Hi, not sure if this is the right place for this, but - I come to slrpnk.net to talk with people about solarpunk ideas and actions, but my dash is frequently filled with endless news stories. If I wanted to read upsetting news, I would… go read the news. Climate in particular has almost no discussion about climate change or actions we can take and only news articles. I’ve been thinking of blocking the community so that I don’t have to sift through news stories to get to posts by members of our community. Does anyone else feel like this?
(Note: this isn’t to say that I’m ungrateful for the folks sharing the news articles. I do appreciate it! I just feel that for myself, I’d rather focus on the possibilities that solarpunk has and human connection with others in this movement.)
The news is important to share, so I don’t want any less news. We still have people denying anything is even happening, hiding the reality away only exacerbates things. If we post news, someone otherwise ignorant of an issue may learn something when browsing all, if we don’t, that can’t happen.
I do agree the ratio of news versus other stuff could use some balancing though, but that’s on us all to find more good stuff to post (and keep posting) about rather than asking for less of the news.
Be the change you want to see!
The thing is, it’s a lot easier to copy and paste a news article than it is to make a new post from scratch - I think people are posting other stuff, or at least I am, but it gets drowned out pretty fast. I wonder if we could have a separate community for news articles? Or a sticky post for sharing news articles? I think the news is super important but I also think part of creating a space for change means that we need to foster discussion rather than doomscrolling