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!

  • silence7@slrpnk.net
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPM
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      1 year ago

      I added a section to remind people that votes are fully public on Lemmy ;)

      I have it on my todo to write a basic environmental activists online communication guideline or to try and find a good one that we could copy into our wiki. Tips and suggestions are welcome.

      • j_roby@slrpnk.net
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        1 year ago

        You’ve got me curious now. How are votes publicly viewable here?

        I had heard that was the case on kbin, but thought that wasn’t so on lemmy. Is it just the admins that can see that, or is there a way that users can see that too?

        • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPM
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          1 year ago

          The Lemmy UI hides it, but it is all in the database of every server you federate with and it’s trivial to write a script to query this.

            • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPM
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              1 year ago

              I don’t think there is an API endpoint for it, but since anyone can spin up a small Lemmy instance and start federating, they can easily have it federate into their own database and look it up there.

              • lumpen2@slrpnk.net
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                1 year ago

                even without the visibility, the point of “etiquette” isn’t strictly that it’s enforceable it’s just stating good manners