Introduction
Each month we pin a post to give all members an update on the state of the instance, as well as a place to direct public comments and discussions.
New moderators / communities
Anyone who accepts the responsibility outlined in the SLRPNK rules can start their own community on this instance. Several people have started communities in the last month you may want to check out:
- Anti-car living - !anticars by @wildcherry
- BreadTube - !breadtube by @ProdigalFrog
- Geoengineering - !geoengineering by Mambabasa
- Not voting (in your election) - !notvoting by @punkisundead
Also, @maanskyn of The Radical Storytelling Crew has set up shop on our instance, and while they have not decided how much participation they want from the rest of us, their community !thersc may be something interesting to watch.
Controversy Over !NotVoting
Anarchism is an philosophy of horizontal organization and consensus building. While anarchists have historically taken several positions on engaging in electoral politics, many have and still do view it as a distraction from the grassroots organizing that brings real change. The strongest expression of this tendency is to promote non-involvement in all elections.
Last month, a couple posts expressing this opinion in !anarchism have been downvoted and rage-posted in from accounts outside the !anarchism community. @punkisundead, a long-time contributor and valued member, created !notvoting to try and solve this problem. Whether it will help or merely compound the issue remains to be seen.
In addition to aspiring to be a space where anarchists feel welcome, we are also struggling with the dilemma of how to both encourage good-faith engagement and protect communities from out-group harassment. Lessons learned from @punkisundead’s moderation strategies may help us with other communities with similar problems. We recently closed !twoxchromosomes due to lack of moderators to respond to similar abuse.
As admins, we support @punkisundead in holding unpopular but principled positions, and have put the fate of !notvoting in their hands. They’ve volunteered to discuss their vision for the community with anyone with questions in the comments below.
User Stats
In the last monthly meta, I included a member-requested ‘user stats’ analysis. Because we switched to Lemmy 0.19 mid-January, the way that activity was reported changed, making the sudden inflection in the activity graph suspect. I thought it would be interesting to check in on that again this month.
Fediverse Observer continues to report an upward trend, though not as steep as it was in January when all the members who voted but didn’t post or comment were first added to the count.
The total post count continues its exponential growth pattern from last month, which I interpret as a linear trend of members becoming geometrically more comfortable with using the platform to share news.
As I said last month, our goal is not to be the biggest or best by metrics, but to build a healthy community of support and solidarity. You’re all part of an exclusive group. @poVoq has expressed the intention to limit membership at a certain point so that the community doesn’t get too big - so ultimately the success of SLRPNK will be judged by what its members are enabled learn and build with the help of this community.
It’s nice to see numbers going up, but what is important to us is mostly intangible. I’m pretty happy with the vibe of this instance, and your words of kindness and encouragement are well-received and appreciated.
Community Pruning
When gardening, it’s customary to remove weaker or redundant branches to give healthy branches more room to expand, and allow the crop to focus resources on growing bigger fruit with less plant. We’ve been doing this throughout our tenure as admins to local communities that are both inactive and unmoderated so that it is easier for people to find active and engaging communities on SLRPNK, and reduce our attack profile for spam and trolling.
Usually there’s some discussion in Movim chat, attempts to contact the moderators, and we’re now listing the communities on the Loomio forum so members can stay abreast of what communities are in the shears. The following communities will be pruned next month unless their moderators return or someone steps up to moderate them.
We’re also pruning some long-unmoderated communities that are significant enough that we considered them worthy of their own !meta posts:
Discussion of those communities future should happen in the CornelWest2024 pruning post and the TwoXChromosomes pruning post.
Open discussion
It’s now your turn to tell us what’s new! Any topic related to this community, our infrastructure, or the Fediverse at large is fair game. 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. Got questions? Ask’em!
Hey I am the moderator of !notvoting, so this might a bit biased:
I would like to know how you feel about the !notvoting@slrpnk.net community and if you think it has a place on slrpnk.net. This has also been a topic in the moderators chat on movim.srpnk.net for a bit.
Discussions around voting and US politics in general gets pretty heated. Even on slrpnk.net where I usually expect good faith exchanges, I had a few situations where the hostility was really noticeable. So please try to be understanding and kind to each other.
A few words about the community by me:
I made the community about not voting. That can include anti voting sentiments (I understand that as “voting is bad”), but also aims at those just not wanting to participate and those not able to participate. I can see how this distinction might not make sense for everybody, so feel free to ask for more clarification :)
I don’t want to create unnecessary divisions or drama on slrpnk.net or with other instances, so I am definitely fine with shutting !notvoting@slrpnk.net down if it constantly leads to that. I can see how !notvoting@slrpnk.net showing up on the local feed can be annoying to some and might result in people commenting on those posts to voice their discontent with the community. I appeal to you to focus on the positions and goals we have in common instead of the differences. Because I believe that will result in a way better experience on slrpnk.net for all of us.
I get why you created the community and agree having a space for those discussions is important. I think maybe the name and narrow focus kind of encourage it to be a space that will attract a lot of negative attention.
Do you think a space focused on encouraging other direct actions could serve a similar purpose while avoiding some of the inherent antagonism of its current form? Maybe something like “beyondvoting” or “directaction”. Then even people who do vote are encouraged to go beyond 4 year single day actions. It opens the space for dicussing the limitations of american democracy while still looking beyond it at what else people can do.
I dont really want to change peoples minds about voting, but I can see how the community might attract especially those that want to do that.
To inspire action, I usually post in !inperson@slrpnk.net and all the anarchism & anarchism related communities.
Makes sense, there are lots of pro action spaces already and its probably better to post in those than create another one.
I do think with the current name it will attract people who do want to change peoples minds and if it gets enough votes to get onto main probably a lot of backlash. If youre down to moderate that though, its probably best to quarentine the arguments onto one community than having it overwhelm other anarchist communities. If it gets traction im thinking itll be a headache to mod, but i commend you for taking that role.
But also maybe itll turn into a space where like minded people can discuss their frustrations with voting & find other people who have decided to divest from the current system.
Either way i think itll be interesting to see what happens & i do think the comminity has a place on this instance. Kudos for the work my undead friend.
I’m personally very pro-voting as I see the argument that it’s a distraction from more important things kinda silly given how little time and effort it takes to cast a vote. That being said, I don’t mind discussion about not voting, though dedicating an entire community to the stance seems a bit much, and I’m not really sure what the intent is for such a thing.
Having a community to discuss how electoral politics relates to anarchism or solarpunk ideals however does seem nice to have, and I can see you moderating it and expressing your opinion there, so long as the opposite opinion is allowed to be freely expressed and civil discussion is allowed to be had.
Edit: I’ll add that I think making a notvoting community would inevitably lead to a provoting community being created and there being a rivalry between the two. I also think that will be bad for the instance, as we should be focusing on finding common ground rather than digging our heels in on very principled positions and fighting over petty differences.
Super well put. Maybe a praxis community? Dicussing everyday activism and direct action. So its not really attacking voting, but promoting additional actions beyond simply presidential voting
That’s crazy talk. There are so many dynamics to non-voting that I’m not even convinced that 1 community is enough. This one community has to accommodate:
I’m not an anarchist but found it interesting to read their rationale for opposing voting and elections.
Then you should be very interested in the 2nd bullet. There are LOT of non-voters in the US and it leads to scumbags taking power (e.g. 2016 POTUS). You should want to see people discussing the low voter turnout problem that helps the republicans.
I’m used to finding that when someone tries to convince leftists that voting is pointless they turn out to have a post history full of awful stuff, so there’s a kind of instinctive distrust when I see it here. I know you are all acting in good faith and I’m here to learn so after one of the first anti-voting threads on anarchism I’ve kept quiet and watched to see what I’m missing. I don’t want to brigade a community I’m pretty clearly not part of. There’s a lot of anarchism that appeals to me, and I don’t disagree with a recent argument that choosing between one genocide and two is a crappy choice. But I also can’t shake the thought that one genocide is less than two. And if a vote is all it takes to make such a huge difference (for the second group), I can take the time. It won’t be my only action that year. Maybe I’m not fully compatible with anarchism - I’m not a great fit for most systems I guess, but I’m happy to work with pretty much anyone when it comes to human rights and ecological stuff. I also think I agree with Povoq and the others, we may learn important lessons from actively moderating a contentious space like this.
Rest assured that an anti-voting stance is far from being fundamental to anarchism, and you don’t need to be in agreement on every point made by other anarchists to consider yourself one. Diversity of tactics is a core part of anarchism, and adhering to dogmatic ideas of anarchist purity would be a disservice to that goal.
You are absolutely welcomed here.
I dont remember the source for that, but in the years before the spanish civil war, many anarchist organizations called for not voting. But in the final election, when fascists where really close to winning, they actually called their comrades to vote and the broader left won by a slim margin.
I just want to tell that story to show that there are historical precedents for anarchists to participate in an election.
Edit: oops i think i replied to the wrong person, reposting my comment in the right place srry
Well if you’re looking for opinions, I don’t think it has a place. It’s your right to refuse to participate in elections but creating a community devoted to the fact that you’re not going to do something seems like a poor use of time and energy that could be put toward something constructive. However, blocking communities I don’t want to see is easy enough, so have at it, I guess.
Same. If “not voting” means focusing on grassroots change, why make an online community in a low density platform? Also I don’t really see why an entire sub should be devoted to that: isn’t it a position explainable in just one post?
also, solarpunk is about participation and, as you also underlined, construction of the new more than destruction of the dead in a dead-end. That is also why I don’t like “anticars” even tho I’m very much fuck cars, there is !urbanism for that
Edit: so many “also”, I shouldn’t write while I’m starting to get sleepy lol
I don’t see why it wouldn’t fit here. There’s significant overlap between anarchism and solarpunk. Maybe there’s some other leftwing instance where this community would also fit (or maybe better), but that doesn’t matter that much due to the federated character. All this regardless of what my stance on voting is btw.
I may not agree with what you say, but I’ll fight to the death for your right to say it
Similar sentiment here. I don’t think voting is a waste of time. It’s easy to do and does make real changes, for better or worse. In my case, lately, it’s worse, as we have an asshat in charge.
Anyway, I am mostly curious about why ‘you’ would feel that by not voting you’re pushing grassroots change (or something like that that’s said in the main post).
It seems to me it’s akin to going in a hunger strike to protest that you’re not being fed.
I willingly admit I don’t know the first thing about anarchism in general, but I am legitimately curious in the vein of I’ve found a weird bug and now I’m wanting to poke it with a stick.
Hi, I’m brand new here and just wanted to say I joined this instance partly because I saw this in the communities list. I don’t know how much I’ll participate in !notvoting myself, but the fact that it’s allowed to be here tells me this is a relatively safe harbor for anarchists and others with unpopular-but-not-malicious views. That kind of discussion is a big part of what I’m here for! I’m also over on Mastodon at kolektiva.social, and we’ve had similar problems recently with people trying to hound that whole instance out of the fediverse (by pressuring other to defederate en masse) largely over the same issue. I don’t have much to say about how to handle this from a moderation standpoint - obviously such a widely hated view is going to attract more than its fair share of venom - but I’m just glad the discussion of it is apparently more or less welcome here.
Welcome to the instance :) hope you enjoy your time here
Thanks!
I’m neutral on there being a community for it really. But then I’m someone with a US citizenship who hasn’t voted in around 5 years because I’m not living in the US anymore, and that upgrades voting for a lesser of two evils from “minorly depressing annoyance” to “majorly depressing and confusing hassle”
I’ve also been kicked from communities of US citizens living elsewhere for saying I’m not inspired to vote despite the difficulty because I didn’t think it would cause a meaningful difference who won (this would be… circa 2020 elections I believe).
I’ve since grown beyond this sentiment for various reasons. But I probably would have grown faster if I was able to voice my concerns about voting in the current system without feeling like I was a heretic.
Tbh, after typing and thinking a bit, I WANT this community here for the same reason I think groups like doomers should be welcomed here. We can’t have the productive discussions that lead to understanding and change if we exclude people who would otherwise be willing to talk and work with us. And yeah, maybe a set space legitimises not voting. But I don’t think that’s a really huge concern honestly.
In case anyone is curious on my 2020 election logic: I was basically so tired of neoliberals thinking that Biden would automatically close the border camps and end gun violence when the recent Democrat stance has always been closer to… thoughts and prayers and inaction. Is that less evil than neon Hitler? Of course. With more distance from both America and neoliberal Biden fans, I can see that now. But for a lot of people, like past!me, being fervently pushed to do A Thing with overly lofty promises OR being guilted into doing The Thing yields opposite results.
I subbed, but I’m interested in how well my own views fit on the muni. I’m pro-voting but also pro-abstention, up to and including submitting a blank ballot or ballot with only write-in and protest votes. I think my firm stance against lesser-evil mentality gives me enough common ground to stand on but I don’t want to be disruptive to those who need a discussion space away from the pro-voting civic propaganda present in contemporary society.
Obviously I’ll do my good faith best to avoid pushing an agenda outside the remit of the community, but I don’t always check which muni puts an article into my feed. If it’s going to be a problem for the core user base, it might be better that I unsub right now.
I find it dangerous to allow the existence of a not-voting community to continue because there is already such tragically low voter turnout that actual progressive local leaders who could affect change at the community level don’t get elected, but right-wingers with rabid fanbases do.
We need to be encouraging people to get involved with local politics and voting in every election so that the government can actually function the way we would like to see it, and have them hold big businesses accountable. The way to do this is by supporting people-powered candidates who don’t take donations from PACs and corporate donors. Grassroots organizing includes electing people-first candidates to positions where they can represent the grassroots.
Make no mistake, I also would like to see the dissolution of the state. A classless, stateless society is possible, but must be achieved by transforming the evil into something that works for all, then its necesity fades away as the infrastructure has been put in place. Unfortunately we are still in a phase in which we need the state, but we will eventually get to the point where we don’t. For now, we need to vote to make it work.
I think this community could be a vibrant and interesting place.
I have some sympathy for the opinion of those who advocate not voting. Specifically, the idea I saw expressed several decades ago in Saskatoon: Don’t vote, it only encourages them!
More concretely, I’m interested in how we can move toward systems in which voting feels neither futile nor absolutely necessary. We should be able to feel that our vote has meaning, that our decision to abstain has meaning, and that, whether we choose to vote or not, there are ways other than voting to get results.
Being from Canada, where we have more than 2 parties, I’m especially interested in voting strategies and tactics that can at least somewhat undermine the effects of particular voting systems.