Monero is an also-ran cryptocurrency, in the same proof-of-work family as Bitcoin and Etherium.
Monero.town is a Lemmy instance whose main communities are: Monero, privacy, Monero Memes, Meta, and Monero Mining.
Enough has been written on the negative ecological effects of proof-of-work based cryptocurrency that I think it's not controversial to say it is incompatible with the Solarpunk vision.
Pictured inciting incident is a person advertising the crypto-capitalist Lemmy competitor "Nostr" in the anarchism community.
I don't personally mind a debate about Nostr, but like most of the content from Monero.town, it doesn't belong here. More sales pitches from a crypto-currency hype instance are going to be tedious, and crowd out the kind of progressive politics and human interactions we're looking to nurture here. Reddit's /r/anarchism had to constantly repel assholes trying to pass off their edgy capitalism as anarchist, Lemmy gives us the unique opportunity to send a strong message and nip this in the bud.
Fediverse sites that have already blocked Monero.town --
reject (10): solarpunk.moe, polyglot.city, freethought.online, icosahedron.website, sunbeam.city, vtuber.house, fruef.social, cutie.city, fuckcars.social, karas.social
followers_only (3): toot.cat, orbsafe.masto.host, partyparrot.social
Image Description
[Image description: Screenshot of an exchange between user Jack@Monero.Town and Five containing the following text
Yea, that’s just not how Nostr works. Take a look here: https://github.com/nostr-protocol/nips These are implementation possibilities that the protocol enables. Every client must implement NIP-01. All of the other NIPs are optional so every client that you use (an app for example) has decided to implement different NIPs. You decide which client you use and how Nostr should feel like. Almost no client prioritizes content that received bitcoin.
Your “login mechanism” (private cryptographic key) has nothing to do with cryptocurrency. If you want to send btc to people you have to set that up yourself, manually linking a wallet to your key.
Five
I’m confused why you’re downplaying Nostr’s primary selling point - its close integration with Bitcoin. It’s clearly a cryptocurrency capitalist con job.
Almost no client prioritizes content that received bitcoin.
That’s not what I was saying, but I’m fascinated that you’re implying it’s much worse than I anticipated. Which clients have their priority linked to received bitcoin? ]
Defederation doesn't make a place disappear from the internet, although exploding-heads is shutting down at the end of the month as apparently they got frustrated with being defederated everywhere (which reveals a lot about the real purpose of that instance).
But what I mean is: do you have any examples of monero.town users causing actual problems here on slrpnk.net or harassing people via DMs?
I remember only one such occasion and when I got in contact with the monero.town admin it was resolved pretty well on their end, so I currently don't really see an urgent need to defederate them here.
Of course there is the option to defederate as a statement of some sort, and I did so for Facebook's Threads, but as much as I think cryptocurrencies are poisoning the well, I think that monero.town is not really comparable to Facebook etc.
Yeah, Monero.Town is small fries in comparison to the damage Threads could do to the culture here. That was a good call.
It is still an evangelist instance; I'd put it in the same category as Hexbear. Their users have a message that they're heavily invested in, and that's all they want to engage other instances about. The post in anarchism is a particularly egregious shoe-horn because of the history of capitalist entryism in anarchist spaces. I've heard Hexbear's admins are cooperative as well, but that doesn't change the nature of the sub.
The tipping point for me was reading the admin's opinion of instances that have defederated already:
My instinct is to express solidarity with anyone a capitalist calls 'small snowflakes,' especially because we're a larger instance. Crypto-currency groups have a toxic culture problem, and maybe slrpnk.net defederation will be a wake-up call; probably not. But in any case, fewer of our people will have to put up with it.