I dont know why? I didnt post anything there.

When someone has the blue OP or green M or red A by their username, hovering over the icon shows what it means, but this is not the case for the red shield. What does it mean?

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 a 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:

• 🌍 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

🗣️ 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

Something broke. I think there was no problem when I last visited a couple days ago. Today all posts have only a down arrow for the spillover actions, no icons. If I move the mouse above where the icons /should/ be, the pointer turns into a finger. So the actions are still available but just invisible.

(edit) when I use Firefox and enable displaying images, only then can I see icons. I normally use Ungoogled Chromium with images disabled (images dramatically increase my Internet costs). So I wonder if someone tried to get fancy and install images instead of icons from fonts.

I get "Instance is not registered" when trying to look up a local community here:

https://lemmy-federate.com/

Is there a reason that slrpnk.net is not listed?

Anyone else running into this issue?

The following was an April Fool's Joke:

Greetings shareholders! Every month we hold a meeting where we discuss the health of the company and demonstrate that we are actively seeking to grow the pecuniary value of your investment. We make numbers go up by leveraging weakness in the institutions whose contributions have a positive effect on metrics of health, stability, and world happiness. At SLRPNK, we pride ourselves at being "disruptors," by which I obviously mean we disrupt the moral and ethical norms that apologists for capitalism believe binds its capacity for harm, and do so in search of new sources of short-term profit.

Welcome SLRPNK.net's new Sponsor: NeoNicotineXt

We're excited to juice our 2nd quarter stock price with this big announcement: SLRPNK has a new advertising partner!

NeoNicotineXt (N-NeXt) is the newest generation of sythetic-nicotine-based pesticide, following the footsteps of imidacloprid, clothianidin, and thiamethoxam. These neonicotinoid products are extremely addictive to farmers because they are so effective at killing non-mammal animals that interact with treated plants, are inexpensive, and extremely easy to use. Neonicotinoids, or neonics, can be sprayed at the base of a stalk or tree, and the plant will become toxic to not only invertebrates like aphids, worms, and honeybees, but birds and fish as well. N-NeXt contains the deadly chemical group common to other neonics, but is enhanced with the same surfactants used in Roundup that were also catastrophic to local ecosystems.

This is likely to be a long and lucrative partnership. If you're familiar with pesticide history, Roundup was put on the market in 1974, but it wasn't until 2018 when all of the cancer lawsuits caused the stock to tank. Neonics first came out in the 1990s, and several new neonics formulations come to market every decade, making cause and effect determinations not legally actionable. Ecosystem collapse is much more difficult than cancer to pin on a single cause, and woodland creatures don't hire lawyers. With environmental protection agencies gutted all over the world, N-NeXt is cleared to hit record profits for several decades.

But let's be clear, neonics do play a major role in ecosystem collapse not only by poisoning the soil and water, killing insects, birds, and fish indiscriminately, but also by extinguishing the food source for birds, fish, and mammals. Neonics are particularly lethal to honeybees, who are responsible for pollinating 80% of all flowering plants. This new stuff is formulated to take out even bats, so N-NeXt can wipe 99% of natural pollinators. Eating an apple from a tree sprayed with N-NeXt gives the same nicotine dosage as smoking a pack of cigarettes. But growing semi-edible food is an unintended side-effect of this product. First and foremost, N-NeXt was designed from the ground up to sap the foundations of ecosystems and drive complex life to extinction. This is great news -- the marketing droids at N-NeXt claim the impotent outrage of environmentalists is a key feature in in getting the word out to industrial farm purchasing departments that N-NeXt is the most effective neonic on the market.

Naturally, this is super bad news for people who expect edible fruit to magically appear on trees. We don't need trees, pick fruit from a supermarket shelf like a normal person. Capitalism depends on exponential growth, and exponential growth can't continue forever. It was only a matter of time before it consumed all of the natural world. If we didn't do it, somebody else would.

Most people have an easier time imagining the end of the world than the end of capitalism. That lack of imagination is the foundation of our wealth. Wouldn't it be embarrassing if there was a political alternative that didn't end in human extinction? But if capitalism ends the world, who will be left to judge us?

Introducing NeoNiko, the Dead HoneyBee!

NeoNiko is N-NeXt's cute and cuddly mascot, to let everyone know that N-NeXt's formulation of neonicotinoid is the best at killing pollinators. We're adding NeoNiko to some of SLRPNK's branding to celebrate our partnership.

The art is simple and iconic, and naturally N-NeXt will sue anyone for copyright infringement who adapts it, memes it, and shares it in an unflattering context. So please do not do anything creative with the N-NeXt corporate logo, mascot, or marketing message.

💹 Adding Value to SLRPNK.net (by extracting it like the infinite natural resource it is)🫰

We've noticed that the SLRPNK userbase has been growing at an exponential rate, which got our investors almost as excited as that time a Corporate militia opened fire on striking miners during the Ludlow Massacre!

In collaboration with N-NeXt, we've devised new ways of creating unprecedented value and features for you, the user, while ensuring we remain mindful of every income level, because we care.

We're proud to announce a new and exciting way of interacting with the site based around an easily understandable (and exploitable 🤤) tiered monthly subscription, which happens to require the use of our new Neoni-kions™, available for purchase NOW in oddly indivisible bundles of 11, 33, or 66, ensuring you'll always have a fun little remainder no matter how you spend them, which we're really excited about!

At the 10 Neoni-koins/month 'Poser' Tier, you'll unlock these incredible (previously entirely free) perks:

• View up to 100 posts per day (posts with images count as 2 posts viewed)
• Subscribe to up to 10 communities
• Downvote up to 50 posts/comments per day
• Create up to 1 post per week
• Pre-register a response or comment, which will unlock and initiate automatically when you up your monthly Token amount to the next tier

At 25 Neoni-koins/month 'Do You Even Care?' Tier, you'll get:

• Comments unlocked! You can now leave a comment or reply, up to 5 times per day
• View up to 300 posts per day
• Subscribe to up to 30 communities
• Downvote up to 250 posts/comments per day
• Create up to 5 posts per week

Finally, at the 100 Neoni-koins/month 'Yeah, That's What I Thought 😤' Tier:

• Upvotes Unlocked! 🤘 You can now spread goodwill instead of just bringing others down, available exclusively for our most dedicated punks (Limit 10 per day)
• Unlimited Post Views! 🥵
• Unlimited Subscriptions! 😱
• Unlimited Downvotes! 😈
• Unlimited Posts & Comments! 🤯

We know you'll love these changes, because our focus group designed to extract as much value as possible without completely scaring you away told us so! On the wildly unlikely chance you have any concerns, check out this sweet pie chart of our projected profits:

But if you're still worried, then by all means, feel free to send us a DM explaining your thoughts and suggestions on how we can improve. Any DM will automatically be printed in our corporate high rise office on the finest unethically sourced paper we could find, where it will fall, still warm from printing, directly into a conveniently placed paper shredder below. Your opinions matter to us. ☺️

^20%^ ^of^ ^proceeds^ ^from^ ^Neoni-kions^ ^are^ ^automatically^ ^invested^ ^in^ ^industries^ ^supporting,^ ^and^ ^not^ ^limited^ ^to:^ ^Deforestation,^ ^Oil^ ^Drilling,^ ^Industrial^ ^Livestock^ ^Farming,^ ^and^ ^other^ ^Common^ ^Sense^ ^initiatives.^

SLRPNK Community Resources (soon to be paywalled):

Community Wiki

Movim Chat - Open to all members (use your SLRPNK login credentials)

Etherpad - Collabrative document editor

NeoNicotineXt does not exist as a corporate entity or product, though neonicotinoids do and are no joke. Art for NeoNiko and Neoni-koins are original, not owned by any corporation, and are licensed as CC-0 / public domain by the artist.

You're welcome to discuss any topic related to this community, our infrastructure, or the Fediverse at large. If you’ve created a new community, this is a great thread to tell us about it. All comments will get extra visibility up until the beginning of next month.

Slrpnk and lemmy are great, and I understand they are volunteer driven. With this post I don't mean to be pushy, and I'm grateful for this place and the software, but I hope it's useful to point out where there might be trouble for users down the line:

So I might be missing something, but there seems to be no way to delete a private message, not even after reporting it. Given the nasty things some people may send just to mess with somebody, this seems like a dangerous omission to me that is at a high risk to lead to grief if not addressed at some point. Is there some bug tracker where perhaps this omission could be best pointed out?

My apologies if I'm missing something however. Perhaps I'm just too silly to see the button, it's happened before.

There seems to be some technical problem when trying to subscribe to other instances, unless it's simply me doing something wrong.

Here is what I tried to do:

1. Open https://lemmy.ml/c/librewolf
2. Click "Subscribe"
3. Enter "slrpnk.net" and press "Fetch community"
4. You should get redirected to https://slrpnk.net/activitypub/externalInteraction?uri=https%3A%2F%2Flemmy.ml%2Fc%2Flibrewolf but for me that simply shows "Server error"

Did I do it the wrong way? It seems like there might be a bug here.

Every 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.

With spring right around the corner, let's see what March brings us.

🛠️ Technical updates 📡

There is some necessary database maintenance that will cause a few hours of down-time that we previously announced but ended up postponing. We will likely do it this month though. Subscribe to our meta community for the latest updates on that and any other instance specific news.

We also postponed hiding the bot repost communities as this somewhat hidden and undocumented feature of Lemmy is hard to use and the Lemmy devs seem to have some upcoming changes to that. So lets see what happens regarding this, but we still plan to do it eventually.

⚡ Solar-powered servers ☀️

After a rather grey January at out server location, February has started to become a bit more sunny again. So last month 58% of the total electricity needs of the small data-center that SLRPNK runs on have been covered by local solar power (up from 36% in January). Especially the last days of February have been productive, so March will hopefully get us back into the 70-80%.

The additional grid-power was mostly wind and geothermal energy and these figures include the total electricity usage on the site, not only those strictly for the server that this Lemmy instance runs on.

🌟 A bit of fun 🌟

We should be posting this in our resident [email protected] community, but it'd be equally interesting as a topic here; Have you read any interesting solarpunk or punk adjacent fiction lately? If so, please share it in the comments! I imagine many of us would appreciate the mental reprieve it would provide (myself included).

To start it off, I recently read "The New Saharan Energy Company, Annual Report 2058” by David McGillveray in the November/December issue of Analog Magazine (one of the few remaining sci-fi magazines still physically printed, with a lineage tracing back to the pulps) It's more of a punk-adjacent short story, along the lines of Climate fiction, and I found it to be quite a well crafted little tale.

In addition to stories or books, we'd also be interested to hear of any solarpunk games you might've played, and what you thought of them!

In that vein, Half-Earth Socialism is a fun little browser game about saving the world from climate change in a post-revolution world. It can be quite tricky to get the good endings, but you'll likely have as much fun trying to get there as you do succeeding.

🌱 Hold a trowel aloft! 👨‍🌾

Some of our members have been busy sharing interesting resources about growing some of your own food. Check out for example Balcony gardening. It's not difficult and almost anyone can do it! For more advanced topics, there is also the Solarpunk farming and Hydroponics communities.

🗣️ 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 - Collabrative document editor

Not sure whats the bottleneck but lately its been pretty slow to open comments on posts from other instances

Each month, we write up a post for the instance to keep you up to date on the happenings going on, recent events, to give a spotlight to new communities, share knowledge, and provide a place to discuss as a town square!

February. Good 'ol Feb. It's here now, and it won't be leavin' for a whole month (hopefully on good terms), so let's put our best foot forward and hope it will return our courtesy.

Last month was a bit of a doozy, both on a global scale and for the instance itself (more on that below). This month, we'll be tackling how our members can become a bit safer in this increasingly worrying world.

Let's get into it!

⛔ Pushing Back Against Big Tech 🧿

Big Tech and mainstream social media have been a negative influence on society for quite some time, but this January has shown us just how complicit they've become in the rise of fascism around the globe, which only underlines the extreme importance of replacing it with federated, Citizen Controlled Media.

In an effort to limit big tech's spread into the fediverse, we are planning to hide posts from the Lemmit bot and similar repost bots from showing up in the 'All' feed of SLRPNK. If you were subscribed to a community populated by such a bot, you should still see new posts in your Home feed, however.

To our moderators on SLRPNK: If you would like to join in on depriving big tech of engagement, ad-revenue, and userbase, we would suggest adding a rule against posting or commenting links to traditional social media (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, etc) in your communities.

🌟 Community Highlights 🌟

In spirit with the previous segment, @Spaduf has created a community dedicated to coordinating and sharing ideas on how to migrate users from traditional social media to the Fediverse. If that sounds like something you'd like to lend a hand to, be sure to check out [email protected]

@Hono4kami created a [email protected], a community dedicated to everything public transport related (and I do quite like trains. God I wish we had more trains in the US. Jealous of you, Europe)

@poVoq created [email protected], a place to discuss Alternative payments methods, regional currencies, community banking, and even Modern Monetary Theory in a Solarpunk context, safe from Crypto-bros.

🖥️ Technical Difficulties 🧑‍💻

You might have notices some intermittent downtime at the end of last month that is hopefully fixed now. The reason was a hardware migration that went badly and had to be partially reverted.

Longer term members are likely aware already that SLRPNK is hosted in a so called "homelab" using repurposed older server hardware and running off a solar panel array since last October. Originally it was running on a shared server with other services hosted by f-hub.org, but after the large Reddit migration in 2023 this was quickly becoming too taxing and we tried switching to some dedicated hardware that was available at the time. This older Xeon (from 2012 with an aftermarket Chinese mainboard) served us well for quite some time, however it was both relatively power hungry and a bit unstable causing unexpected random reboots that often broke the account integration between our Lemmy and XMPP server. And it didn't really get better over time...

At the end of 2024, a new opportunity came up to cheaply acquire some refurbished enterprise server mainboard with a faster CPU and DDR4 RAM and the plan was made to migrate several services including our Lemmy instance to it as sharing a faster server is ultimately more power efficient then running several smaller ones. This new hardware seemed to run fine in initial tests and so we attempted to migrate our Lemmy instance to it as the first test case. After migrating everything, the first thing that happened was the PSU in the server giving out (with a big puff and smoke) and about 24h after swapping the PSU, the server crashed with some very odd issues related to the NVMe SSDs' PCIe bus connection. After an entire day of troubleshooting and having to revert to an older backup due to database corruption issues (yay the backups work!), it was ultimately decided to at least temporarily revert to an older but known to be stable mainboard & CPU for the Lemmy instance alone.

We still plan to do some more testing with the new server, but to avoid further stability issues the Lemmy instance will likely stay on the current older system at least some months. Performance wise it seems to hold up, but we will monitor this and might have to think about other options as well.

🕵️ Digital Camouflage 101 🫆

This section could be useful for anyone, but it could be particularly useful to those residing in countries where fascism seems to be on the rise. As an example if we consider who now controls the entire surveillance apparatus (PRISM), it's not inconceivable that your online activities could be used against you, depending on how far this whole thing goes.

Saying that, this guide will only be so effective. If you become a person of particular interest, it is quite difficult to achieve complete security or privacy from such forces without extreme measures. What you can reasonably expect after following this guide is a pretty solid reduction in data that corporations can harvest from you, and a sort of 'heat reduction', or digital camouflage effect that should make it more difficult for you to become a person of particular interest in the first place (if you're not already).

We'll begin by breaking up the guide into different steps corresponding to the level of difficulty or inconvenience it incurs relative to its benefits.

Step 1: The low hanging fruit (no inconvenience, helps prevent surveillance capitalism)

The easiest first step is filtering the invisible trackers placed on your computer as you explore the internet. uBlock Origin is the most popular and trustworthy adblocker, and is also extremely effective at improving your digital privacy. Using it not only makes the internet far more enjoyable to use; it's trivial to install as well.

If you're using a Chrome based browser, you'll have to use Ublock Origin Lite instead, which isn't as capable as the regular version, but is certainly better than nothing.

If you're using an iPhone, you'll unfortunately be restricted to using AdGuard.

Next, if you're not using a VPN, it's recommended to switch to using Mullvad's DNS over HTTPS, which will encrypt your DNS inquires. You can refer to this guide on how to implement it in your browser.

Finally, switch to using a more private search engine, like DuckDuckGo, Startpage, or Brave Search instead of Google or Bing.

Downloads:

• Ublock Origin Download
• Adguard Download

Step 2: A smidge of effort (mild inconvenience, helps prevent surveillance capitalism)

These recommendations require slightly more involvement from you, but not much. First, we'd recommend using a hardened browser that has more stringent privacy policies already in place.

Browsers:

On Desktop, Librewolf is a good choice as a main everyday browser. If you tend to use a decent amount of browser add-ons, this is the one to add them to. Though bear in mind every additional addon you install increases your digital 'fingerprint', which makes it easier to identify you based on how uniquely configured your browser is. If you are having issues accessing websites you trust, you can add exceptions to the "Advanced Tracking Protection" in the privacy settings of Librewolf. For example our Movim likely requires this.

I'd also recommend having The Mullvad Browser as a second, more secure browser that you leave untouched, with no additional add-ons or tweaks. This will help minimize your fingerprint, letting you blend in with other web traffic. If combined with a VPN, this browser can even act as sort've Tor-lite, but we'll come back to that aspect later.

On Android, I'd recommend the Fennec browser from the F-droid store, or standard Firefox with Ublock Origin installed.

For iOS, your options are once again limited. Of the ones available, Brave is likely your best choice.

You can test to see how badly your current browser fingerprints you compared to one of these hardened ones by using the EFF's Cover Your Tracks test.

Communications:

Using Encrypted communications between you and your friends is quite integral in limiting how much can be gathered on you. XMPP, a federated messaging protocol, is a good choice. Our sysadmin poVoq hosts an XMPP server that any SLRPNK member can log into using their existing Lemmy login, and can be accessed from any browser using Movim, or from any dedicated XMPP app. On JoinJabber.org you can find an overview of the recommended clients/apps for XMPP.

Other reasonably secure choices are Signal (maybe using the Molly fork), Matrix and SimpleX.

For Email, consider switching to a private host, such as:

• Tuta - Offers free tier and premium tiers
• Posteo - Only costs $1 a month
• Mailbox.org - Starts at $1 a month, upper teirs allow custom domains
• Disroot - Free, with custom domains available to those who make a one time donation

However, Email in general is not very secure and should not be used for sensitive communication. Using a private hosting service really only protects you from corporate data harvesting for ads.

Downloads:

• Librewolf Browser (Desktop)

• Mullvad Browser

• F-Droid Store (Android)

• Brave Browser (iOS)

• XMPP Messenger Apps (All platforms)

• Signal Messenger (All platforms)

• Molly (Hardened Signal Fork (Android)

• Matrix Element Chat (All platforms)

• SimpleX Chat (All platforms)

Step 3: We're getting there (kinda inconvenient, can make you semi-anonymous)

In the previous two steps, we focused entirely on preventing corporations from being able to track you as easily, but you would still have been surfing the internet with your real IP address, and thus, the websites you visit would still be known by your ISP, and the websites themselves would see who you are as well. In this step, we'll be focusing on how to be somewhat anonymous.

Operating System:

First, switching your operating system to a more secure and private one is highly recommended. Proprietary operating systems can have government backdoors and be infesting with surveillance capitalism.

On Desktop, switching from Windows to Linux is highly recommended. A good easy to use Linux Distro is Linux Mint, but if you're a bit more tech-savvy and/or have very new hardware, Fedora is a great option too.

On Android, GrapheneOS is the most secure and private option, but the downside is it only supports Google Pixel phones/tablets. If you're in the market for a new phone, I would recommend prioritizing a pixel purely for access to GrapheneOS. Otherwise, there is:

• Calyx OS, which supports Google Pixels, Fairphones, and 3 Motorola G series phones
• LineageOS, which supports a much wider range of phones, but features the least security/privacy features, mostly acting as a way to remove Google from your phone.

On iPhone, iOS users are shit outta luck, as Apple does not allow you to flash your phone with a different OS.

VPN:

Next, you'll want to consider using a VPN. These will mask your IP address and make it much more difficult to track who you are as you browse the web, both to your ISP and the websites themselves (unless you log in).

There aren't many trustworthy VPN's, which makes the list small.

1. Mullvad VPN: The premier option. It costs $5 a month to access.
2. Proton VPN: After the CEO's recent comments about Trump, I'm not as hyped on this one, but they do offer a free option, which may be worth considering if you're on a budget.
3. Rise-up and Calyx VPN: These are two free options ran by activists. The downside is they run very few servers, so they tend to be quite slow.

Note: If you use a VPN, you may want to disable Mullvad's DNS in your browsers, as it won't really be doing anything at that point, and would just slow things down.

There are some things to keep in mind when using a VPN: Don't visit high-security sites, or places where you might get banned/blocked for using a VPN IP Address out of suspicion, such as banking websites.

Using a VPN for privacy means you must trust that they do not keep logs, but it's not a silver bullet even if they don't. It's possible a government entity could force them to secretly log specific users, as happend with Proton mail. Do not assume you are truly anonymous with a VPN, and act accordingly.

Downloads for Step 3:

• Linux Mint (Desktop)
• Fedora (Desktop)
• GrapheneOS (Android)
• CalyxOS (Android)
• LineageOS (Android)

Step 4: Hardcore (Inconvenient, provides almost complete anonymity, even from state actors)

At this point, you're looking for nearly complete anonymity no matter the cost. This is where we break out the big guns.

Tor:

Tor is one of the most secure and private networks available. If you ever hear reports of your local government jailing socialists or anarchists without cause, Tor is where you'll want to head for safety (though ideally you'd be using it before it comes to that). The reason you may not opt to use it before then is: it's a bit slow, and many sites will block the Tor network.

There are a few ways to use it; from the Tor browser, or if on a phone, used like a system-wide VPN with Orbot.

To avoid drawing attention from your ISP for using the Tor network, it's recommended you use a Tor Bridge, which masks your usage of Tor behind a non-tor relay, making your traffic appear ot be on the normal-net.

Tails OS:

For absolute security, you may want to use Tails OS, a version of Linux that is designed to not leave any trace of what your previous activity after it shuts down. It's not something you would use as a daily driver, it's only useful for temporary use where utmost security is needed.

Simless Phone:

It's been known that in addition to whatever apps you install on your phone that invade your privacy, your cell phone carrier tracks you as well. We suggest life without a SIM card, which is much easier now with ubiquitous WiFi and inexpensive jailbroken and rooted cell phones.

Old Vehicle:

Modern vehicles collect a mindboggling amount of date on you, including GPS tracking, acceleration data, contacts and text messages from your phone if you sync it with the car, and even video recordings. To avoid this, you'll either need to find a way to disable the trackers in your car (which can be done sometimes, but is unique to each car), or specifically seek out an older vehicle that was made before data gathering of that nature was technically feasible. You'll have to research each model of car individually, but as a starting point, cars from before 2008 tend to have limited tracking ability. A second or third generation Toyota Prius would likely be your best option. Avoid cars with built-in GPS or wifi capabilities.

Car-sharing can help to make the data less personalized, and you can also consider switching to public transport or a bicycle.

Faraday Bag:

To ensure your phone is not able to track your movements, you may want to consider placing it inside a faraday cage bag, which will completely isolate it from recieving or sending wireless transmissions. The downside of this is that it means you cannot receive any texts or calls while inside the bag. This is obviously pretty inconvienent, but there may be times where this trade-off is worth it. A DIY bag made of Tinfoil or a fully enclosed metal box can also work as a faraday cage, if sealed completely.

Downloads:

• Tor Browser (All platforms)
• Orbot (Mobile)

That concludes Digital Camouflage 101. But remember, no matter what, computers cannot be trusted to be completely secure, so always use appropriate caution, even if you followed every step in this guide.

🗣️ Open Discussion 🗪

As we witness the rise of fascism across the globe, it's important to remember that the most powerful thing we can do to fight it is by getting involved in local communities of likeminded folk. Invidiaully there is little we can do, but collectively, we can resist this. Never forget that.

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 :)

Stay safe out there, Solarpunks.

SLRPNK Community Resources:

• Community Wiki
• Movim Chat - Open to all members (use your SLRPNK login credentials)
• Etherpad - Collabrative document editor

We are planning to swap out some components on the server running this Lemmy instance to see if that solves the stability issues we are seeing lately.

This will result in 2-3 hours downtime sometimes this weekend assuming everything goes according to plan.

Edit: Postponed to Monday morning (hopefully).

Edit: Was finally done on Tuesday afternoon 🫠

This thread was inappropriately censored by either @[email protected] or @[email protected] claiming:

“Reason: Reason: Literally the opposite of anti-work is "over employment" which OP is arguing for”

There is an English comprehension problem by the mod. Would someone whose first language is English please:

1. notice that over employment is actually the problem that the thread’s thesis seeks remedies for. Being forced into a full-time or nothing ultamatim is a very common problem that oppresses anti-work proponents. It’s the single most common problem we face. Appalling that a mod would block the discussion.
2. undo the improper mod action

The mod’s action to suppress is actually a pro-work action, as it prevents discussion around solutions to over-employment.

This started a couple days ago. I tried clearing the browser cache, which did not change the behavior. The counts show up normally in the Lemmy UI. My slrpnk account is my only Lemmy account so I have no visibility as to whether this is an issue on other instances.

Every month, we post an update on the happenings of the instance, as well as provide a sort of town square to share news and happenings in your own life.

With January comes a new year, and this time even a new quarter-century! While the last year brought with it many things to grumble about (to put it mildly), this new year brings new hopes as well; China's emissions could peak this year due to solar installations being constructed at an unprecedented scale, The fall of Assad's regime may bring a reprieve for Rojava, Unions are forming and growing at a rate we haven't seen in decades across the globe, and mutual aid organizations are experiencing an influx of new people looking to help due to recent events.

So let us face this new year together, and continue to build up, piece by piece and no matter how small, the world we want to live in.

📡 Technical updates 📡

Not much to report for technical updates, other that we updated to Lemmy version 0.19.8 last month. For the coming month we plan an update to our Movim enabling so called "stories", a form of time limited micro-blog popular on some other messengers.

Due to various reasons, we didn't finish the prototype donation page yet, but it will be available soon. Due to the high amount of submissions we also did not yet hear back from Nlnet if our grant application for adding GNU Taler donation support has been successful or not.

⚡Solar-powered servers ☀️

Last month has been again rather rainy and cold at out server location, therefore only 41% of the total electricity needs could be covered by the solar panels we installed in early October. The average over the last three months was 50%, which isn't too bad considering that these were all unusually rainy winter months. The additional grid-power was mostly wind and geothermal energy. It should be noted that these figures include the total electricity usage on the site, not only those strictly for the server that this Lemmy instance runs on.

🗣️ Open Discussion 🗪

Remember, this post is also a place for you! If you have something to share, a new community to show off, a thought about the instance, or a story to tell, then please do tell!

Happy New Year, everyone.

I've been trying to follow two groups on slrpnk.net using my (main) account on hachyderm.io. The groups initially show as followed, but I get no posts in my feed. I've tried creating new test accounts, one on mastodon.social, one on hachyderm.io, to follow those groups - the account on mastodon.social starts getting posts right away.

Are there known federation issues with hachyderm.io? I've reached out to the admins on their side, they see some intermittent 503's from slrpnk.net, but not a general block.

The groups I'm trying to follow are https://slrpnk.net/c/electricvehicles and https://slrpnk.net/c/energy . I've reached to moderator ( @[email protected] before too and they weren't aware of any limitations placed.

Anyone?

This meta post isn't our typical monthly update.

📡 Technical updates 📡

The previously announced server maintenance of the supplementary services (Movim, XMPP, Wiki) had to be postponed to this month due to some difficulties encountered with the upgraded host system. We are currently looking into making it a bit more modular, but the PHP software doesn't lend itself very well to containerization.

We also started some slow improvements to our overall network structure to prepare for a potential upgrade to a 10 gbit fiber connection next year, but this will likely not have a big impact on SLRPNK itself as we are currently still far from exceeding the currently available bandwidth. It could allow for a sister Peertube site or something similar though.

💌 Donation support 💌

We hope to finally open a way to donate for helping to run the infrastructure that SLRPNK runs on this month. Initially it will be possible to donate through LiberaPay or directly to us through Stripe with a credit card. Since we are not a registered non-profit or so, we cannot provide you with a certificate for tax deductions though. If there is a big demand for alternative donation platforms like Patreon or KoFi etc. we can also consider it, but usually those just end up costing additional fees with little or no benefit to us.

We also applied for a small grant from NLnet to help us implement an option to donate through GNU Taler, which might become available to people in EU countries via a German coop bank sometimes mid 2025. We will keep you updated if that grant gets approved and how and when you can try it. If you are generally interested in GNU Taler, check out /c/money.

The United States elected a fascist government

SLRPNK is an international instance, and we try to avoid centering United States politics and news, as there is enough of that elsewhere in the Threadiverse. As the center of the world order, unfortunately much of what happens in the USA has resounding repercussions across the world. Sometimes those events are so big it becomes important to discuss them, even in our tiny corner of the internet.

During the campaign, the centrist Democratic Party appropriated a leftist talking point: Trump is a fascist. Now the Democrats are preparing for the peaceful transition of power to a fascist. This in unequivocally a bad thing for the people of the United States and the people of the world. A small cottage industry has arisen overnight of pundits giving post-election analysis. Here's what I think is relevant to you as a solarpunk:

You and I are in the midst of fomenting a media revolution through our participation in the Fediverse. It may sound self-congratulatory to compare the invention of ActivityPub to the printing press, the radio, internet, social networking sites, and micro-blogging. But I wouldn't be this committed to the platform if I didn't believe it was true.

Pay close attention to how fascists made extremely good use of emerging media messaging methods this election to disseminate false information to gullible voters. The last time fascists came to power, they did the very same thing with the new technology of radio broadcasting.

I believe there is a structural difference between Fediverse technology and those previous technologies - most of the fascists have already fucked off to their isolated islands, while our social graph continues to grow. If we can keep the Fediverse growing, the political revolutions it will eventually facilitate will have a much different character.

The other thing to notice is it wasn't just the United States where the incumbent party lost votes this election. Pundits have noted that during times of high inflation, it is typical for the electorate to blame their economic anxiety on the current government. This is backed by data.

[Image Description: Data showing historical and recent shift in vote share from incumbent parties across governments]

Every ruling party in every developed country got a smaller percentage of the votes than it did in the previous year. This is attributed to worldwide inflation and economic hardship.

As one of the few communities not in passive or active denial of the seriousness of global warming, we can recognize the climate catastrophe is directly responsible for a significant amount of this economic chaos. We can also predict that since little is being done to slow environmental collapse, economic conditions will get worse.

If there is an election in four more years, it is unlikely that fascists will stay in power. If there is no fair election, or Trump suspends elections, that does not change the facts on the ground. Ask Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain if autocracy saved them from popular unrest due to inflation. Trump is planting the seeds of revolt now by planning to dismiss his most competent generals and hundreds of thousands of female, gay, and transgender soldiers. If there is a revolution in the United States, it will probably involve the disbanded military.

Two years after the death of Hitler, Albert Camus published La Peste. It is a story where a plague overruns a city, only to disappear just as quickly, but with the looming threat to one day return. The plague is a excellent metaphor for fascism. I can't offer much solace, but I'm confident of this -- fascism is terrible but not sustainable. The silver lining of this tragedy is that it will one day be over. Let's continue our preparations so that day comes sooner, and that we and our loved ones survive to see it.

The preparations

The future is more difficult to predict than ever, but we can narrow down some essential preparations that could end up being the most critical. These recommendations are mostly based on Deviant Ollem's talk on Risk & Preparedness. I'd recommend watching that for more detail, if you have the time.

Find a good lawyer and memorize their phone number ⚖️

This goes for everyone, but especially if you are an activist, a minority, trans, an immigrant, a person who is publicly leftist, or any other person who is likely to be targeted by the new regime. If they use the legal system against you, already having a lawyer in mind and their number in your head (or a business card with their number on it inside your phone case or wallet) will give you a critical leg up if you're sitting in a jail cell without access to the contacts in your phone. This advice may become less useful as time goes on and the courts become sidelined entirely, but at least right now, I would consider it worth the effort.

Get your passport 🛂

If you've ever thought about getting a passport but have been putting it off, or you have one that's expired: get one. Get it soon. There may come a time when you need to flee the country quickly to save your life, and the most critical piece of documentation you will need is a valid passport, and the time to get one is long before you need it. If it eventually becomes possible or necessary to legitimately claim asylum in a less hostile country due to political persecution in the US, having a passport will be essential.

Also, though this is highly dependent on your lineage, if you have a parent, grandparent, or possibly even great-grandparent who was a foreign citizen, look into the process of applying to become a dual-citizen for that country by ancestry. Some countries make the process somewhat easy, and will even be willing to sorta fudge things a bit to grant you citizenship (Italy is one example, more details in the Deviant talk linked above). If you're able to take this route, this would give you the easiest escape route out of the US if it became too dangerous for you to stay. If this is a viable route for you, I would advise you to gather the required documents and begin the process as soon as possible, as some countries can take 6 months or more to get a foreign passport in your hand, while others can be quicker.

Consider acquiring the means to keep yourself safe 🛡️

Having a good can of pepper spray probably wouldn't be a bad idea; they're cheap, easy to learn how to use, non-lethal, and usually quite effective at giving yourself an opportunity to escape a bad situation (I would recommend POM, who also offer inert training canisters to practice with).

In addition, it may be worth considering taking a reputable self-defense class that teaches you how to fight with your hands or a melee weapon effectively. Learning how to take a punch will really help if things get physical.

Learn First Aid! ⛑️

It is equally, if not more important, to be able to keep yourself and others alive if they get hurt. This is a tremendously useful skill for anyone to learn, you can never have too many medics.

Tacticool Girlfriend provides a great introduction building a personal first aid kit, called an IFAK, which can deal with things like bullet wounds and other serious bleeding wounds. I also want to emphasize her recommendation of only buying medical gear from reputable sources (not Amazon!), such as North American Rescue to avoid fakes that could cost you your life.

But you'll need to learn how to use that equipment, too. The best resource for that is to take a local Stop The Bleed class, which are pretty widely available in most places. They may cost a small fee, but can also sometimes be free. Alternatively, if you cannot access a local class, this video by PrepMedic will give you a solid understanding of how to use Tourniquets and Gauze for wound packing.

Injuries are less harmful if they are tended to early. Learning first aid can help conserve resources when healthcare becomes unaffordable. Having several medics in case of harm by police is an extremely powerful morale booster during a protest that may become a police riot. When you become comfortable with the basics of first aid, riot medicine is the next suggested step.

Establish or join local Mutual Aid networks ✊

If you haven't already, get to know your neighbors. Mutual aid is a willingness to support and grow your community. This can include informal networks through friends, tenant/renter organizations, solidarity groups, and industrial unions.

These are groups using direct action to solve each other's problems. Building strong communities makes it difficult for fascism to take root. The actions of the government are going to hit every community hard, and the ones who build trust in each other and work together are most likely to survive. We've been building a list of resources in [email protected] to help you on your way.

This isn't only for your own community protection. Your ability to organize today will change the political landscape tomorrow. When revolution occurs, the social organizations that show the greatest resilience through the regime are the ones typically calling the shots when the dust settles. When it comes to elections, get out the vote drives are useless if most of the voters are fascists. At some point, you have to do grassroots political education if you don't want fascist candidates winning elections. Mutual aid networks are excellent forums not only for teaching each other good political ideas, but demonstrating them in practice.

Open Discussion

You don't have to endorse my or any of our views to be welcome on this platform. Our fight for a better future brings us all together. This isn't just my soap-box though - it's your soap-box too. If you've got questions about the server or the Fediverse in general, this is a great place to ask them. If you notice an issue with the service, posting the problem here will get it visibility.

Seeking a bit of crowd wisdom here, as the topic may be of general interest.

What are the best methods to promote a new community on this instance? What behavior crosses the line? What practices seem to work best to grow a new community?

Thanks for any insights.

This weekend, probably on Sunday, we plan to swap out the mainboard, RAM and casing of the server that runs the supplementary services (XMPP, Movim and Wiki). This is done to save some space in the server shelf and free the bigger case for another server. The new mainboard and RAM is also a bit faster, but I don't expect that to make a noticable difference.

The main SLRPNK Lemmy instance and our Etherpad which runs on another server will be unaffected. At least if I don't accidentally trip over a power cord or so 😅

I expect the down-time to be around 2 hours as all the components and backup drives will have to be reinstalled in the new smaller casing.

Edit: this will be postponed to the coming week or the weekend after as the preparation work takes a bit longer than expected

There will be a short down-time (1-2h) for the upgrade to Lemmy version 0.19.6 this weekend, learn more about the changes here: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-11-08_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.6

Spooky nights have come and gone,
A new monthly thread, but we shan't drag on.
Come one, come all, do join us down below,
Us Admins read every comment, dontcha know.
Share your news, your fun, your most wondrous thoughts,
The server, by the by, lives now upon the cleanest solar watts!

And thus, let us welcome November.

🌟 Community Highlights 🌟

We have a new community thanks to @CurlyWurlies4All, who created [email protected], a place to document and discuss the downward trend of the tech world as described by Cory Doctorow.

Or maybe you're interested in how you or your community can better respond to the upcoming changes due to climate change? You might want to check out [email protected], which gathers together some excellent articles and guides on preps, mutual aid, and disaster response.

But what if you have a burning question about solarpunk problems, solutions, or ideas? Something that makes you do the chin grabby thing and ponder about the future? Well why not ponder about visiting [email protected] and drop a big 'ol brain tingler in there! (I'm sorry).

⚕️ Experts & Fighting Misinformation 👩🏿‍🔬

We recently received a report for a post spreading potentially dangerous misinformation in [email protected], and as the creator and mod of that community is MIA, we had to determine ourselves if the report was legitimate. We eventually determined that the post wasn't misinformation, but as we admins are not medical experts, it took a fair amount of effort to research.

With how potentially dangerous medical misinformation can be, and with how widespread it is online, this situation highlights the importance of having someone qualified to root out that mis-info on subjects where it has the possibility of doing serious harm. We've decided to lock the community to prevent the possibility of that occurring in the future, at least until someone with the ability to weed out that harmful information wishes to take over moderating the community.

🛠️ Technical Updates 📡

Despite last month's announcements, not much actually happened so far. We are currently considering pushing back the Photon frontend migration until the new Svelte5 based version stabilizes, but are optimistic that it will bring a nice speed improvement.

We are currently struggling a bit with IP/DNS issues, as our contract with the glass-fiber internet provider does not guarantee a fixed IP (the joys of DIY hosting...). After nearly five years of never changing it, they seem to have made some backend changes and now it seems to randomly change some time. For now, we put an automatic monitoring and DNS updating in place as a mitigation, but this is not ideal on some slow updating DNS mirrors. It would be possible to upgrade to a contract with a fixed IP, but it would require some negotiations as their default offer for that has a lower upload bandwidth. On the upside, it might finally allow IPv6 connections. For now, we will probably wait and see how often this happens and how well our mitigation works.

Our Movim XMPP chat and blogging service has also seen some updates with some bug fixes and additions of "Briefs" as a sort of microblogging feature. This is not compatible with Mastodon etc., but you might have some fun with it nevertheless. The upcoming group video/audio calls are still a work in progress and will hopefully arrive by the end of the year or so. In addition, we updated the Ejabberd XMPP server to the latest 24.10 version, which includes some nice bug-fixes and a few new behind the scenes features.

⚡ Solar-Powered Servers ☀️

We have not really analyzed our power consumption via the newly installed solar panels, and it has been a bit rainy the last month, so production has not been optimal. By a guesstimate, we covered about 70-80% of the total electricity needs of our servers, with some days of significant surplus but insufficient battery storage capacity. In a few months we will probably have a clearer picture how well it fares over the winter, but so far it is better than expected.

💬 Open Discussion 🗨️

It wasn't just a poem, we really do like it when you share with us your news, questions, happenings and thoughts. If it's about the instance, the fediverse, or anything else you think is on topic (like how you created that new community? You know the one), this is the time to slam it (or gently place it, that's cool too) down below!

We hope you all had a great October and fun filled Halloween. If we're lucky, maybe November will start with a touch of Steve McQueen. :)

...I'll stop now.

The server on which our Movim, XMPP server and the Wiki runs will be down for 1 hour this weekend as I am swapping out the CPU and cooler for a stronger one.

SLRPNK Lemmy, the alternative frontends and the Etherpad will not be effected.

There will also be a few other short disruptions in the coming days as I am switching around a few other things with the hardware, but those should be only a few seconds to minutes at most.

Edit: Double-checking the specs I just now realized that I have to do it in a different way.

Edit2: Will still do a short maintenance to replace the CPU cooler, but not the CPU as the new one needs a different type of memory.