Code of Conduct

This page is still a work in progress.

Also refer to the official CoC of the Lemmy project.

Tl;dr:

• Solarpunk is about looking towards brighter futures. Please try to find optimism in what can be very grim realities. This means moving away from doomer talk about how all hope is lost. We all know there are problems so lets work together to create solutions.

• Stay civil when talking to others. We all have different views, and many of us are passionate about them. This does not give you the right to insult, brigade, or bully another person. If something is truly harmful, disgusting or hateful, please report it to moderators so it can be removed.

• Activism puts the punk in Solarpunk. As all punks know though, some plans must be made in secret. Lemmy is an inherently open and accessible space. ANYONE can read when is written here: the FEDs, lawyers, even the company you might be planning to sabotage. Do not use this space to plan activist work. Use secure channels instead, such as an end to end encrypted messaging service.

• Encourage others to take positive steps, even if they are small ones. Lets lift each other up and make this a welcoming space for people to explore how we can make tomorrow a better place.

No gatekeeping

Comments that discourage others from participating, commonly referred to as "gatekeeping", especially on holier-than-thou moral grounds are not conducive to the welcoming community we want to establish. This does not mean that you can't point out something you find problematic, but it needs to be done in a way that respects the boundaries and believes of other people even if you might strongly disagree with them on a specific topic. If you consider something in violation of the community or overall site rules, please use the down-vote and report functions instead of commenting.

Discussing civil disobedience

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 direct action. However, Slrpnk.net is a public web-site and thus easily monitored by people that might be interested in reporting such discussions to the local authorities. Thus to protect this service and everyone using it, please refrain from planning discussions with specific targets or general calls for action against specific persons. Obviously, we can never condone violence against persons, but aside from that please be very careful with discussing climate activism on the clear-web and rather only use fully end to end encrypted communication channels with people you can trust!

End-of-the-world pessimism

Also commonly referred to as "doomer" mind-set, is one of the big current challenges Solarpunk tries to address. Obviously anyone not in total denial of the current situation, will have such dark thoughts from time to time. But instead of indulging in such a mind-set, or worse: spreading it in our community, we encourage you to privately reflect on the self-fulfilling-prophesy nature such thoughts. Furthermore, please do not engage in such self-reinforcing discussions when encountering them in our community. We might live in challenging times, but that is all the more a reason to raise to the challenge and do our best to address it.

Eco-fascism

Similar to the "doomer" mind-set, there are people that think that the climate-catastrophe can only be solved by a strong-man or authoritarian organisation enforcing extreme measures. These ideas often come in tandem with Social Darwinism, calls for non-consensual population control (or worse), simplified Malthusian theories and variations thereof based on outdated Club of Rome predictions etc. There can be also an overlap with Primitivism and proponents of these ideas are not always aware how close their discourse is to outright fascism. Solarpunk is the very anti-thesis to these ideas.

Down-vote etiquette 

Down-votes are not to be used as a popularity contest, but rather to help with soft content moderation. Especially in the comment section when for example engaging in a back and forth discussion about a topic you find yourself in disagreement with the other participants, it doesn't help anyone if you down-vote all the other comments. Please only down-vote posts or comments that you consider to be off-topic or otherwise irrelevant or harmful to the community. Organized down-voting, especially when utilizing accounts from other servers, is also strongly discouraged and will result in a ban or even de-federation. In this context, please be aware that all votes on the ActivityPub network are public even if this is not visible in the Lemmy web-interface.