Each month, we create a post to keep you abreast of news and happenings regarding the server, discuss recent events, and to act as town square for the community.

🌟 Community Highlights 🌟

  • !fixing@slrpnk.net - Celebrating/talking about repairing stuff, the right to repair stuff, and the intersection of tech and solarpunk ideals.
  • !selfhosting@slrpnk.net - Hosting your own services. Preferably at home and on low-power or shared hardware.
  • !reclamation@slrpnk.net - A place to discuss and learn about the restoration of disturbed lands to desirable end land uses

📸 Meta Post Image: Asante-Akim Center for Non-Motorized Transport 🎞️

People of rural Ghana organized a school for teaching how to chop, weld, and re-assemble bicycles to better meet the needs of rural Africa. The Asante-Akim Center for Non-Motorized Transport takes its inpiration from punk bike chopping groups in the United States and Europe.

These bikes not only look cool, but are better suited to the poor roads and Jungle environment. Photo from ratbikes.org.

🌏 World Carfree Day / In town, without my car! Events September 21-28 🚴

World Car-Free day is Tuesday September 22nd. At SLRPNK we’d like to draw a little more attention to this holiday, and see it celebrated even more widely and internationally. Like all good holidays, it has its roots in civil disobedience.

In 1961, Jane Jacobs wrote The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She was one of the organizers of demonstrations that saved a popular public park in New York City from being turned into more road for cars. She was inspired by both the Garden City and City Beautiful movements before her, and her book and methods were internationally influential.

The Netherlands had seen the precursor to car-free days as a response to oil price shocks during the Suez Crisis, and anti-car sentiment has festered due to speeding vehicles in narrow city streets. Late one night in 1968, neighbors in Groningen took pickaxes and shovels to sections of their street to create intentional barriers that cars had to slow to navigate around. Despite official resistance, the civil disobedience movement to create “Woonerfs” or “Living Streets” spread, and in 1972 the first official Woonerf was constructed in Delft.

The Dutch lead the way in re-envisioning cities without cars through the 1970s, but the idea became internationally popular. People began organizing yearly car-free days, with the intention to explore other ways of organizing city life without the use of personal motor vehicles. Car-free days and automobile restraint in Urban planning goes hand in hand.

In one famous case in Jakarta, Indonesia, Car-free day is a weekly event. On Sunday mornings, several streets into the city are barred from use by traffic. They become popular paths for pedestrians and cyclists who come to the city for Sunday events. Initially it was planned to occur only 3 times a year in 2007, but as interest and infrastructure around the event grew, it became a weekly event only 5 years later. The streets used for this purpose have become more pedestrian-friendly as their use by pedestrians grew.

The most popular day for yearly Car-free days is September 22nd. In french-speaking countries, it is called “En ville, sans ma voiture” or “In town, without my car” - but the concept is the same. What ever the concept is called in your locality, we would like to boost it here as a Solarpunk holiday. Check out related communities for this event:

⛔️ Defederation with lemmy.devr.cc ⛔️

lemmy.devr.cc was abandoned by its admin and allowed for open sign-ups (no manual review of new applicants), resulting in it being used by advertiser bots and others posting illegal material, necessitating us defederating from it. As it’s a small instance with no active communities, the defederation is unlikely to effect any of our users.

🔋 How to Support SLRPNK.net 🌱

If you’d like to donate to SLRPNK to help cover Internet, electricity, and domain name costs, you can now send a one-time (just select do not auto-renew) or reoccurring donation via Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/F-hub.org/

Currently, F-hub.org and thus SLRPNK is receiving 68.72€/month in donations from 13 people, which is covering most of our recurring expenses. Thanks a lot!

💬 Open Discussion 💬

Now it’s your turn to share whatever you’d like down below; your thoughts, ideas, concerns, hopes, or anything related to the server. If you have a new community you’d like to shine a spotlight, shine away! If you’re a new user wanting to say hi, feel free to post an introduction :)

SLRPNK Community Resources:

  • Community Wiki - Moderators, you can create your own Wiki here for your communities!
  • Movim Chat - Open to all members (use your SLRPNK login credentials)
  • Etherpad - Collaborative document editor (we are currently looking for an alternative for this as the Etherpad project has started to use LLMs for development quite heavily).
🗃️ Meta Archive 📰

Our Monthly Meta posts are sometimes home to more in-depth sections written by our admins. Many of our newer members may not be familiar with some of the past guides, so for those interested, we’ve compiled a list below.

  • December 2024 - How to Prepare for a Fascist Regime
  • February 2025 - How to avoid Big Tech and maximize your digital security & privacy
  • June 2025 - A brief guide on Security Culture & Adopting FOSS as prefiguration
  • July 2025 - How to build community with fun projects!
⬛ Union Resources 🟥

These are unions from around the world who can train you to become an effective organizer to form a grassroots union with your co-workers!

      • MidwestSolarpunk@slrpnk.netEnglish
        4·
        3 days ago

        Oh I’m already in, on both platforms! I’m slowly but surely converting my grassy hellscape, it’s only like a fifth of an acre but I’m trying to go the permaculture/food forest route. A little more ornamental in the front than the back, but it’s come a long way since I started.

        Front yard: planted a native tree, expanded an existing bed with 20+ natives and berry bushes, added two large mulch beds with native plants and large ornamental rocks. Gutter-fed rain barrel, statically watering our busiest bed with a soaker hose. Plan to add a rain garden to capture some runoff from a drainage trench running down the side of the yard, plus a hang out spot with seating and a fire pit, ringed in plants.

        Side yard: my “rewilding” project, a narrow corridor between my carport and fence. I’ve boxed it off and sewn it with native seeds and other ornamental varieties, sunflowers took off the most this year but I’m going to keep chucking things at it until it’s basically an impassibly tall prairie. Two more rain barrels here, one with a soaker hose that runs through and the other that I use to fill watering cans.

        Back yard: built a wooden platform patio, two large-ish raised beds, two apple trees (they’ve been having a rough go of it), and two greenhouses (a small one that’s more of a staging area for seeds before they go into the large beds, and a bigger one where I hope to grow some hardier plants year round). The greenhouse also lets me capture yet more water. I have three more in-ground no till beds planned, maybe next year. I had some sun diffusion shades up that my plants seemed to love, but a tree branch took the larger of the two out during a storm a couple weeks ago, so I’ll have to replace that next year. If plug-in solar gets passed in my state, I might install some panels over my beds to get a little agrivoltaic action going. Not really related to the concept, but also hoping to squeeze in a hot tub in one corner. 😅

        • GreatWhiteBuffalo41@slrpnk.netEnglish
          3·
          2 days ago

          I love this! I just recently moved so I’m in the “why is this broken Jesus I need to fix these 3 things too?!” Phase of owning this house. Hoping next year to rip out the overgrown non native shrubs and start a small native pollinator garden and go from there. There’s like 3 Wild Ones chapters near me and several places that sell native only plants. I’m early excited about getting back into all this.

          • MidwestSolarpunk@slrpnk.netEnglish
            2·
            1 day ago

            I hear you. In just the last month we’ve had a run of bad luck: tree branch tearing down our service line (some siding repair $$ + tree needs trimmed & cabled $$$$), failed water heater (upgraded to heat pump $$$$), and overwhelmed sump pump causing slight basement flooding ($$$ DIY plus a lot of headache). We’d hoped to progress with our plans more this year but it’s just not in the cards.

            However, something I’ll say that saves a lot of money is propagation instead of buying new plants. Get cuttings from friends and neighbors, some rooting hormone, and just make new plants. Even adding a few to your yard can make a big difference for the pollinators!