In an ideal world I would love to, but in this world I prefer strict anonymity. At least for now. I hope that’s okay. There are a lot of details beyond geographic location that I also restrict.

This is a line I drew for my own well-being after multiple encounters with unstable people IRL and on social media. It’s not worth the worry for me.

With that said, I encourage others to ask questions if they want more specifics on anything. I’ll either answer or explain why I don’t want to. I would also be comfortable comparing/contrasting in more detail if other users were participating in similar conversations.

I’ve started harvesting from my garden (started from scratch ~2 years ago) and I’ve gotten some nice specimens, but yields were low. Some plants didn’t make it to harvest, some didn’t mature enough, and some didn’t fruit. My soil started with almost no nutrition and I’m doing this on a - quite frankly - very cheap budget; I haven’t done another soil test but it’s pretty clear I need to further improve the soil. I’ll run another test, grab some fertilizers and spread them out hopefully later this year.

I’m looking to adapt the soil to the plants but also the plants to the soil to some extent, so I’ve been keeping an eye out on what grows without much soil improvement. There’s definitely a few. More did well with the vegetative stage than the flowering stage (due presumably to a lack of phosphorous).

The things I’m growing in pots are generally doing pretty well, but they require a lot of watering (the whole garden does - without a reservoir system, if running water goes out people’s gardens will soon follow).

I tend to give things a little more shade these days than I would have when I was younger. Maybe I’m being counter-productive but it seems like I see more sunburn and drying out here/now. At some point I should take measurements but I don’t have time right now.

The weather was harsh at times for the spring/summer seasons. I have above average windbreaks and eliminated standing water so I didn’t lose too many plants.

I’ve had a lot of opportunist “weeds” crop up in areas of disturbed soil. They do very well at all stages haha. I let some grow for awhile to let them improve the soil in various ways, and then pulled anything non-native.

I’ve had lots of baby trees popping up, too. I keep mowing to a minimum. I let some stay, move others, and generally avoid getting rid of them as much as I can. But there’s a lot. I might have to start a business selling them lol. Anyway, there are reasons that people turn to famine foods in famine - because they’re the only thing that grows. A pretty simple concept, but probably not something we usually think about while mowing.

I’m not looking forward to moving pots in/out with the seasons changing. I also have propagations to tend to, and need to prepare more.

Not a bad season overall. I have some seed lineages I’m excited to continue. Modern conveniences make all of this possible, at least without other infrastructure prepped. Certain weather instabilities have definitely been a hassle although nothing was too extreme so far this year. Let’s see long how that lasts.

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If you want to start growing plants inside and plan to move them outside, do yourself a favor and invest in a proper light timer. I’ve been surprised by how many supposedly non-photoperiod plants can really struggle with a sudden day period mismatch.

Also be mindful of getting plants too warm and then moving them to a cooler outdoor environment, as that really messes up their seasonality. (That’s probably common sense but I thought I might as well point it out.)

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As the argument of population control is one I think not at all worth having for many of reasons, such as, you just can’t do much about it!

I’ve often argued a similar line. This topic is notorious for bringing out bad-faith posters trying to shape the narrative. Sometimes it seems hardly worth discussing to me as well. Especially among redditors which is what I was used to for many years. But to not be able to discuss it at all is too much for me as a mod, especially when those who would take advantage of us discuss it freely.

And it will become reality easy enough if it becomes mandatory and that’s sad enough.

My concern is that there are still different ways that this can all go down, and that we aren’t charting towards handling the crisis in a wise and humane manner. We’re basically blindly following capitalists into the void. And acting “naively” (following systemic biases) is not moral or ethical in our position. People are already dying of exposure today, in our local communities and around the world. It is the most disadvantaged that suffers most and it will continue to be that way unless something is changed.

But I guess if we find ourselves truly not welcome here anymore than it seems we would just have to move with you guys.

Whatever works best for everyone involved.

@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.

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