SLRPNK Community Discussion - August 2026

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 🌟

• !tidalpunk@slrpnk.net - A community to discuss news about our oceans & seas, marine conservation, sustainable aquatic tech, and anything related to Tidalpunk - the ocean-centric subgenre of Solarpunk.
• !detrashed@slrpnk.net - For community cleanups, magnet fishing hauls, tools, technologies, news, and more!
• !alt_bike@slrpnk.net - A place to discuss alternative cycling, bike parts, and showing off your unique style. The weirder the better!

📸 Meta Post Image 🎞️

66 Signs of Neon was a traveling exhibit of works of assemblage from the ruins of the 1965 Watts riots in Los Angeles, California. The riots, incited on August 11th by police brutality towards a black man and his mother, were the culmination of years of racial discrimination, police abuse, housing segregation, and economic injustice. The violence lasted 6 days and the California National Guard was mobilized to contain the rebellion, killing 34 people. After the fires smouldered, $40 million ($425 million adjusted for inflation) in property had been destroyed.

Headed by Noah Purifoy, the artists collected tons of debris from the wreckage of demolished buildings and re-assembled it. The resulting sculpture memorialized as well as communicated and interpreted the event to a wider audience.

The assemblage of junk illustrated for the artists the imposition of order on disorder, the creation of beauty from ugliness. Its analog was the essence of communication…The reason for being in our universe is to establish communication with others, one to one. And communication is not possible without the establishment of equality, one to one.

-- From the catalog “Junk Art, 66 Signs of Neon”.

From 1966 and 1971, the exhibit educated, awed, and inspired people. It began as a small event at a local High School, then traveled to many California state universities before traveling throughout the United States and finally Internationally.

Martin Luther King Jr. famously said, "a riot is the language of the unheard" - art provides a nonviolent medium for communities to speak, and if their audience is receptive, to be heard.

Art of itself is of little or no value if in its relatedness it does not effect change. We do not mean change in the physical appearance of things, but a change in the behavior of human beings.

-- Noah Purifoy

👾 Canvas Recap 👾

For those who missed it; the 2026's Fediverse Canvas Event is a collaborative artwork where any fediverse account can join in and place a single pixel every 30 seconds on a 500x500 sized blank canvas for 48 hours. This limitation requires that communities work together to create larger works of art, as well as encourage communication and collaboration with neighboring artworks and their communities.

We missed last year's canvas event, but this year managed to catch an announcement post for it, and quickly began to organize, ultimately deciding on 3 different artworks proposed by our members.

Choosing an initial spot to land our art was an important step, as it's possible to be overrun by competing artworks laying claim the same area. A chance contact with members from the Pawb.Social lemmy instance ultimately decided our spot, as they were more than willing to have us as neighbors. This alliance drastically altered the outcome of our experience for the better, with many of them offering essential help, including advice on how to allow all our members to see an overlay of the canvas with our templates already placed (shout out to the absolute legend @KoboldCoterie@pawb.social), as well as helping us secure our spot and assisting us in drawing our artworks (which we gratefully returned in mutual aid). I'm also quite pleased to say that we enjoyed our alliance so much, we've planned to join them as allies once again in next year's canvas event.

To see the final state of the canvas and what we managed to create, click here. There is also a video timelapse of the entire event here on Peertube.

After the event concluded, the organizer @grant@toast.ooo updated the stats of the event to CanvasStats.com, which allows us to see exactly where and how our instance members participated in the event. This showed that 2026 was our most active year on Canvas, with 9188 pixels placed by 20 slrpnk members, making us the 9th most active instance out of a total of 96!

The 2026 Canvas Atlas is also now available, which not only lets you scroll through the event as time progressed (with the bar at the bottom), it also lets users encircle a piece of work to give added context of what it is or what its about when moused over. I added context to our Slrpnk logo and Turtle Flag already, but if anyone else wants to add some details for any other artworks, feel free! :).

It was a really fun event this year, and particularly wonderful to see your ideas and proposals slowly appear on the board, as well as the fun adhoc art, such as @reallykindasorta@slrpnk.net's cute solar powered turtle tree, @benjirenji@slrpnk.net's Flag of Humanity, and @faythofdragons@slrpnk.net's sunflower meadow, which took on a life of its own and spread across the canvas as other users spotted it, helping it grow into a thriving patch of green teeming with color.

Doesn't get much better than that. Thanks again to everyone who participated this year, and to our furry friends over at Pawb.social!

🌄 Sunsetting of our Alexandrite frontend 🌅

As recently discussed, we are planning to sunset unmaintained alternative frontends. Originally we thought we had to remove the Mlmym (old.slrpnk.net) and the Alexandrite frontend, as both original projects have not been maintained for more than a year now and thus are posing an increasing security risk due to the use of outdated and know to be insecure libraries. In addition the soon upcoming Lemmy 1.0 version is making some significant changes to the client API and thus it is only a question of time before these unmaintained frontends will start breaking. Luckily it turned out that there is a still actively maintained fork of the Mlmym project, which we are using now, but sadly the Alexandrite frontend seems to be fully abandoned. We thus plan to shut it down later this month.

🔋 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 68.92€/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).