Introduction
Greetings everybody! Slrpnk.net now has two Admins! On the 16th of October @poVoq gave me admin privileges, and I’m now involved in approving applications, responding to report tickets, and coordinating with other instance administrators. Your main admin is continuing to do those things as well, in addition to sysadmin tasks and technology improvements, and we are coordinating over XMPP to keep our actions consistent and in line with Slrpnk’s values. Thank you @ProdigalFrog and @punkisundead for your warm endorsements, your support means a lot to me.
XMPP chat integration
As mentioned last month, Slrpnk.net is running an Ejabberd service. Movim.Slrpnk.net hosts a web-client you can use with your current username and password. After logging in to the Movim client, your XMPP account will be active, and you can access Slrpnk chat with any XMPP compatible Android or Apple client. You can find a list of suggested clients at joinjabber.org. Cheogram from F-Droid is a recommended choice.
Audio and video calls are still not fully functional yet, but we’ve been experimenting extensively with the chat options, and it has been invaluable for coordinating administrative activities. In addition to directly chatting with other users, there are public chat rooms, and you can create invite-only private rooms. The interface is not bug-free, but we’ve had direct help from the author in troubleshooting problems and fixing bugs. Thanks @edhelas@slrpnk.net!
Everyone is encouraged to join, but especially moderators who share communities. We’ve created an invite room for all moderators moderators@chat.slrpnk.net, and when demand requires, rooms for each community like “mod-memes” and “mod-anarchism” are available for community-specific coordination.
Call for moderators
We’ve noticed a rise in spam - this is good news as it is an indication of the Threadiverse’s rising popularity, though it is of course also a challenge. There has also been a rise in hate speech and genocidal language due to recent tragic events. Palestinians and Israelis, Jews and Muslims are all people deserving of dignity and respect, and are all explicitly welcome here. I’m proud of the inter-admin solidarity particularly with Lemmy.world and Beehaw.org in responding to reports. I’m also proud of all of you who have participated in discussions, flagged spam and hate speech for us, and shown humanity to others in this trying time. You are an inspiration to me.
To grow and become better, we need people to mod. If you enjoy posting in a community, consider asking the owner of the community if you can help mod; if you’re a moderator and you notice a person who you think would be a good moderator, don’t be afraid to ask them to join you. If you’re already a mod, consider reaching out to other mods to help them with their communities. Our Lemmy feature requests are improvements to the moderation tools, and the XMPP chat significantly improves the ease of inter-moderator coordination. More mods in a community usually means overlapping coverage when there’s a diversity of time-zones and sleep schedules, and is a great opportunity to get to know other members of the community and learn social custodial skills from each other.
Fedi-Admin Guild
Since @poVoq announced it last month, we’ve added admins from four other Lemmy instances to the Fedi-admin guild, with a fifth likely to join soon. The guild runs on the open-source forum software Loomio, which is designed to facilitate online decision-making. It was designed for community governance, and though it is still a work in progress, the developers have been very responsive. If you’re looking for another reason to volunteer as a mod, access is still open to you even if you’re not an admin. Both Lemmy and Loomio are fascinating software concepts, if you’re curious about that sort of thing, I think you’ll like learning the features and seeing the clockwork.
I’m a big fan of the guild initiative as a form of prefigurative politics and for its potential for improving the general Threadiverse stability and performance. It’s also an opportunity to build consensus on community norms in this new form of social technology we’re all building together.
No UI change this month
We’re sticking with the default Lemmy UI for at least another month. You can continue to experience site navigation in Photon and Alexandrite. There’s a feedback post for Photon, and the developer, @Xylight@lemmy.world, is active in the threads. There’s also an Alexandrite feedback post.
Open discussion
This is the monthly meta thread, 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. Got questions? Ask’em!
Hi!
I’m new here and have no business telling anyone how to do anything.
That said, every time I see the description for the !climate community I get a bit twitchy. It says “truthful information about climate, related activism, and politics”. One thing that’s become clear living in this post-truth world is that “true” can be very difficult to nail down.
I guess a single statement can be true as in “today is Thursday” but information can never really be a complete truth because for complex concepts, particularly climate change, we just don’t have all the details (although we have enough data to draw conclusions confidently).
Another issue is, there can be multiple perspectives of the truth. People with different predispositions can form different conclusions from the same facts.
I guess I’m wondering what others think about the term “truthful” and whether there might be a better alternative like “authoritative” or “reliable” or some term that doesn’t have the same baggage.
Regardless, it’s not my intention to be critical. Go team!
I would up using that language because of a history of reddit having several communities dedicated to promoting falsehoods about climate. I’m very much aware of the limitations of both my knowledge and human knowledge.
I suppose it helps to qualify what you say. But then it may become quite unreadable.
Even “Today is Thursday” is questionable. Where is it today? Do you mean right now, right here? What calendar? Somewhere it’s already Friday. The “day” is just rolling around the earth, etc. It’s more defensible to say at the time of posting this it is Thursday in California.
The philosophy people have a thing where you posit a thesis and then present counter arguments, and then counter these again (and, in medival time, counter the ones that are non-dogmatic once again to make sure you don’t get burned alive).
The Chinese had a seven legged essay, I think it went back and forth 7 times, and the conclusion was left up to the educated reader, in contrast to scientific paper standard today where we explicitly state the conclusion.
Exploring and to some extent preempting counterarguments may be helpful in any case.