Collapse

@eleitl and I have been members of the wider collapse community for quite awhile - since around 2009 for me. I am a member of multiple communities, each many times larger and more active than this one (although I'm particularly fond of the userbase here).

We've seen collapse communities prosper and we've seen them falter. The tension between users, mods, and admins is nearly a constant. Despite those tensions, more and more people join these spaces every year because they still find value in them. One of the common discussions that triggers these tensions is the Limits to Growth.

That conversation has been going on since '72 and it's not about to stop. If this is an issue now then it will continue to be one moving forward. Personally I do think it's something important to discuss (how could it not be?), I know many other Marxists who agree, and I believe that in most cases the community has successfully held these conversations while self-moderating (including the work of the mod team) against ecofascists and right-wing trolling, brigading, etc. Successful as compared to how other communities handle it, at least. Temporal population limits themselves have never been the primary focus of discussion, and as a moderator I would not allow that focus to develop because such myopia is not productive for understanding our holistic situation.

Many of us come from spaces that can generally handle these challenges to our consensus standard. Our much more frequent complaint (on other sites) is admin censorship over the merits of such things as introducing rent-seekers to guillotines. I don't mean to say that opinion in these spaces are perfect but in my experience, far-right propaganda gets proliferated on more reactionary forums (such as the front page and climate change subreddits which are largely captured). The collapse channels in recent years, on the other hand, are where those talking points are often dunked on and resoundingly refuted by informed users.

I love the people I've interacted with on lemmy and I am interested in supporting an even better space for discussing collapse in the fediverse. I don't want anyone to have to feel alone as they deal with a firehose of lies around sustainability, as I had to do for many years. My only real interest here is creating a safe space for people with both empathy and collapse-awareness.

Our current hosts are not entirely comfortable with the prospect of us navigating these complexities skillfully. From our brief discussions in the removed thread, it appears that they think we are already failing to do so. And that is their right as admins! It is certainly possible for low-quality collapse-related discussions to turn into genocidal echo chambers - I see them all the time lately in non-collapse-related forums - and while I trust in the community here, the admins are under no obligation to undertake that risk.

As developers, however, they gave us a graceful solution: Federation allows us to move to an instance that will be more comfortable hosting us. That reduces tensions for everyone. It's a win for all parties involved as far as I can tell.

I appreciate our admins/devs. I am not particularly concerned about our differences of opinions from my side of things, but I also don't want to give them headaches or create any more hard feelings - I'd rather just get out of their hair.

If anyone feels they got the short end of the deal, I encourage them to reach out and I will do whatever I can to make amends. I know that is not ideal, but it is what I can offer.