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!
I feel like these discussions should be separate posts, since a lot of the comment threads are kind of unwieldy.
Doomers: I would make part of our code of conduct an agreement to avoid non-constructive negativity.
Civil disobedience: I think the code of conduct should include a requirement not to speak in a way that could incriminate anyone or inspire harm against specific people. I think this is broad enough to take care of the worst concerns while still allowing people to debate the merits of industrial sabotage philosophically.
Vegans: I would make a rule against community gatekeeping. This should be sufficient to address anyone who tells someone that their diet or lifestyle disqualifies them from participating in this community, without singling out any specific diet or lifestyle choice.
Yeah, but having a lot of local sticky threads is also annoying. I just wish Lemmy 0.18.3 hadn't introduced this bug that breaks loading deeply nested comments ๐คทโโ๏ธ
We need to brainstorm a bit how to formulate this in the CoC so that it does not single out vegans but still makes it clear what we discussed in this thread. I would like to avoid adding a lot of examples to keep it short and to the point. Otherwise no one reads it.
What do you think of discouraging it through a provision against gatekeeping? Along with basic requirements to be civil, that would seem to me to cover most cases in which anyone -- vegan or otherwise -- is acting in a hostile manner towards others.
Would it be possible to have the CoC short but with links to explicitely non-exhaustive examples for what is meant by each point?
Maybe links to screenshots with blocked out user names?
These are all very well worded! They address the issues without being overly restictive.