Each month, we create a post to keep you abreast of news and happenings regarding the server, discuss recent events, and to act a town square for the community.
Bring it on, May.
⚡ Solar & Blackouts ☀️
You might have heard of the huge blackout that hit the Iberian peninsula earlier this week. Causes are still being investigated, but it looks like it was caused by an extreme weather event, made more likely by climate change. Despite our servers being technically located in Portugal, we were not directly affected as the Azores have a fully independent and quite resilient power-grid. But since our internet gets routed over mainland Portugal, it could have caused connectivity issues, which luckily wasn't the case.
And even if there would have been a local blackout (which sometimes happens during heavy storms), we are quite well prepared with a solar PV system acting as a UPS for our servers that can easily supply power for several hours or even days if the sun shines.
As forecasted in the last solar-power update in January, there has been a significant increase in our local power production in the last three months. While February was still a bit dark with only 66% of the power used provided by solar PV, March (92%) and April (95%) looked much better already. This will obviously stay good in the coming months until at least October or November.
If you haven't looked into getting your own small solar-system yet, don't hesitate any further. You can even get nice small portable ones to directly charge USB devices which might end up very useful to have in the case of an emergency.
🌟 New Community Highlights 🌟
We have some new communities on our instance this month, be sure to give them a visit and a sub if you find them interesting!
- [email protected] - Discussion of fruit trees, fruit forestry, fruitarianism, and all things fruit-related.
- [email protected] - Appreciation and sharing of links, resources, and culture of the smol web
- [email protected] - Discuss hopping freight trains, figuring out where trains are going, and how to get on them safely.
- [email protected] - Calls out products that fail early, use anti-repair tactics, or make you needlessly dependent.
🎊 New Lemmy Instance Highlights: Lemmini Elettrici & 50501.chat 🎉
When Lemmy was still in its infancy, the programmers offered free hosting for a year for people willing to administer a Lemmy server that would federate with them. SLRPNK.net is one of the oldest Lemmy instances due to @ex_06 taking them up on this offer. He lost interest in administration and passed the torch to @poVoq, who is primarily responsible for the stability, performance, ethos, and vibrant community it has today.
We're grateful to @ex_06 for the seed of SLRPNK.net: the name, and acting on the idea that Solarpunk is an essential part of federated social media. He has since returned to SLRPNK.net as a member, and we're grateful for the positive contributions he has added with his presence.
We're excited to announce that he has founded an new Italian Solarpunk instance: Lemmini Elettrici. Solarpunk is an international idea, and LE is the newest addition to the localized Solarpunk communities in French on JLai.lu ([email protected]) and Polish on Szmer.info ([email protected]). We're pleased to endorse his new project. If you speak Italian, we encourage you to check out the entire instance, and [email protected] specifically.
50501: 50 protests, 50 states, 1 movement (originally 1 day) is a nationwide United States grassroots activist network that coalesced over social media. Reddit is the primary forum for the movement so far, which causes problems because 1) our ongoing blackout of content from that platform, 2) the interests of Reddit's owners are counter to the interests of the movement, which incentivizes Reddit admins to abuse their power and engage in sabotage. Still, non-Reddit 50501 media has made it to [email protected], and we're eager to see the movement thrive and grow.
We hope the movement continues to spread on Reddit, but the natural primary home as a decentralized federated movement is on a decentralized federated social media ecosystem. 50501.chat is the 50501 movement's Lemmy instance, and we're excited for the potential this has for both the growth of the movement and the development of the Fediverse. We've also endorsed their instance on Fediseer. We encourage you to explore, comment, and post on 50501.chat to help it grow into greater force in the 50501 movement.
They are looking for additional moderators. If you have experience moderating communities on SLRPNK.net, your skills are very much in demand on the new instance.
With the US government's new executive order possibly leading down the road to martial law, publicly visible resistance demonstrations like 50501 are going to be more important than ever to help encourage others to also stand up, that there are hundreds of thousands of others who will join them in the fight. A large part of Nazi Germany's success in taking over the country was a lack of massive public demonstrations against the new regime, making people feel helpless and afraid to take a stand..
If you're a new member of slrpnk.net, we wrote about some other ways to prepare in a previous monthly meta post.
✊🏾 May Day! ✊
On this day, 139 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.
The mere threat of a strike of that size prompted many corporations to capitulate immediately, with as many as 45,000 workers winning an 8-hour workday overnight, a tremendous victory.
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. Groups like 50501, NoVoiceUnheard, BuildTheResistance, and many more decentralized organizations across the US (and even Canada) will be protesting the current regime in honor of our fallen from so many years past.
But 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).
Below are some resources to Unions from around the world who can help you become an organizer and form a grassroots union with your co-workers:
🗣️ 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
Movim Chat - Open to all members (use your SLRPNK login credentials)
Etherpad - Collaborative document editor
I also think the authors that have left Substack have done something admirable, and I agree we should boost their work to encourage more people to follow suit.
I notice you don't post. I encourage you to give it a try. Following the authors who have left Substack and posting their work in the appropriate communities would be a great introduction to sharing stories on the Fediverse.