SLRPNK Community Discussion - November 2025

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 🌟

• !Audiobooks@slrpnk.net - Share and discuss interesting books of an audible nature!
• !Lunar_punk@slrpnk.net - Explore the darker aesthetics of Solarpunk.
• !Soilscience@slrpnk.net - A science based community to discuss and learn all things related to soils (Get all up in that dirt! Woah, hold up, okay that's like maybe too much dirt- Oh you're eating it. No that's cool, I'm chill with it now).

🏵️ Meta Post Image Breakdown: Cempasúchil 🏵️

Cempasúchil, also called marigolds, is the flower traditionally used to honor the dead during Dia de los Muertos. Dia de los Muertos, or Day of the Dead, is a multi-day Mexican Holiday. It is celebrated the first two days of November, with November 1st dedicated to the remembrance of dead children.

⛔ Defederation from MAGA.place and HillariousChaos.com ⛔

We briefly broke our habit of not commenting on electoral political developments in !meta in December 2024 when we reported that the United States had elected a fascist government. Our characterization of Trump's regime and the MAGA movement as a US-localized version of the regimes of Mussolini, Franco, and Hilter has only been proven more and more prescient, as masked government agents attacking and kidnapping protestors, citizens, and immigrants in defiance of the rule of law. Trump's regime builds expensive concentration facilities and gaudy palatial vanity projects while pushing working Americans deeper into poverty.

We've joined instances from DBZer0.com to Lemmy.world in adding maga.place to our blocklist, defederating SLRPNK.net from the servers entirely. This prevents them from attracting new users by federating our posts and comments, and prevents their users from harassing SLRPNK members. The maga.place instance joined the Fediverse one month ago, and appeared on our radar when the admin began appearing in SLRPNK posts and communities.

We're not the first to block Hilariouschaos.com either, which also hosts fascist content and tolerates right-wing trolls. We've been side-eyeing this server for a while, but the eager collaboration between HC users and maga.place has made the fascist trends on HC unambiguous enough to take action.

This is consistent with our defederation standards. We've always encouraged good faith discussion between a spectrum of ideological and political positions, and stood up for our members to moderate their communities according to their politics, even when it contradicts our own. We have also ejected members who consistently engage in trolling, bad faith argument, and spreading demonstrably false information. When an instance has cultivated a significant culture of trolls and bad faith actors, we have defederated from those instances. We've blocked Hexbear.net and Lemmygrad.ml on that basis.

Our blocklist is not limited to instances that tolerate modern forms of fascism, but all fascist instances belong on our blocklist. Fascism is a fundamentally irrational political position, and is impossible to defend rhetorically with good-faith argument. Reality is the source of ideological truth. Among people who hold these positions, this relationship is flipped, and ideological truth is the source of reality. This is why they so easily dismiss evidence out of hand that contradicts their narrative, and the admin of maga.place's reliance on claims of 'fake news' regardless of the source and credibility illustrates this point.

Several servers we federate with do not block maga.place. This means maga.place won't see your posts or comments on these servers, and you won't see content posted from maga.place to these servers either since we began the block. It also means members of these servers will see content from both us and maga.place, and may encourage more fascists to join these instances to get around the block. Posts on these servers will appear alongside posts from blocked servers, despite there being no other interaction besides proximity.

We encourage other admins to add maga.place to their blocklist as well to prevent cultivating a fascist audience. Trolling is a form of censorship, a performance of irrationality intended to frustrate people engaging in good faith and drive them away from platforms that tolerate this behavior. The casual dismissal of scientific consensus without evidence and other irrational antics takes a much darker turn once the political power of trolls is great enough to make their critics disappear. Incarceration, deportation, and murder for political thought are all much more significant forms of censorship in comparison to federation blocks.

While most instances institute these blocks without comment, others engage in a form of internal comment or debate. Sh.itjust.works engaged in a public discussion, and is currenly voting on the issue (only SJW members should participate in the vote thread). A similar discussion occurred on Lemmy.ca, and they ultimately decided to defederate.

The politics of voting on the Fediverse probably deserves its own discussion; at SLRPNK, we wear our ethos on our sleeve, and we feel acting within the bounds of our server's ideals should not require a bureaucratic process. We are committed to transparency and open discussion, hence we walk a middle ground between seeking a formal public mandate and silent executive action.

Due to the nature of our server, most of what I've said is probably taken for granted by most of our members. Solidarity and coalition building are powerful tools in resistance to fascism. I've dedicated a large portion of this meta post to this discussion in solidarity with all of the members of other platforms who are also calling for their admins to defederate from instances that encourage fascist trolls. I'm tagging the admins of several instances who still federate to welcome them to join the conversation here and on Sh.itjust.works as well.

⚡Solar-powered Servers ☀️

Since we are getting into the dark months of the year again here is a quick update on how our solar-power production is going: In October it has been rather rainy at our server location (due to several Atlantic storms passing by), therefore only 67% of the total electricity needs could be covered by the solar panels. The average over the last three months was 83%, with the downward trend starting in September (88%). The additional grid-power was mostly wind and geothermal energy and the good news is that this nearby geothermal power-plant is currently being renovated and expanded (and will include a modern thermal spa soon as well, yay).

📡 Technical Updates 📡

We did a quick server OS update earlier today, which went smoothly, so there isn't much to report on. Overall we have still some pending hardware changes to reduce energy consumption a bit, and those will require some unscheduled server restarts. We also discussed the updated plans for the potential Piefed migration in the server upgrade thread here, tl;dr: the main blockers should be gone now, but we need to set up a Piefed test instance and investigate the database structure for creating a migration script. As a preparation, we already have a working object storage setup on our servers now, which should make media storage easier to expand in the future. The first test case for it is a new PeerTube instance that our hosting organization f-hub.org recently added.

💬 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