Just wanted to say thanks, I’ve read a lot of your posts and appreciated them.

My cards on the table, I’m absolutely against letting perfect be the enemy of good. I’m sick of people bickering over the right way to fix things rather than just doing something, even something small.

There’s a very twitteresque theme of endless nitpicking that I imagine is intended to showcase the speaker’s exceptional values that I have been glad to find mostly absent from this instance (it’s part of why I bounced hard off r/solarpunk back when. Nothing anyone did or shared was ever good enough or even a step in the right direction, nothing but utter perfection was sufficient for some of the members over there. There’s always room to strive for improvement but it’s exhausting reading about how nothing is ever good enough, so much so that it’s also a favorite tactic of conservatives trying to kill any conversation about change. It turned conversations about replanting land and solar initiatives as bleak and nihilist as the endless stream of bad news around climate change. They could always find something; any effort at improvement was secretly pointless or outright bad.

Hope is supposed to be what sets solarpunk apart.

I think it’s important to remember that this instance will be many people’s first exposure to the genre/movement, and that lots of people are coming to this space from different places. Trying to kick them out or shout them down because they haven’t reached the correct level of advanced veganism is going to cost us allies who might have gotten there eventually (or who might improve the world even if they don’t). I think people can do good while not doing everything perfectly and that at this point, we should encourage any progress we can get.

I wish them luck in finding or making a place where they won’t have to see this kind of thing. I think tailoring the instance to meet their demands (and they’re always only ever demands) won’t make the place more effective.

And if I’ve been unfair, well, I probably have. These complaints are bubbling up from far more interactions than with the folks in just this post, they just hit a very familiar theme.

Just a quick note: “Sam BOT” is a Reddit repost bot that mirrors highly upvoted external links from the /r/solarpunk subreddit.