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 🌟

• !fixing@slrpnk.net - Celebrating/talking about repairing stuff, the right to repair stuff, and the intersection of tech and solarpunk ideals.
• !selfhosting@slrpnk.net - Hosting your own services. Preferably at home and on low-power or shared hardware.
• !reclamation@slrpnk.net - A place to discuss and learn about the restoration of disturbed lands to desirable end land uses

📸 Meta Post Image: Asante-Akim Center for Non-Motorized Transport 🎞️

People of rural Ghana organized a school for teaching how to chop, weld, and re-assemble bicycles to better meet the needs of rural Africa. The Asante-Akim Center for Non-Motorized Transport takes its inpiration from punk bike chopping groups in the United States and Europe.

These bikes not only look cool, but are better suited to the poor roads and Jungle environment. Photo from ratbikes.org.

🌏 World Carfree Day / In town, without my car! Events September 21-28 🚴

World Car-Free day is Tuesday September 22nd. At SLRPNK we’d like to draw a little more attention to this holiday, and see it celebrated even more widely and internationally. Like all good holidays, it has its roots in civil disobedience.

In 1961, Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She was one of the organizers of demonstrations that saved a popular public park in New York City from being turned into more road for cars. She was inspired by both the Garden City and City Beautiful movements before her, and her book and methods were internationally influential.

The Netherlands had seen the precursor to car-free days as a response to oil price shocks during the Suez Crisis, and anti-car sentiment has festered due to speeding vehicles in narrow city streets. Late one night in 1968, neighbors in Groningen took pickaxes and shovels to sections of their street to create intentional barriers that cars had to slow to navigate around. Despite official resistance, the civil disobedience movement to create “Woonerfs” or “Living Streets” spread, and in 1972 the first official Woonerf was constructed in Delft.

The Dutch lead the way in re-envisioning cities without cars through the 1970s, but the idea became internationally popular. People began organizing yearly car-free days, with the intention to explore other ways of organizing city life without the use of personal motor vehicles. Car-free days and automobile restraint in Urban planning goes hand in hand.

In one famous case in Jakarta, Indonesia, Car-free day is a weekly event. On Sunday mornings, several streets into the city are barred from use by traffic. They become popular paths for pedestrians and cyclists who come to the city for Sunday events. Initially it was planned to occur only 3 times a year in 2007, but as interest and infrastructure around the event grew, it became a weekly event only 5 years later. The streets used for this purpose have become more pedestrian-friendly as their use by pedestrians grew.

The most popular day for yearly Car-free days is September 22nd. In french-speaking countries, it is called “En ville, sans ma voiture” or “In town, without my car” - but the concept is the same. What ever the concept is called in your locality, we would like to boost it here as a Solarpunk holiday. Check out related communities for this event:

• !urbanism@slrpnk.net
• !utilitycycling@slrpnk.net
• !publictransport@slrpnk.net
• !TacticalUrbanism@slrpnk.net

⛔️ Defederation with lemmy.devr.cc ⛔️

lemmy.devr.cc was abandoned by its admin and allowed for open sign-ups (no manual review of new applicants), resulting in it being used by advertiser bots and others posting illegal material, necessitating us defederating from it. As it’s a small instance with no active communities, the defederation is unlikely to effect any of our users.

🔋 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 68.72€/month in donations from 13 people, which is covering most 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 (we are currently looking for an alternative for this as the Etherpad project has started to use LLMs for development quite heavily).

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

FINAL EDIT: We are now organizing in this thread: https://slrpnk.net/post/40411722

EDIT 2: There’s apparently a page on Canvas where teams can propose where their template will be on the canvas, which may help ‘reserve’ a spot for us.

EDIT: Now is the time to propose your templates! Pixelorama is a great free pixel art tool to use for it. Try to get your proposal in by July 16th so we can decide which to do! :)

The Canvas event is the Fediverse’s take on r/place, I.E, a collaborative artwork where every participant can place down a single pixel every 30 seconds.

This limitation means the only way to assemble a larger piece of art is for people to come together in groups to collectively decide what they’ll be drawing (usually with a pixel art template someone proposes), where it will be on the canvas, and communicate with other groups working on neighboring artworks so as not to impede their efforts, or even to negotiate mutual aid treaties to help maintain each other’s art from potential hit-and-run attacks.

SLRPNK participated in 2024’s Canvas event, which @Five@slrpnk.net documented in one of our previous Monthly Meta’s. There’s also a fun timelapse from last year’s Canvas event here.

If there are any Solarpunks interested in participating this year, this thread might be a good place to organize and collaborate :)

The Canvas Event will take place at this link On July 18th 04:00 UTC, and run for 48 hours. Here is their official post about it for more details.

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

The comment by The D Quuuuuuill:

When I was in elementary school, I met a man who worked in the Merrimac Mine in VA (closed 1935 after two anarchists dropped lit dynamite into a gas pocket) who one late summer day got on a train and headed up to Logan County with an 1895 Winchester and a pack of hard tack in solidarity with his UMWA brethren. He must have been about 90 when we met him. Our teachers shuffled him out of the room when he started talking about “The Civil War” because “he was getting confused.”

It wasn’t until much later that I realized it was some of the realest shit anyone had ever said to me. It didn’t really matter that it wasn’t the civil war, it still was a civil war, and it was the one he’d fought in. He’d staked his life to that he deserved to be treated with dignity and that future generations shouldn’t waste away deep beneath the earth the way his friends had. I think about that that was the kind of person who was willing to say some seemingly bonkers shit to some 10 year olds just to jolt them awake because that’s who he was. That was what he knew. I also think about that he met us. He saw us. He created a connective tissue between the elders of his day. If they were as old to him as he was to us, they would have been more in 1837 before anyone new the value of the coal beneath the soil in our home valley. The most military technology of the time was powered by the wind. They grew up knowing, and hating, the southern plantation system that existed in nearby valleys and down in the piedmont just south and east of where we grew up. One of them probably even knew the enslaved man who built the finest building in the entire valley, a building so impressive and beloved that the entire town gathered the funds to buy his manumission papers, and then helped him buy the mill that would a few years later be burned down 3 times by both the Union and Confederate armies under the assumption that the owner was feeding the other army.

He spoke to us. He spoke to us the way those elders had spoke to him. He said something so threatening to the status quo that it was assumed to be nonsense. I think when he was a boy probably some old abolitionist said something like that to him that didn’t set in until he was old enough to get on that train. Ever since I realized the value of this connective tissue I have lived my life to preserve these stories and pass them into future generations. To help people of today see that the settler-colonists who first defiled this land and tried to create plantations despite the dense forests and ill suited soils just to turn over a quick buck, who killed and raped the Muskogee native Americans who had been here for millennia, and who pushed the escaped enslaved Africans from Florida further west into what is now Kentucky are the same people who joined the Confederate army, are the same people who refused to respect the results of the post-civil war elections and created the Jim Crow era, are the same people who thugged for JH Blair, are the same people who Dr Martin Luther King and Angela Davis resisted, are today once again active and going by the name “Immigration and Customs Enforcement.”

When I was in my 20s, I was naive. I thought that the moral arc of history was long, and bent towards justice, and that I would know liberation in my time. I see things very differently now. It will probably be some 10 year olds I speak to when I am 90 who know the freedom I am so thirsty for. Even then, this may be my naivete. The generations between me and them may be too twisted by the hatred that has been engendered in me that I hold toward the people who enable the system we suffer under for the process of communal healing to be complete. Thank you for sharing the story of Blair Mountain with more people. It is but one example of many of the great American imperial project’s violence against my people. The greatest advice I can give, especially right now during Pride month, is to build the largest and widest coalition you can, and to never stop speaking truth into the universe.

I am reminded of a song (though everyone should go listen to Union Maid or Which Side Are You On immediately). “Your heart is a muscle the size of your fist. So keep on loving and keep on fighting”

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