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!
But the problem as I understand it isn't people being strongly opinionated or having different starting points, it's comments and posts that serve no other purpose than to glorify themselves with no place for any discussion. Online vegans are a great example. I have absolutely nothing against vegans, and I can understand their position, that the meat industry is very cruel and polluting, and that the act of killing is not deemed immoral when done to animals. These are all points we can talk about, dissagree on, explain our positions and ideally reach some conclusion. But what happens so often is that you get someone who comes and says veganism will save the planet by reducing emissions, if you're not a vegan you're directly responsible for it and you're literally okay with slavery and murder, I'm very cool and noble. That's not asking for a discussion nor is it arguing for a cause, it serves absolutely no other purpose than to stoke the fire and make some people feel superior, or feed their addiction for arguments. And, as I see it, that's what it boils down to: do your words have any other point than to make yourself feel superior and invoke frustration. Because words that were made to do only that were better left unsaid. Now I'm not too sure about removing and banning them, but I am sure that we shouldn't contribute to encouraging them.
Slrpnk.net was my first real exposure to the kind of vegans I've seen people complain about for years.
I'm a vegetarian and became one basically as soon as I'd realized it was an option after moving out on my own.
I genuinely can't tell if some of these folks are for real. They read like trolls to me, like agressively-written parodies intended to drive fence-sitters away from the movement. It's how I'd imagine that guy at the cookout who gets mad when you don't need a burger imagines vegans talk online. I honestly have no idea if it's sincere. I haven't seen it before but I've not spent too much time on Twitter or similar spaces.
As for what to do, I think we've got an opportunity in that this is one of the larger, more-established, and well-organized instances.
As Lemmy grows, it will be a lot of people's first exposure to solarpunk. If what they learn from that first glance is that solarpunk is I'm-better-than-you vegans having Twitter arguments I'm worried they'll leave or get pulled into drama rather than listen to the rest of the message, and that they'll take that impression with them, tell their friends, and become less receptive to environmental justice in general. There's so many other ways to help.
Solarpunk is so new - we're still shaping the genre, the movement, and the wider, cultural understanding of what it is. These folks can poison the vegan well all they want but I'd really rather they not become the face of solarpunk.
I'm happy to share this space and movement with vegans as long as they can tolerate the rest of us existing, trying to help the world in our own ways. To me, that means they're going to have to tolerate the entire instance not being mandatorially vegan and if they can't do that without descending from on high to call people murderers and enslavers, they'll have to block the communities that offend them or start a pure vegan instance elsewhere. I get that from where they're standing, they're morally correct, but it's an absolutely terrible way to recruit people.
Yea that's why I'm saying for me it's ok if someone is abrasive, as long as it doesn't get personal. Calling someone a murderer for not being vegan falls under that umbrella.
Ed: or even more broadly, just saying and doing things that clearly indicated there's no discussion to be had. For me that also includes stuff like calling out someone's post history or making fun of grammar. I tend to just ignore and quit, but others can be baited into a flame war.
Regardless, spelling out 50 rules won't help - if someone wants to be an ass, rules won't stop them. The only thing that can help are moderators that can step in and moderate. A short-time ban like 1 day can help if someone can't listen. But I can imagine it being a lot of work moderating a sub like that.
I don't know that it needs to be spelled out specifically for vegans, but maybe use it as the example for the be excellent to each other/no trolling rule to demonstrate where the line is crossed.