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.
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 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:
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.
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 68.72โฌ/month in donations from 13 people, which is covering most of our recurring expenses. Thanks a lot!
Now itโs your turn to share whatever youโd like down below; your thoughts, ideas, concerns, hopes, or anything related to the server. If you have a new community youโd like to shine a spotlight, shine away! If youโre a new user wanting to say hi, feel free to post an introduction :)
SLRPNK Community Resources:
๐๏ธ Meta Archive ๐ฐ
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.
โฌ Union Resources ๐ฅ
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!
May have beed asked already but what is the relationship between f-hub and slrpnk?
I see the donations are related, so is it hosted/maintained by the same people?
Yes. Well the history is that I (the current main technical admin here) was working on non-fediverse community hosting efforts mainly related to FOSS game development communities (since the early 00s). Sometimes in the late 10s we also started experimenting with fediverse software like Hubzilla, but it never got very far.
But at some point the original founder of SLRPNK (who got free hosting from the Lemmy devs in the early days), wanted to shut down or hand over the site and as I was already helping out as a moderator since some months, we agreed that I would take over the site.
Given that I was now administrating multiple sites with a much broader scope (also an unrelated Akkoma instance) and was interested in also hosting a federated git forge, the idea came up to start a more technical umbrella org that f-hub.org aims to be. Practically it isn't anything official though and just composed of me and some occasional volunteer contributors. Maybe I will try to turn it into some sort of worker's cooperative in the future, but that is unlikely to happen any time soon.
f-hub should really be renamed the ExxonMobil Holding Corporation so that if the US imposes sanctions on it, as just happened to an Italian operation, the silly pattern matching implementation of those sanctions completely trips up a fossil fuels firm.
Ah awesome, thank you for the back story as well!
Anyone taking any solarpunk actions this month?
Weโre excited to be getting a battery for our solar system installed, and just today Iโve made new connections through my community time bank (Iโm going to be officiating a non-traditional wedding, and possibly getting a much-needed haircut).
Also our tomato plants are popping off, new to gardening (first year getting anything usable out of it) and Iโm DELIGHTED. Had some on a grilled egg and cheese sandwich with mayo for lunch today, it was edible art.
Hell yeah, tomato harvests are new to me as well, relatively. It's been super addicting to maximize my garden yield in my small space as the years go by. I'm growing shit loads of San Marzano, Sweet 100, and red jewel varieties this year. It's a good year.
I forget the name of our variety but we got a bit of a late start this year so I chose a fast growing option. We have space to do more but it feels difficult to go from 0 to 100% garden with no experience. Hoping to keep ramping up year over year until we basically have no lawn and a full food forest.
San Marzano are great! Are you growing anything besides tomatoes? We have handful of peppers. Hoped to do watermelons but they didn't take off for some reason.
There are so many tomato varieties, it's still a bit overwhelming to me.
We began with a tomato starter when we moved to the pnw three years ago in our tiny backyard. It took over the entire porch by winter, lmao. I got hooked!
The next year we ripped out all the bulb flowers and put them out front and grew a couple more tomatoes. They also did amazing, we had the best tomatoes ever for the entire harvest season and we're spoiled with salads galore.
This year we built some planters and trellises from scrap wood (non-cured) to get some more planting space. The neighbors see me biking to the grocery outlet for another bag of top soil constantly, it's hilarious.
We're growing tomatoes, cucumber, lettuce, bok choy, sunflowers, snap peas, and trained hops to grow over our overhang. Also have some herbs and peppers in pots but the latter aren't doing so hot, no pun intended. Far too small of fruits to be really usable. We're going to grow tons of garlic and onion over the fall and winter. I think we'll find ways to grow even more next year!
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
That welder is as punk as it gets:
I bet you feel the hair raise on your skin being within 10 feet of that. It's so cool
Is there a solarpunk mini-fiction community? I was thinking of something like 365 tomorrows, but Solarpunk.
We have !fiction@slrpnk.net and !writing@slrpnk.net, either of which would likely welcome your short stories :)
To find other local communities we have, be sure to take a look at our communities page ^^
Thanks. Strange that, I'm using photon and the search didn't turn anything up. Seems browsing communities is the go.
I love the continuity highlights in the monthly discussions. I feel like I get a new community to subscribe to every month.
Once again, thank you for running the place for us.
I'd love some context for that sweet bike in the photo.
The context is in the Meta Post Image section, below community highlights :)
Completely glossed over that somehow, thanks.
EDIT: the link, nor the domain in the link text work, sadly... What happened there?
EDIT2: The rat-patrol.org domain decided to resolve after a second try. hmm...
EDIT3: that site is fucky for me, but here's another source: http://www.chicagofreakbike.org/2004_04_01_archives.php
the rat bikes link seems to load okay for me, but unfortunately all but the first two images do not appear to load.
I was able to see them on Firefox by right click > "open image in new tab" for some reason. Don't ask me why it works that way
Huh, that works for me too. Good find!
Here we can discuss anything about this Lemmy instance/server itself.
Our XMPP support chat: Movim or XMPP client.