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!
About the /c/collapse sub, I like the idea that Robert Evans uses, of not referring to "collapse" but instead "the crumbles" - podcast link. The point is it's not going to be a single moment and it's not going to be absolute, so the idea of it being a thing that either will happen or won't happen is a false dichotomy.
It's a slow, inexorable process of change and that implies that rather than a landslide that will just fall on us all without any hope for remedy, it's a process whose path we can influence and change. Maybe you could close /c/collapse and create /c/the_crumbles or something like it? Maybe explain the purpose of the rename and put some resources in the sidebar to ideas about radical hope and practical ways people can help. I also think directing people's despair in that direction can only be a good thing.
I wish I could volunteer to moderate something like that but I'm afraid I can't really give the time or consistent energy to it. It's just an idea :)
Maybe c/crumbling
edit: c/rumbling
Yeah, I think that's better. "The Crumbles" is dramatic but it doesn't quite flow so well as a community name.
Makes me think of a dessert
To your edit: Why not both? /c/rumbling would definitely develop a theme of shitposts about people getting into playfights. I say go for it.
I think if we look at the fall of past civilizations, we'll notice that they don't disappear in one day, but rather slowly... crumble, with occasional events that precipitate the decline suddenly, only to return to a more steady pace, with society changing and evolving around the differences. There's also always the chance to change and build something new from the remains of what was.