As you likely know we are running several alternative web front ends for Lemmy. Currently they are:

• Photon
• Voyager mobile UI
• Alexandrite
• Mlmym (old.)

Of these Alexandrite and Mlmym have not been updated and maintained for more than one year now and the original authors have likely lost interest. I also assume that once we upgrade to Lemmy 1.0 they will stop working properly.

In addition I think only Photon and maybe Voyager have added support for the Piefed API, should we switch to that in the future (but it seems like Lemmy 1.0 might solve our main technical concerns with it, and the memory consumption recently got quite a bit better).

So all in all, we will probably sunset Mlmym and Alexandrite soon.

There is also a new frontend called Blorp that we could set up. It seems quite nice, but also very similar to Photon. But let me know if you are interested in using this frontend.

Edit: I was made aware of an somewhat maintained fork of Mlmym that we are now using, so that one can stay a bit longer then.

Edit2: We switched to an even better maintained mlmym fork that even plans to support the Lemmy 1.0 api v4, so I think that one should be good to keep for a while.

Final EDIT Mk2: To see this year’s stats for our instance on canvas, click here (20 slrpnk users participated, collectively placing a whopping 9188 pixels!!, that’s 3x more than our previous record, and made us the 9th most active fediverse instance on canvas this year). You can also see every pixel placed by a slrpnk user on this image here.

Final EDIT: 48 hours later, the event has come to a close. Massive thanks to everyone who participated! We really hit it out of the park this year with some fantastic pieces of art, and this is by far the largest amount we’ve drawn in our history of Canvas events.

To see the final state of the canvas without any template to get in the way, click here.

To see a complete timelapse of the event, click here.

Big thanks to the Furry community this year, who graciously let us be their neighbors, and who contributed towards our works so much in mutual aid! You all rock! ^^

And be sure to leave a comment of appreciation here to the awesome folk who created and hosted the event, it’d mean a lot to them :)

I hope you all had fun! Here’s looking forward to next year’s Canvas! :D

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Original Post (spoiler to save space)

EDIT 3: The first 24 hour time-lapse of the Canvas Event is now available to watch! Check it out here :)

EDIT 2: Looks like we’ve finished our goals already! If anyone has any other templates they want to add (I recommend Pixelorama for making them), I can pop em anywhere on the canvas as long as you’re sure they’ll fit somewhere. You can also create your own ‘team’ here to submit templates yourself, which everyone here will also be able to see (use the gear icon at the top right to create the team, then log in with it with the button next to it).

EDIT: Additional art to draw was added since we’re blazing through them!

Welcome everyone! the 2026 Canvas Event is now live, which means it’s time for us to gather together to make our mark on it!

>> Click here to go to the Canvas Page with the template already loaded! <<

Be sure that your template’s opacity is set to 50% so you can see what pixels still need to be placed. you can adjust the template opacity by clicking the settings button below your username at the top right:

For those unfamiliar with what the Canvas event is, refer to our previous planning thread here. But short version is: You can place 1 pixel every 30 seconds. You can also build up to 6 pixels to put down all at once just by waiting. !canvas@toast.ooo is the main Canvas community, where users can post and talk.

How do I join? - At the login on Canvas, use your existing Lemmy username (in my case, it would be ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net), which will prompt the website to send you a message to your Lemmy inbox with a code. Use that code along with your Lemmy username to log into the Canvas site so you can begin placing pixels.

What will we be drawing on the Canvas? - We’re going attempt to draw two three different images, one of a stylized SLRPNK logo:

This lovely image submitted by Terradragon:

An idea submitted by Vegafjord: the Indigenous peoples of the Americas’ flag for North America/Earth, which they refer to as Turtle Island.

And lastly, a .net to go after our slrpnk logo, so people know it’s a website (which I forgot to put into the original submission). I realized I could add it as its own seperate template next to our existing one, so no possibility of it messing up the positioning :)

EDIT: I edited this and changed the positioning on the template so it’s taking up less room on the canvas, and so it ensures that it stays connected to the main logo. Sorry for the extra work!

Where will we be drawing them on the Canvas? - The Furry artwork team, part of which is comprised of the Pawb.social lemmy instance, has agreed to let us create our artworks near them. You can see where we ours is planned to be in relation to theirs on this preview template map (look toward the bottom left corner): https://chocolatecakecodes.goip.de/cotemplate/ui/template/20260520-Canvas26_main

Their group has been incredibly helpful and kind, and were absolutely essential to helping us solidify our claim, as well as provide essential advice on how to use Canvas. If you have any spare pixels, consider helping out their projects in the bottom left corner as well in mutual aid. As far as I’m concerned, they’ve been absolute legends. :)

How do we begin drawing the artwork? - It’ll be best to begin with the outlines of each artwork, as that will help both stake our claim, and help us ensure the overall dimensions are right before we begin filling it in with the details.

I’ve created a set of instructions on what order to create each artwork in, progressing in 20% increments. Click each one below to expand it:

SLRPNK Logo 20% Steps:

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

Hope is Rebellion 20% Steps:

20%

40%

60%

80%

100%

We are finally moving to a better container format for our Movim instance later this week. This will hopefully fix those persistent image preview issues we started having ever since switching to the old container format that lacks an image proxy.

The instance will be probably down for an hour or so as we need to reorganize a few things with the storage and overall setup.

Your access to the XMPP server with other apps should be unaffected.

Oh and in case you didn’t notice yet, Movim recently added Discord like voice channels that you should definitely give a try 👍

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 🌟

• !spoonbreadtube@slrpnk.net - A community for sharing videos about labor issues centered on Appalachia, but almost anything that can be connected to the region is welcome (the creator is posting a great documentary that they’ve been excited to share, so be sure to check it out!)
• !solarpunktravel@slrpnk.net - Community for those focused on sustainable travel.
• !disasterresponse@slrpnk.net - Disaster response, community prepping, mutual aid… everything that can help to weather the ongoing and coming disasters (perhaps especially helpful for those experiencing a heatwave)

🌆 A quiet month 😌

Overall, June was a fairly quiet month for the instance. We did tweak the taglines mentioned in the last meta to rotate between different highlights, as all of it at once was looking a bit cluttered if viewed from a mobile browser. But otherwise, things have mostly been purring along.

For the graph enthusiasts among us (I know you’re here >_>), let’s take a quick look at the instance’s stats.

According to our fediverse.observer page, we’re continuing to see a steady flow of new users signing up, now totaling 2,369, and our Monthly Active Users (MAU) are hovering at around ± 380 users, which has been pretty consistent for a little over a year now.

📸 Meta Post Image 🎞️

This month’s artwork is Library Truck by Jacob Coffin (CC BY-ND 4.0), who is also a member here!

It depicts how a library economy might collect unwanted or unused furniture and appliances to be brought to a local warehouse and assessed and repaired, so that it can then be repurposed and given out to people in the community who need it. There’s a more detailed write-up by Jacob Coffin in the link above, for those interested. :)

It’s another image from the awesome Story Seed Library, which incidentally just concluded their their 2026 Disaster Preparedness, Response and Relief Art Collab, and we’re excited to see the submissions from it! :D

---

🔋 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 (just select do not auto-renew) or reoccurring donation via Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/F-hub.org/

Currently, F-hub.org and thus SLRPNK is receiving 63€/month in donations from 10 people, which is covering a good portion of our recurring expenses. Thanks a lot!

💬 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

🗃️ Meta Archive 📰

Our Monthly Meta posts are sometimes home to more in-depth sections written by our admins. Many of our newer members may not be familiar with some of the past guides, so for those interested, we’ve compiled a list below.

• December 2024 - How to Prepare for a Fascist Regime
• February 2025 - How to avoid Big Tech and maximize your digital security & privacy
• June 2025 - A brief guide on Security Culture & Adopting FOSS as prefiguration
• July 2025 - How to build community with fun projects!

⬛ 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!

• 🌍 Global: IWW (Français) - (Español)
• 🇦🇷 Argentina: FORA
• 🇦🇺 Australia: ASF-IWA
• 🇧🇷 Brazil: FOB
• 🇧🇬 Bulgaria: ARS, CITUB
• 🇩🇪 Germany: FAU
• 🇬🇷 Greece: ESE
• 🇮🇹 Italy: USI
• 🇳🇱 🇧🇪 Netherlands & Belgium: Vriji Bond
• 🇪🇸 Spain: CNT
• 🇸🇪 Sweden: SAC
• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: UVW

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 🌟

• !fieldrecording@slrpnk.net - Recording nature and other sounds outdoors.
• !xmpp@slrpnk.net - Discussion & News for XMPP (Jabber), a secure and decentralized chat protocol
• !documentaries@slrpnk.net - A place to post Solarpunk related documentaries (we got some good ones in there)

📣 Experiments with Taglines 📣

Lemmy has a ‘tagline’ feature which allows an admin to add some custom text or links at the top of the main page.

Inspired by how the admins of Pawb.social are using theirs, we’ve decided to experiment with implementing something similar; adding useful links to what Solarpunk is, highlighting our XMPP and the alternative frontends we host, as well as a link to our liberapay for those who’d like to support the instance.

I believe highlighting our XMPP in this way may be particularly impactful, as a surprising number of our members have told me they weren’t aware that it exists, or that they can access it without having to create a new separate account (it uses the same database that your slrpnk.net login uses, allowing you to use your existing SLRPNK username and password to access it).

If you feel it takes up too much space, we have the option to spit up the different sections and rotate through them individually when the page reloads. We’d love to your thoughts on it. :)

UPDATE: We noticed the main page was a little too busy from a mobile browser, so we opted to switch it up and rotate between the XMPP and Alternative frontend taglines to save space.

🚧 Piefed Migration Update 🚧

For those unaware, we’ve been looking into a potential future migration to Piefed, which has been discussed in previous Monthly Meta threads.

We’ve mainly been eyeing the prospect of migrating due to a persistent database bug with Lemmy which has been particularly troublesome. However, it’s quite a big task to migrate our instance with all of its comments and communities intact, and poVoq would be pioneering that endeavor, as it hasn’t been done before. It is also likely that all pictures previously uploaded to SLRPNK would not make the jump to Piefed, which is an unfortunate downside.

In the time since we considered migration, Lemmy development has begun to approach a stable 1.0 release, and with it are some changes to how it handles the database which could potentially fix the issues we’ve been experiencing. It also would bring with it some long requested quality of life features.

Due to that new development, we’ve decided to give Lemmy 1.0 a trial run to see if it resolves our issues, and reassess from there if a Piefed migration is still warranted.

📸 Meta Post Image 🎞️

The wonderful art for this month’s community discussion is Community Gardens by Daniele Turturicil (CC BY-ND 4.0). It also lets us also highlight the Story Seed Library from which it was sourced, which is a superb library of Solarpunk artwork and story ideas from which to gather inspiration for your own Solarpunk works.

(We also have a Story Seed Library community here at !storySeedLibrary@slrpnk.net)

---

🔋 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 Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/F-hub.org/

Currently, SLRPNK is receiving 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

🗃️ Meta Archive 📰

Our Monthly Meta posts are sometimes home to more in-depth sections written by our admins. Many of our newer members may not be familiar with some of the past guides, so for those interested, we’ve compiled a list below.

• December 2024 - How to Prepare for a Fascist Regime
• February 2025 - How to avoid Big Tech and maximize your digital security & privacy
• June 2025 - A brief guide on Security Culture & Adopting FOSS as prefiguration
• July 2025 - How to build community with fun projects!

⬛ 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!

• 🌍 Global: IWW (Français) - (Español)
• 🇦🇷 Argentina: FORA
• 🇦🇺 Australia: ASF-IWA
• 🇧🇷 Brazil: FOB
• 🇧🇬 Bulgaria: ARS, CITUB
• 🇩🇪 Germany: FAU
• 🇬🇷 Greece: ESE
• 🇮🇹 Italy: USI
• 🇳🇱 🇧🇪 Netherlands & Belgium: Vriji Bond
• 🇪🇸 Spain: CNT
• 🇸🇪 Sweden: SAC
• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: UVW

We will likely have a 2 hour or so down-time of our Lemmy server this coming weekend (16/17th of May).

The plan is to update the OS and finally move the database and main backend back to the original server. It should be relatively quick as we will move the NVMe drives directly instead of copying the files over.

The initial OS upgrade will only affect the Pictrs image server of our Lemmy instance, so don’t be overly surprised when the images fail to load first.

Of course fingers crossed nothing goes wrong when messing with the hardware 😅

The other services should be unaffected, but newly logging into the XMPP server will not be possible while the main Lemmy database that holds the accounts is offline.

Edit: all done I hope.

for these reasons:

• The enshittification topic is not a Solar Punk topic
• The moderator:
  • has contempt for privacy in a relatively privacy-centric forum
  • is oppressive
  • uses censorship to control the narrative and silence viewpoints
  • practices selective enforcement (censors civil comments while permitting off-topic threadcrap that reinforces the mod’s viewpoint)
  • is non-transparent (witholds specific rationale for mod actions)

It’s great to have thematic instances like slrpnk.net which are in short supply amid the ocean of general purpose nodes. It’s of course good for thematic nodes to stay close to their “constitution” (declared purpose). The relevance of tech enshittification to solar punk is a tenuous stretch and very slight at best. To keep with the theme, admins might want to consider locking the forum to prevent new threads while keeping the history of posts in reach for a while for archival purposes.

If it is decided that enshitification is fitting enough to keep, consider replacing the moderator who does not represent solar punk values. Oppressive tyrannical types are not a good representation for slrpnk.net.

After a long hiatus of security fixes only the development of Etherpad has recently taken up speed again. But it seems to be nearly fully vibe coded with the help of Anthropic Claude and the amount of new features added makes it very unlikely that there is sufficient human code review.

I bring this up because as you probably know we host an instance of it over at https://pads.slrpnk.net/

Aside from the general issues with AI assisted code development and corporate capture through closed AI models like Claude, I consider it also a security risk as the NodeJS ecosystem (Etherpad is using that) is especially vulnerable to supply-chain attacks and AI halluciations make this issue significantly worse.

So basically this means we will probably have to shut down this service soon (stopping to update it is not a good option due to the many security issues found in NodeJS packages all the time), and look for an alternative.

If you have any important collaborative documents on our Etherpad instance, it would be good to export them in the near future. Best would be probably to export it as Markdown, as most alternatives seem to use that syntax.

As for alternatives, suggestions are welcome, but I did look into other options before (Hedgedoc, Cryptpad etc.) and was not so convinced by them either.

Crossposted from https://lemmy.ml/post/46870721

This month-old instance has three communities. One is for testing and the other two are anti-trans.

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.

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🌟 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.

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🔋 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

🗃️ Meta Archive 📰

Our Monthly Meta posts are sometimes home to more in-depth sections written by our admins. Many of our newer members may not be familiar with some of the past guides, so for those interested, we’ve compiled a list below.

• December 2024 - How to Prepare for a Fascist Regime
• February 2025 - How to avoid Big Tech and maximize your digital security & privacy
• June 2025 - A brief guide on Security Culture & Adopting FOSS as prefiguration
• July 2025 - How to build community with fun projects!

⬛ 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!

• 🌍 Global: IWW (Français) - (Español)
• 🇦🇷 Argentina: FORA
• 🇦🇺 Australia: ASF-IWA
• 🇧🇷 Brazil: FOB
• 🇧🇬 Bulgaria: ARS, CITUB
• 🇩🇪 Germany: FAU
• 🇬🇷 Greece: ESE
• 🇮🇹 Italy: USI
• 🇳🇱 🇧🇪 Netherlands & Belgium: Vriji Bond
• 🇪🇸 Spain: CNT
• 🇸🇪 Sweden: SAC
• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom: UVW

Is there currently a Solarpunk community for booklovers/Solarpunk reading recommendations, etc? I came to think of it when I was going to ask around if anyone was still using book swapping sites like BookMooch and Paperback Swap, but it would be a nice place for other book discussions, too. I did use search on the communities page, and it didn’t turn up exactly what I was looking for, but there’s always the possibility that I was using the wrong search terms.

what’s wrong with slrpnk.net reaching out to hilariouschaos.com?

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.

This July, we’ll be talking about the SLRPNK Outage, the upcoming 50501 Protest, and fun projects to do with others to build community.

---

🌟 Community Highlights 🌟

• !Foraging@slrpnk.net - A new foraging community, where we come together to explore the bountiful wonders of the natural world and share our knowledge of gathering wild goods!
• !TacticalUrbanism@slrpnk.net - A community about implementing urbanist improvements Via direct action
• !Signs@slrpnk.net - A community celebrating clever and inspiring anti-fascist art at demonstrations.

🔌 The Great SLRPNK Outage of 2025 🪫

Last month, SLRPNK went offline on the 4th of June, and lasted a total of 7 days; the longest downtime since its creation.

The length of that downtime was due to multiple unexpected and unfortunate circumstances, all intersecting at once. For one, our main Sysadmin, poVoq, had taken on obligations that took him outside of the country for an extended period of time (3 months). In addition, the other sysadmins that had physical access to the server coincidentally also had taken on responsibilities or had gone on vacation, which prevented them from being able to access the server as well.

As the server seemed to be working perfectly fine for a long period of time, it didn’t seem like it would be much of a risk to leave it unattended for that duration. Unfortunately, things chose to go wrong after everyone who could attend to it, now couldn’t…

The primacy cause of the outage was a recent change in IP assignment by our ISP, in addition to what looks like an very recent bug in our firewall software (IPfire).

Previously, our ISP would assign new IP’s to us slowly, 3 times a year. But recently they have been assigning them more frequently. IPfire normally catches this, automatically changing the Dynamic DNS to the new IP, and all was dandy. However, before the trip, IPfire was updated, which introduced a new and yet unknown bug, which ultimately prevented it from automatically updating the DNS when a new IP was assigned. All other fail-safes previously put in place by poVoq to notify him of this problem also failed, which lead us to assume there was a hardware failure in the Firewall, preventing us from being able to access the server remotely.

However, a few days later, poVoq received signs of life in the form of an automated e-mail sent from the server, indicating that the it was still running, meaning something else was preventing access. They would have to find out what the new assigned IP was manually to access it.

With the help of a friend, they were able to help track down the new IP by performing a port-scan on over five hundred thousand IP’s in a subnet that was known to contain our server, narrowing it down to 20 possible IP addresses by looking for open ports that are used by XMPP servers (as we also host an XMPP chat messaging service). After trying each one, they finally hit pay dirt, and were able to log in for the first time since the outage! By the 11th of June, we were back up and running.

We’ll be taking many lessons from this event to bolster the reliability and accessibility of the server to hopefully prevent an outage of this scale from happening again, such as:

• Switching to a new and hopefully more reliable Firewall/Dynamic DNS software & adding additional out of band notifications on IP change
• Installing a KVM on the main firewall that is connected to a separate IP to make it possible to connect to it directly, giving us the ability to reboot and troubleshoot remotely even if the main connection is lost.
• Experiment with a Wireguard tunnel on a rented VPS, which could allow for a more stable connection, and could be used to host essential services like our XMPP, which would help it remain accessible even if the main server went down.

As unfortunate as this outage was, due to the efforts of poVoq and his friend, it was thankfully far, far shorter than it could’ve been, and we’re extremely grateful to have such a dedicated admin hosting our little corner of the web. Three cheers to poVoq and his friend! :D

📢 Good Trouble ✊🏿

Last month on June 14, millions took to the street in strategic non-violent protest. News about the results of past protests, and announcements of new direct actions are welcome in all of the localized communities at 50501.chat.

While protests are good for demonstrating unrest with the regime, they are also extremely potent milieus for sharing information with like-minded individuals. It is typical to find political and labor organizations distributing information from xeroxed flyers to printed newspapers. If you feel inclined, we encourage you to invite people you meet in the streets to join the Fediverse. If you come up with flyers or zines to help do this, we’d love it if you shared it in this month’s meta to help others do the same.

John Lewis was a civil rights leader who eventually transitioned to become a United States politician. He is famous for saying, “Speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.” This July 17th, organizations across the world are mobilizing for a sequel to the wildly successful “No Kings” protest, called “Good Trouble Lives On” in honor of the five-year anniversary of John Lewis’ death of cancer at 80 years old.

While this protest movement is nominally for the United States, the trend towards authoritarianism as the climate crisis worsens is a world problem. Mobilizations have already been announced in Florence and Dublin. This is not a ‘US’ problem, it’s an ‘us’ problem. If we hope to push back authoritarianism, we must do it together through solidarity. The signs in the streets remind us that we are part of a world-wide resistance movement - from Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s imperialism, Palestine’s struggle to be free from the tyranny of the IDF, to the barricades that just went up recently in Belgrade, Serbia. We are all connected.

🛠 Fun Projects to Build Community 👩🏾‍🏭

Meeting your neighbors, fostering goodwill, and having a real sense of community is a powerful thing. It’s the main building block that all other actions we have in our arsenal rely upon. Without it, we’re far less able to build the vision we all share of a more hopeful future, and less capable to resist the darker visions others have for us.

With summer here and hopefully some good weather gracing a good amount of us, now’s the time to bust out some tools (maybe from your local library if they have a tool section!), gather some friends, heed the primal call, and do some solarpunk style community building with direct action!

In the clickable drop-down below are a few ideas to get started. I’m hoping more of you chime in with your own in the comments as well! :D

🔽 Community Projects🔽

• First off, seek out a local group already engaging in mutual aid in your area. That could take the form of a Food Not Bombs chapter, a local Anarchist group, or even a progressive church if you’re in a more rural area and that’s all that’s around. This is possibly the best method to meet like-minded folk who you can befriend, and who will already be open to the idea of fostering and building community with you, and might even join in on some of these other projects!
• If know of an area near you where food security is an issue, building a community fridge is a great way to alleviate that while also fostering a sense of community.
• If you have a front yard, that could be a great place to create a small community garden that your friends and neighbors could partake in with you! But If you live in an HOA which doesn’t allow that, it might be worth considering reaching out to receptive neighbors and collectively joining the HOA board to change the rules. Alternatively, if you can manage to find a larger piece of land to, that would be ripe for a larger collective community garden. Garden’s like these are incredibly powerful community building tools, and could also be a main source of food to stock your community fridge with!
• Little Free Libraries are a great way to spread goodwill with your neighbors, and encourage kids in your neighborhood to read. It’s also a good place stock with cool zines! (Check out our zines community at !zines@slrpnk.net for info on how to make them and other ideas)
• Engage in some Guerilla Gardening! It’s not only fun to do with friends, but (over time) can create green spaces with lots of shade, or even become a food forest, which can be a gathering place for your community to hang out and connect (and that shade will be critical to making climate change a little more bearable too). Just be sure to use native species in your area! They’re already adapted to your local climate, and won’t out compete with other native plants. Do your research!

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🗣️ 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

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.

This June, we’ll be discussing Security Culture, as well as the importance of Free & Open-Source Software in building the world we want to live in. And let’s give a shoutout to Pride Month of course! 🏳️‍🌈

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🌟 Community Highlights 🌟

!Cooperatives@slrpnk.net - All things about democratic businesses that serve their communities first

!Zines@slrpnk.net - A place to share tiny, self-published texts (usually small printable magazines)

!Abc@slrpnk.net - News about incarcerated anarchists & resources for prisoner support.

🏳️‍🌈 The First Pride was a Riot ✊

The month of June is widely celebrated as Pride Month because of the Stonewall Inn riot on June 28, 1969. Just yesterday, videos are spreading across the internet of an ICE Raid on the Buona Forchetta restaurant was pushed back by a crowd of San Diego’s South Park residents. It’s important to reflect on the lasting systemic change that can be achieved through community cohesion and spontaneous revolt.

As transgender people are currently being specifically targeted by the current fascist wave, I’d like to draw attention to Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera - two prominent participants in the Stonewall Riot that created Pride. Pride has always been and must always be trans-inclusive. Attacks on transgender people are an attack on our communities, and if the attacks succeed, other sections of the queer community will soon follow.

To all our fellow solarpunks, happy Pride!

🤐 Security Culture 🛡️

Sometimes benign seeming efforts can turn into unexpected personal data collecting traps. Like an obscure website for exchanging contact info with other students turning into a global ad-tech surveillance network (Facebook), or innocent seeming online personality tests being use to harvest character profiles. Even Etsy, Reddit, Tinder, and Duolingo are feeding information to US Government Agencies like ICE.

Security culture is commonly used to describe the general awareness of such potential traps and how it can affect groups or entire communities. This goes beyond mere individual privacy efforts, as without joint efforts these often fail to work.

Especially in activist circles, security culture is paramount. For opsec reasons not everyone in the group might be aware of what clandestine efforts others are involved in, but with a general security culture many potential data leaks can be avoided.

Movements are made by the volume of their participants, and the easier and less dangerous it is to participate, the more people will get involved. As more people get involved, individual involvement becomes even less dangerous, creating a virtuous cycle.

Perhaps you, dear Solarpunk reader, could help boost that cycle by sharing your own examples of best practices, lessons learned, or traps to watch out for online in the comments below. Security culture is a collective effort, so our best defense is sharing our knowledge with others!

We’ll start it off with some

General Advice

• Mentally wall off personal uniquely identifying info from your online presence, actively build a habit of opsec so that withholding information is your default mental state
• Be careful about who you meet online
• Use different, unrelated usernames, passwords & emails for every account. And try not to connect to those accounts with your real IP address (use Tor or a VPN)
• Be mindful that anything done online leaves a trail
• agents provocateurs may seek to find patsies willing to perform an ill-advised illegal activity in order to legitimize police repression. If someone is trying to pressure you, especially if you don’t have a long and proven history with them, be extremely wary.

But we’re excited to see what ideas, suggestions and advice you may have for safer patterns of behavior to use online. :)

💽 Free & Open-Source Software as Praxis 🖥️

I think it’s safe to assume most of us grew up surrounded by proprietary software, it was simply what software was. Normal. Cozy. Familiar.

Our current reality is anything but normal, with our lives dominated by exploitative, invasive, insecure software, and much of it damned difficult to escape after dedicating years or even decades to committing it to muscle memory. But part of being a solarpunk is choosing to stare the failings of our society in the face and saying “No more. There has to be a better way.” Despite how difficult it may be to change our current habits.

Free & Open-Source Software (FOSS) is a candle in the dark, and luckily for us has never burned brighter than today. It gives us a pure example of mutual aid in action, built with the cooperation of tens of thousands of individuals who offer their work, often for free, to all who wish to use or build upon it. We won’t be able to achieve a solarpunk future without it, and any victory it achieves is a tangible step toward prefiguring the world toward our shared vision.

So how can we help it along its way? The first step is to use it! Let’s give some examples of alternatives to popular software you may use or even rely upon (click the spoiler below to expand it):

🔽 FOSS Alternatives 🔽

🚫 Proprietary	✅ FOSS	🌐 Links
WIndows & MacOS	Linux - Perhaps the most essential piece of software to switch to to avoid extreme surveillance with the addition of Recall in Windows, making it a huge liability if you’re an activist of any kind, or even anyone you talk to who also uses Windows 11, as it’ll be recording on their end as well. Linux Mint is the most beginner friendly version of Linux, and it’s what I’ll be recommending and link to.	Linux Mint Website & Installation Tutorial
Google Android	GrapheneOS & LineageOS - GrapheneOS is only available for Google Pixel Phones, but it’s the most secure option. LineageOS is available to a much wider variety of phones.	GrapheneOS Website & LineageOS Website & Tutorial
Google Maps	CoMaps - Currently in the process of forking from Organic Maps, but should become the premier alternative soon, so keep an eye out for its release	CoMaps Website
Google Chrome	LibreWolf - A security and privacy focused version of Firefox. Can sometimes break websites, so have an install of Firefox too!	LibreWolf Website
Adobe Photoshop	Krita - with the recent addition of the G’mic Toolset which adds powerful features like Content Aware Fill and Crop Assist, it can serve admirably as a Photoshop replacement, especially if you enable the Photoshop shortcuts!	Krita Website & Tutorial
Adobe Premiere	Kdenlive - not quite 1-to-1 in a professional sense, but with the use of Proxy Clips, should cover most people’s needs.	Kdenlive Website & Tutorial
Adobe Illustrator	Inkscape - Excellent vector art editor that even does things Adobe Illustrator can’t.	Inkscape Website & Tutorial
Paint.NET	Pinta	Pinta Website
Obsidian Notes	TrilliumNext Notes	TrilliumNext Github & Brief Overview
Scrivener	NovelWriter - A bit different since it uses Markdown instead of being a WYSIWYG editor, but mimics most of the functionality of Scrivener in other ways. Very stable and well made app.	NovelWriter Website & Tutorial

Alright, so now we’re using some sweet FOSS stuff, but if we want the whole ecosystem to improve or gain more adoption even faster, here’s what else we can do to help:

1. If you’re financially able to, seriously consider donating to the projects you use! Most are almost entirely reliant on user contributions to support themselves, meaning you’d have a big impact even with a small donation!
2. Contribute to projects directly with your fancy skills: Most projects would be elated by volunteers capable of translating documentation or apps into different languages, contributing code, or even just providing good bug reports.
3. Spread the word! Show your circle how well these alternatives work, make cool stuff with it, and mention what you used if you share it around to help prove that it’s a viable alternative.

We’re likely at a critical crossroads in history as we tackle the polycrisis that’s encroaching into our lives more each year. If we’re to successfully tackle them and free ourselves from the grip that is our current system of exploitation and domination, we’ll need to preconfigure as much of the world as we can, as quickly as we can. FOSS is a foundational component of that preparation, without which we expose ourselves to the likely possibility of our tools betraying us, derailing our attempts before they have a chance to gain a foothold.

If you’re able to set aside an afternoon, I implore you to try out these alternatives with the hopes of switching over. There is nothing they fear more.

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🗣️ 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