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 🌟

• !tidalpunk@slrpnk.net - A community to discuss news about our oceans & seas, marine conservation, sustainable aquatic tech, and anything related to Tidalpunk - the ocean-centric subgenre of Solarpunk.
• !detrashed@slrpnk.net - For community cleanups, magnet fishing hauls, tools, technologies, news, and more!
• !alt_bike@slrpnk.net - A place to discuss alternative cycling, bike parts, and showing off your unique style. The weirder the better!

📸 Meta Post Image 🎞️

66 Signs of Neon was a traveling exhibit of works of assemblage from the ruins of the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles, California. The riots, incited on August 11th by police brutality towards a black man and his mother, were the culmination of years of racial discrimination, police abuse, housing segregation, and economic injustice. The violence lasted 6 days and the California National Guard was mobilized to contain the rebellion, killing 34 people. After the fires smouldered, $40 million ($425 million adjusted for inflation) in property had been destroyed.

Headed by Noah Purifoy, the artists collected tons of debris from the wreckage of demolished buildings and re-assembled it. The resulting sculpture memorialized as well as communicated and interpreted the event to a wider audience.

The assemblage of junk illustrated for the artists the imposition of order on disorder, the creation of beauty from ugliness. Its analog was the essence of communication…The reason for being in our universe is to establish communication with others, one to one. And communication is not possible without the establishment of equality, one to one.

– From the catalog “Junk Art, 66 Signs of Neon”.

From 1966 and 1971, the exhibit educated, awed, and inspired people. It began as a small event at a local High School, then traveled to many California state universities before traveling throughout the United States and finally Internationally.

Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, “a riot is the language of the unheard” - art provides a nonviolent medium for communities to speak, and if their audience is receptive, to be heard.

Art of itself is of little or no value if in its relatedness it does not effect change. We do not mean change in the physical appearance of things, but a change in the behavior of human beings.

– Noah Purifoy

👾 Canvas Recap 👾

For those who missed it; the 2026’s Fediverse Canvas Event is a collaborative artwork where any fediverse account can join in and place a single pixel every 30 seconds on a 500x500 sized blank canvas for 48 hours. This limitation requires that communities work together to create larger works of art, as well as encourage communication and collaboration with neighboring artworks and their communities.

We missed last year’s canvas event, but this year managed to catch an announcement post for it, and quickly began to organize, ultimately deciding on 3 different artworks proposed by our members.

Choosing an initial spot to land our art was an important step, as it’s possible to be overrun by competing artworks laying claim the same area. A chance contact with members from the Pawb.Social lemmy instance ultimately decided our spot, as they were more than willing to have us as neighbors. This alliance drastically altered the outcome of our experience for the better, with many of them offering essential help, including advice on how to allow all our members to see an overlay of the canvas with our templates already placed (shout out to the absolute legend @KoboldCoterie@pawb.social), as well as helping us secure our spot and assisting us in drawing our artworks (which we gratefully returned in mutual aid). I’m also quite pleased to say that we enjoyed our alliance so much, we’ve planned to join them as allies once again in next year’s canvas event.

To see the final state of the canvas and what we managed to create, click here. There is also a video timelapse of the entire event here on Peertube.

After the event concluded, the organizer @grant@toast.ooo updated the stats of the event to CanvasStats.com, which allows us to see exactly where and how our instance members participated in the event. This showed that 2026 was our most active year on Canvas, with 9188 pixels placed by 20 slrpnk members, making us the 9th most active instance out of a total of 96!

The 2026 Canvas Atlas is also now available, which not only lets you scroll through the event as time progressed (with the bar at the bottom), it also lets users encircle a piece of work to give added context of what it is or what its about when moused over. I added context to our Slrpnk logo and Turtle Flag already, but if anyone else wants to add some details for any other artworks, feel free! :).

It was a really fun event this year, and particularly wonderful to see your ideas and proposals slowly appear on the board, as well as the fun adhoc art, such as @reallykindasorta@slrpnk.net’s cute solar powered turtle tree, @benjirenji@slrpnk.net’s Flag of Humanity, and @faythofdragons@slrpnk.net’s sunflower meadow, which took on a life of its own and spread across the canvas as other users spotted it, helping it grow into a thriving patch of green teeming with color.

Doesn’t get much better than that. Thanks again to everyone who participated this year, and to our furry friends over at Pawb.social!

🌄 Sunsetting of our Alexandrite frontend 🌅

As recently discussed, we are planning to sunset unmaintained alternative frontends. Originally we thought we had to remove the Mlmym (old.slrpnk.net) and the Alexandrite frontend, as both original projects have not been maintained for more than a year now and thus are posing an increasing security risk due to the use of outdated and know to be insecure libraries. In addition the soon upcoming Lemmy 1.0 version is making some significant changes to the client API and thus it is only a question of time before these unmaintained frontends will start breaking. Luckily it turned out that there is a still actively maintained fork of the Mlmym project, which we are using now, but sadly the Alexandrite frontend seems to be fully abandoned. We thus plan to shut it down later this month.

🔋 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 68.92€/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).

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 🌟

• !foxtrot@slrpnk.net - A comic strip written and illustrated by Bill Amend.
• !relationshipanarchy@slrpnk.net - For all those that live relationship anarchy and those that want to learn about it.
• !outdoor@slrpnk.net - Hiking, camping, nature photography etc.

✊🏾 May Day! ✊

On this day, 140 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.

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. 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). You can find resources to help you unionize in the Union Resources section of this post.

📸 Meta Post Image: The Desplaines Street Haymarket Memorial in Chicago 🎞️

Revealed in 2004, the Haymarket Memorial sits on Desplaines Street near the original site of the events that inspired May Day.

🚦 Lemmy.World Defederation and Refederation with Anarchist.Nexus 🚦

Recently, Lemmy.World’s primary administrator MrKaplan defederated from Anarchist.Nexus and threatened to defederate Lemmy.DBZer0.com, two large anarchist Lemmy instances. After significant feedback and discussion he has since refederated Lemmy.world with Anarchist.Nexus.

SLRPNK is not an anarchist instance, anyone who feels affinity with the Solarpunk movement to create a better world is welcome here. That said, I and my fellow admins are anarchists. I think I speak for most other anarchists who have found a home on SLRPNK as well when I say that we can’t help but view MrKaplan’s careless behavior as an attack all people who share our moral and political convictions: what is happening in Palestine is a genocide, and Zionism is the ideology that fuels it.

The Fediverse is a collection of small social media servers that through coordination build a grassroots network of human connection that is growing to rival centralized corporate social media. Despite the political diversity across this network, we share a common value – decentralized social media is important. We would like to see this network continue to grow, and that means adding more servers to our federation and nurturing the ties that we already share. Defederation means a severing of all communication between two servers. This is a blunt tool that instance admins should be careful to wield, and it should certainly not be done in anger or over a bruised ego. It is however a tool that we do deploy for various reasons from time to time, be it for reasons of federated feed curation, more technical reasons like preventing abuse coming from unmaintained instances, or in rare cases due to severe ideological misalignment. Especially in the last case we are careful to ensure that none of those decisions are taken lightly or in anger and we typically document our reasons for each in either our monthly meta posts, or in their own separate post on c/Meta. We have and will continue to take the issue of which servers we federate with extremely seriously, and listen to our members for their feedback on this topic.

These events are extremely recent and we’re still processing the news. Further discussion is welcome in the comments.

• LW banned me and defederated AN over “Murder all zionists” in my display name
• Lemmy.world Admin MrKaplan rages over anti-Zionism banning users and defederating instances
• Update: anarchist.nexus has been refederated
• Join the Pledge to boycott lemmy.world!

🔕 Defederation from Poa.st 🛑

Poa.st is a Soapbox instance (a Mastodon-like microblogging software) which was used in a now debunked disinfo attempt to paint Dbzer0 and Anarchist.Nexus as being the target of entryism by a group of antisemitic Nazis.

While that specific doctored conversation did not take place, that group of individuals on poa.st was likely chosen due to displaying nazi behavior elsewhere on that instance, which enhanced the credibility of the disinfo attempt. For those same reasons, we have chosen to defederate from Poa.st on the same ideological grounds that we defederated from Maga,place and HilariousChoas (which you can read here in last year’s November Monthly Meta).

As it is a Mastodon-like instance, it hosts no communities that our users would’ve followed, which means it should not noticeably effect any of our users. Instead, the defederation will effectively only block poa.st users from directly interacting with posts on our instance.

🔋 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 our F-hub donation site: https://contribute.f-hub.org/ (Note: Your contributions work, but due to an annoying bug they are currently not shown in the summary)

We also offer Librapay as an option for those who already have an account there, which supports reoccurring donations: https://liberapay.com/F-hub.org/

(Note: the Librapay option supports the broader F-hub project, of which SLRPNK is a part of. If you’d like all of your donation to go toward SLRPNK, use the alternative F-hub donation link, and select ‘slrpnk.net’ in the ‘reason’ drop-down instead)

Currently f-hub.org is getting a combined 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

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.

This July, we’ll be talking about the SLRPNK Outage, the upcoming 50501 Protest, and fun projects to do with others to build community.

🌟 Community Highlights 🌟

• !Foraging@slrpnk.net - A new foraging community, where we come together to explore the bountiful wonders of the natural world and share our knowledge of gathering wild goods!
• !TacticalUrbanism@slrpnk.net - A community about implementing urbanist improvements Via direct action
• !Signs@slrpnk.net - A community celebrating clever and inspiring anti-fascist art at demonstrations.

🔌 The Great SLRPNK Outage of 2025 🪫

Last month, SLRPNK went offline on the 4th of June, and lasted a total of 7 days; the longest downtime since its creation.

The length of that downtime was due to multiple unexpected and unfortunate circumstances, all intersecting at once. For one, our main Sysadmin, poVoq, had taken on obligations that took him outside of the country for an extended period of time (3 months). In addition, the other sysadmins that had physical access to the server coincidentally also had taken on responsibilities or had gone on vacation, which prevented them from being able to access the server as well.

As the server seemed to be working perfectly fine for a long period of time, it didn’t seem like it would be much of a risk to leave it unattended for that duration. Unfortunately, things chose to go wrong after everyone who could attend to it, now couldn’t…

The primacy cause of the outage was a recent change in IP assignment by our ISP, in addition to what looks like an very recent bug in our firewall software (IPfire).

Previously, our ISP would assign new IP’s to us slowly, 3 times a year. But recently they have been assigning them more frequently. IPfire normally catches this, automatically changing the Dynamic DNS to the new IP, and all was dandy. However, before the trip, IPfire was updated, which introduced a new and yet unknown bug, which ultimately prevented it from automatically updating the DNS when a new IP was assigned. All other fail-safes previously put in place by poVoq to notify him of this problem also failed, which lead us to assume there was a hardware failure in the Firewall, preventing us from being able to access the server remotely.

However, a few days later, poVoq received signs of life in the form of an automated e-mail sent from the server, indicating that the it was still running, meaning something else was preventing access. They would have to find out what the new assigned IP was manually to access it.

With the help of a friend, they were able to help track down the new IP by performing a port-scan on over five hundred thousand IP’s in a subnet that was known to contain our server, narrowing it down to 20 possible IP addresses by looking for open ports that are used by XMPP servers (as we also host an XMPP chat messaging service). After trying each one, they finally hit pay dirt, and were able to log in for the first time since the outage! By the 11th of June, we were back up and running.

We’ll be taking many lessons from this event to bolster the reliability and accessibility of the server to hopefully prevent an outage of this scale from happening again, such as:

• Switching to a new and hopefully more reliable Firewall/Dynamic DNS software & adding additional out of band notifications on IP change
• Installing a KVM on the main firewall that is connected to a separate IP to make it possible to connect to it directly, giving us the ability to reboot and troubleshoot remotely even if the main connection is lost.
• Experiment with a Wireguard tunnel on a rented VPS, which could allow for a more stable connection, and could be used to host essential services like our XMPP, which would help it remain accessible even if the main server went down.

As unfortunate as this outage was, due to the efforts of poVoq and his friend, it was thankfully far, far shorter than it could’ve been, and we’re extremely grateful to have such a dedicated admin hosting our little corner of the web. Three cheers to poVoq and his friend! :D

📢 Good Trouble ✊🏿

Last month on June 14, millions took to the street in strategic non-violent protest. News about the results of past protests, and announcements of new direct actions are welcome in all of the localized communities at 50501.chat.

While protests are good for demonstrating unrest with the regime, they are also extremely potent milieus for sharing information with like-minded individuals. It is typical to find political and labor organizations distributing information from xeroxed flyers to printed newspapers. If you feel inclined, we encourage you to invite people you meet in the streets to join the Fediverse. If you come up with flyers or zines to help do this, we’d love it if you shared it in this month’s meta to help others do the same.

John Lewis was a civil rights leader who eventually transitioned to become a United States politician. He is famous for saying, “Speak up, speak out, get in the way. Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.” This July 17th, organizations across the world are mobilizing for a sequel to the wildly successful “No Kings” protest, called “Good Trouble Lives On” in honor of the five-year anniversary of John Lewis’ death of cancer at 80 years old.

While this protest movement is nominally for the United States, the trend towards authoritarianism as the climate crisis worsens is a world problem. Mobilizations have already been announced in Florence and Dublin. This is not a ‘US’ problem, it’s an ‘us’ problem. If we hope to push back authoritarianism, we must do it together through solidarity. The signs in the streets remind us that we are part of a world-wide resistance movement - from Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s imperialism, Palestine’s struggle to be free from the tyranny of the IDF, to the barricades that just went up recently in Belgrade, Serbia. We are all connected.

🛠 Fun Projects to Build Community 👩🏾‍🏭

Meeting your neighbors, fostering goodwill, and having a real sense of community is a powerful thing. It’s the main building block that all other actions we have in our arsenal rely upon. Without it, we’re far less able to build the vision we all share of a more hopeful future, and less capable to resist the darker visions others have for us.

With summer here and hopefully some good weather gracing a good amount of us, now’s the time to bust out some tools (maybe from your local library if they have a tool section!), gather some friends, heed the primal call, and do some solarpunk style community building with direct action!

In the clickable drop-down below are a few ideas to get started. I’m hoping more of you chime in with your own in the comments as well! :D

🗣️ 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