communities, but I think we need to come up with a common idea how to deal with this better.
Discussing civil disobedience
aka Direct Action or the other man’s “Eco Terrorist” (yeah right…).
Obviously this is a topic many climate activists find themselves more and more confronted with and you might already be involved with a group engaged in such actions of civil disobedience. And lets not forget about the punk in Solarpunk either :)
However, obviously this is a public web-site and thus easily monitored by law-enforcement and other people that might be interested in reporting such discussions to the local authorities. Thus to protect this service and also our users from themselves we can’t really allow planning discussions with specific targets or generally calls for action against specific persons to happen here out in the open (or in the semi-public direct messages).
Obviously, we can never condone violence against persons, but aside from that please be careful with discussing climate activism on the clear-web and rather use fully end to end encrypted means with people you can trust!
However this has obviously a large grey area and people might have stronger views on what should and should not be discussed here.
Absolute Vegans
Vegans are obviously welcome on SLRPNK and I think we can all agree that strongly reducing the consumption of animal products is a worthy goal.
However, there are some very opinionated (online) Vegans / animal rights activists that (intentionally or not) are indistinguishable from trolls and generally very toxic to deal with. Please don’t feel personally attacked by this, but I think we need to come up with something regarding this in our code of conduct.
So these were the three topics I had in my mind lately, but feel free to discuss others as well.
I am looking forward to your thoughts on this!
You must log in or register to comment.
I think one of the big attractions of solarpunk in general is the sense of tempered optimism it offers in the face of darker narratives (cyberpunk, doomer) – ie. there is hope out there but it is going to take a lot of hard work to get there
And significantly that doing anything is better than doing nothing, even if we’ve already crossed a point of no return. While the earth will not get better in our lifetimes, it can very certainly get worse. Giving up, while less selfish than profiteering from the climate crumbles (I saw that term in another comment and I like it and I’m going to keep using it) as many of the most profitable companies are, is still a selfish act. I think there’s an argument to be made that it also links up with eco-fascism and eco-colonialism, but I’d need to do a bunch of work and research to see if there is one, so it’s just a gut feeling.
I think we need as part of our code of conduct something about if reading the climate news bums you out so much you don’t know what to do (and I suspect we’ve all been there) then go sprinkle some native wild flower seeds some where, go for a walk, try to find a pollinator and say hello, eat some local fruit, look at your municipality’s bus map, anything that gets you in touch with your inner hopeful and joyful climate advocate. The news sometimes is a bummer, and the fact it bums you out means you care. But you can’t feed that bummer part of you. You need to feed the part of you that envisions a better future and wants to do something to make the bummer feelings less of a bummer.
This whole thing won’t get fixed all at once. It’s going to take all of us doing lots of small things that add up. And some of it is going to be advocating not doing business with those super profitable companies. But look… We’ve all bought something from amazon we couldn’t get closer because we’re broke. In those moments you are the exploited worker you advocate for
Hey there. New member, freshly registered.
I would say that the biggest threat to a solarpunk community like this one is greenwashing. More specifically, I’m thinking about techno-solutionism - a devious form of magical thinking that lets us think that tech is going to solve everything.
It is okay to share news about the latest technological advancement, to marvel at the ever lowering price of solar energy. But if it leads people to think that we can just replace fossil with another energy source and keep our societies and economic structures as is, this is toxic.
And I get that if you get enthusiastic about some tech and post it here, but then someone starts raining on your parade in the comment section, that person could easily be disqualified as a doomer.
How can we foster a sane debate about technology in this community ? Honestly I don’t know, but I’m eager to try!
All the best,
That’s very well put. People tend to cling to the ideas of silver bullets, and that’s, more often than not, detrimental to climate goals and tends to just slow things down.
Could not agree more! I’m also fairly new. I think the most constructive possible way to do so might be to try to brainstorm how to apply the technology in a non-capitalist (non-statist), mutual aid context? Admittedly, lots of times, that seems far-fetched.
About the /c/collapse sub, I like the idea that Robert Evans uses, of not referring to “collapse” but instead “the crumbles” - podcast link. The point is it’s not going to be a single moment and it’s not going to be absolute, so the idea of it being a thing that either will happen or won’t happen is a false dichotomy.
It’s a slow, inexorable process of change and that implies that rather than a landslide that will just fall on us all without any hope for remedy, it’s a process whose path we can influence and change. Maybe you could close /c/collapse and create /c/the_crumbles or something like it? Maybe explain the purpose of the rename and put some resources in the sidebar to ideas about radical hope and practical ways people can help. I also think directing people’s despair in that direction can only be a good thing.
I wish I could volunteer to moderate something like that but I’m afraid I can’t really give the time or consistent energy to it. It’s just an idea :)
I didn’t know where to ask this so I’ll ask it here: where can I donate money to the instance?
Thank you for the amazing job, guys
There is currently no way to donate to SLRPNK directly and it is also not urgently needed. I’ll probably set up a Liberapay site later this year or so, but for now please donate to the main Lemmy developers if you have some funds to spare. Thanks 🥰
So it seems you’re automatically defensive about wanting to moderate vegan speech (preempting with "don’t feel personally attacked) and deep down I think you know why.
I understand you’re just trying to make a space where everyone feels welcome. But harrassment policy and other conduct policy should cover people getting out of bounds and requires no vegan specific clause. Making a vegan specific clause is a little hostile.
Unless you are truly aiming to ban people for having the opinion that it’s not ok to not be vegan. That would be tone policey and censorious, in my opinion. If a vegan is actually harassing someone that calls for moderation, but its already a rule to refrain from harassing. If you want to make a rule on harassment and include several examples, and one of them is a vegan example, that would be fine.
It just reminds me of other contentious issues like racial justice or gender issues. Sometimes people didn’t like getting called racist, but do you censor a racial minority because their message is intense and makes someone a little uncomfortable? People have the right to decline interactions that arent going well but they shouldnt expect to always be perfectly comfortable when writing in the public square.
Ok fair enough, but I think calling animal husbandry “slavery” is intentionally going for the shock value of it and just deeply offends people that otherwise strive for the same values and are usually very much aware of the of how badly animals are treated in industrial farming.
I also get your examples with racial and gender issues, and while you are right that there are some parallels, I think it is not right to attack people who very much have similar concerns about animal rights, but just came to somewhat different conclusions what to do about that.
And while I agree that it should in theory just fall under the general no-harrassement etc. rules, I am near certain that if I would actually start moderating such posts I would have to explain why anyway, so I would rather pre-empt such discussions now and not do them in the heat of the moment when someone likely feels wronged about a moderation decision.
Forbidding the comparison of animal captivity, forced reproduction and child stealing, and economic exploitation to slavery would be a clear example of indulging a censorious impulse.
I rarely use this comparison personally because it’s subject to this kind of confusion (thinking comparison to human slavery is equating to human slavery). Nevertheless it’s my personal opinion that when you account for the massive scale of the suffering, billions of animals yearly, a comparison of severity can still be drawn, even with any inspecies prejudices about the richness of human lives and experience potential compared to animals.
Context matters… if you say “slavery” in the context of massive industrial animal farming people are unlikely to be offended.
Using it in the context of someone having some backyard chicken or a video about a small scale sheep herder that produces wool (both actual examples from the last couple of weeks) is IMHO a different matter.
Do you know what they do to male chicks and hens after their amount of eggs go down, even on small farms? Do you know what they do to sheeps for wool when their wool quality lowers after half of their lifetime? Even small farms don’t offer retirement homes for them. They live to produce eggs and wool which are taken from them, if they fail to deliver they get slaughtered.
It’s sad when people with empathy for animals are being called trolls. Nobody is trolling on this topic.
Yes I know all that and people involved in such small scale farming are surely the ones that are especially aware. But I also recognize that people can be fully aware of the situation and still come to different conclusions and I try to not judge them for it.
You are not going to educate or convince anyone by barging into a discussion and loudly proclaiming that this is “slavery” and write reports to the mods asking any such discussion to be removed.
Context matters here when we’re talking about what speech you’re going to outlaw on this platform. You can have whatever opinion you want on whether its ok to exploit a backyard chicken but if you ban someone for this, that’s quite censorious. Why don’t you just say to them what you said here and let the people suss it out.
There is nothing “censorious” about moderating trolls. Regardless of the actual matter, if someone writes comments with the explicit purpose of offending others that is trolling. If we leave people to “suss it out”, there is going to be exactly one outcome: the nice people leave and only the trolls remain.
I don’t think drawing parallels between small-scale farming and slavery equals trolling. It’s certainly a position many non-vegans will disagree with, but that doesn’t make the point automatically invalid.
I’m pretty new to this style of vegan - is the slavery analogy a genuine attempt at outreach or just fishing for a strong emotional reaction? Because so far I’ve only seen it when it’s off topic and usually bundled with other insults.
My ancestors were never enslaved, my family doesn’t bear scars from that atrocity (which happened within living memory in many places, especially when you count things like prisoner-lease) so I’ve had the luxury of moving on and staying on topic, and the slrpnk community has, I think, done a good job of not taking the bait in all the conversations I’ve seen.
But it doesn’t exactly make for a welcoming place. Maybe I’m wrong, and misjudging what will offend people (I wouldn’t be the first white guy to speak out of turn). But it just doesn’t seem worthwhile to me - how many people repented their carnist ways VS bounced hard off vegans using this analogy or calling them murderers, pissbabies, etc?
These days I’m watching the world burn down around me and I want results, not people grandstanding about their moral purity and how hard it is to be surrounded by the rest of us. I’ve fallen in love with the slrpnk community because it’s so action-oriented, because it’s somehow both realistic and optimistic, because people here are making real steps, even small ones, to improve the world around them. It’s inspired me to do more of the projects I had on the back burner, to prioritize planting and fixing and zerowaste-type reuse.
I think because this place had that effect on me, I’ve come to see it also as a recruiting tool - I want others to read the conversations and to reconsider consumer culture, the way our societies exploit natural resources and animals, the source of their electricity, and yes, their diet too. But I recognize that we’ll be meeting people where they are and that insults make for bad recruiting.
There are many ways to help and at this point, if someone is willing to just plant some native flowers in their yard, or build a bat house, or they’ll give something away instead of throwing it out, that’s progress. Small steps are better than nothing, which is what we’ll get if we drive people away by insulting them.
Yes, it is a discussion worth having and I would not moderate it as such if done in a civilized manner and in the appropriate community.
The problem is that this is not happening. Rather people intentionally barge into other communities and and intentionally try to offend people in some misguided attempt to speak the truth as they perceive it.
Meta, how does moderation / deletion work?
If i post to another instance and they remove my comment, does it also disappear from my own local profile view (as if the hosting instance controls display of all comments even remotely)? Or would it have to be removed by my own host to make it disappear from my own local profile view?
Yes, that is the general idea of participating in remote communities. Technically your home instance could ignore the deletion request, I don’t see why that would be desirable.
I was wondering where some of my comments went. Wouldn’t it be better if it would hide them from the thread view but let them stay in the profile (as long as your local mods doesn’t also remove)?
(And I don’t think those comments broke the rules and recieved no notification, so it seemed very weird that they just vanished)
Hmm, they should not just vanish. If a mod deletes a post a stub remains saying “removed by mod” or so.
At best I’m seeing a stub “load more comments” but then it doesn’t show either there OR in my own profile (where all other comments still show)
Can you link to an example or DM me one? As admin I see a some deleted posts, but I don’t think this extends to posts removed in the regular way on other instances. Also check the modlog (linked in the side bar) of that specific community to see if any moderation actions against your posts are documented.
I started drafting some ideas for the code of conduct here: https://wiki.f-hub.org/books/slrpnknet/page/code-of-conduct
Feedback appreciated.
Down-vote etiquette is well-neigh unenforceable. You can encourage people to do the right thing, but aside from catching brigading, you’re going to have a really hard time doing anything with it.
Anything encouraging people to use end-to-end encrypted communications needs to give examples, as many people really don’t know what that means.
I feel like these discussions should be separate posts, since a lot of the comment threads are kind of unwieldy.
Doomers: I would make part of our code of conduct an agreement to avoid non-constructive negativity.
Civil disobedience: I think the code of conduct should include a requirement not to speak in a way that could incriminate anyone or inspire harm against specific people. I think this is broad enough to take care of the worst concerns while still allowing people to debate the merits of industrial sabotage philosophically.
Vegans: I would make a rule against community gatekeeping. This should be sufficient to address anyone who tells someone that their diet or lifestyle disqualifies them from participating in this community, without singling out any specific diet or lifestyle choice.
I feel like these discussions should be separate posts, since a lot of the comment threads are kind of unwieldy.
Yeah, but having a lot of local sticky threads is also annoying. I just wish Lemmy 0.18.3 hadn’t introduced this bug that breaks loading deeply nested comments 🤷♂️
We need to brainstorm a bit how to formulate this in the CoC so that it does not single out vegans but still makes it clear what we discussed in this thread. I would like to avoid adding a lot of examples to keep it short and to the point. Otherwise no one reads it.
Hi! I got banned from one of the communities in the instance about a month ago (climate). I think (hope) it was actually a mistake? I got into a discussion with someone under an article, they kept saying dumb things, and the mod for that comm removed his comments with the reason “don’t troll”, but then banned me for 30 days for “trolling” (and not the other user who had their comments removed). I messaged the mod for that comm to ask if it had been a mistake, but I’m thinking they may had blocked me as I didn’t get a reply.
I’m posting mainly because I don’t want that permanent “stain” in my record when it was possibly a mistake. Is there anything I can do about it?
Sounds like a mistake. I’m sure @poVoq@slrpnk.net can help
With regard to direct action, I don’t think general discussions of, or even encouragement of, illegal or violent activity should be discouraged. It’s when you get to talking about specific acts, specific targets, and actual planning that it should be disallowed (and people should know better than to discuss that shit online anyway). Like, encouraging people to shoplift, generally? To defend their communities? To engage in anti-fascist action? Why not?
I think some folks here are going way too far with suggestions like “[don’t] go beyond recommending safe/legal ways to resist the system” (@ProdigalFrog). If we’re stuck in that liberal mudpit, IMO there’s no point in having radical spaces (like I hope this is/can be) at all.
The discussion should be about how to handle content that’s fine with enslaving and slaughtering of other species instead of how to restrict the ones that oppose animal abuse very strictly.
