October 2026 Update
Welcome to this month's Anarchist.Nexus update! As always, if you have anything to add, please do so in the comments.
Editor (@qull7513)'s Note
The following was composed by @y0kai@anarchist.nexus . I promise I'm not cracking up and writing in the third person. As @y0kai@anarchist.nexus mentions below, I was a little too busy this week to write our update. I will open up to you what is going on, as it actually has some bearing on my portion of the update. Here in Appalachia our little group of Friends, Comrades, and Allies have run into a breakdown in communication surrounding one of our Neighbor's actions, and how we respond to this not through the structures of white supremacy and punitive criminal justice that pervades the United States ever since the house of burgesses was established in 1612 to extract as much capitalist value from the land of Turtle Island as possible. Additionally I have been working on setting up a warm clothes distro to help our local unhoused neighbors survive the winter, as well as restore some of their stolen and destroyed property from the police.
@y0kai@anarchist.nexus also had something to attend to (making sure loved ones know they're loved), so he passed this back to me. I'm doing something very rude right now by further editorializing that which I felt I didn't have time to do to say that I always enjoy speaking with @y0kai@anarchist.nexus , and I think he's a delight. I also take seriously that he writes about me like I'm really cool and try to live up to being as cool as he seems to think I am. I've also been learning from a Potawatomi elder how to better celebrate eachother in these spaces, so I am in this moment trying to treat him how she treats me. Additionally, this week, I have given special public appreciation to @tenchiken@anarchist.nexus and Mia on Matrix that deserves to be preserved here where information is more visible long term. None of what makes the threadiverse so enjoyable for me would be possible without them, and I am truly grateful to refer to them as "Friend" and hope to someday break bread with them and call them "friend."
Hi everyone, like last month, Quill is pretty heavily involved in his local community’s struggles and has asked me to write the update.
AN has updated to Pylova v0.5.0 v0.5.1
Kudos to the lovely Mia
As I was writing this update, we moved from Pylova v0.5.0 to v0.5.1. You may notice the header on our site still says Pylova v0.3. This is evidence of just how much hard work Mia (@quokka@quokk.au) has been putting into this platform every day. She pushes useful new updates to the platform faster than the admins can keep up with updating our own headings. For this, we feel recognition and a thank you is necessary *at the very least. *I have reached out to her to see if she has a donation link she would like to share, but at the time of posting, she had not yet replied. I will update this section in the future with any links she provides.
New features in v0.5.0
New & Improved
- Shareable Blocklists: Users can create, maintain, and share block lists of users, communities, instances, or domains. Users can be hidden completely or muffled.
- Roles: Permissions have been changed into ‘Roles’, these offer expanded functionality. Admins can create multiple roles choosing what permissions they can be given, if any. As well as setting upload and storage limits, ability to post video, etc. Posts can be restricted to certain roles for matters of voting and commenting.
- Temporary Bans: Now users can be banned from an instance for a limited range of time. This also fixes the nasty bug that leads to temp bans from Lemmy never expiring on PieFed instances.
- Instance Chooser: Discovers new instances from Fediseer, as well as polling other instances. This removes any singular point of authority in seeding new instances and helps disperse discovery. Instances in the chooser also show Fediseer endorsements, and Fediseer tags can be searched for to help find instances based on content.
- New User Experience: New users are better presented topics when joining to help discover content, and a user with no subscriptions is shown a list of popular communities and feeds they may want to join.
Bug-Fixes & Misc
- Inline Comment Editing: Edit your comments without leaving your position on the conversation.
- Visual Changes: Small changes to create a more unified modern look.
- Bento Tiles: Masonry Tiles are revamped into Bento boxes, masonry-wide has been removed. Removed security issue in tiles.
- Instance Vote Settings: Admins can select if up/downvotes are accepted from an instance.
- Instance Overview: When browsing instances additional information about them is displayed.
- New Fonts: Ubuntu and Open Dyslexic have been added. Ubuntu is now the default font for new instances.
- New Post: Starting a new post no longer changes targetted community when switching post type, non-allowed post types are hidden if that community does not accept them.
- Themes: PhpBB and Trans theme are currently removed awaiting some much needed fixing, they will return in the future.
New features in v0.5.1
Aside from minor tweaks and fixes, you’ll now find a new Transparency page, as well as a new admin setup wizard.
In addition to Mia’s python sorcery, Tenchi has been on top of things all month. On top of keeping up with the Pylova rollouts, he has been tirelessly fighting bots, AI scrapers, issues with the database and federation just to keep the site running. It’s been a busy month for us all, and none of it would be possible without our Ten-chickens in a trenchcoat. So, if you see him around make sure you tell him thank you or send him a picture of a chinchilla doing some thing cute, or a few dollars, he’d probably like that too.
Time for a new Logo
With all this talk of Pylova, which is a Phythonic play on the word Pavlova, a delicious merengue dessert, one begins to wonder why we still have a pie in our logo. The answer to that, for anyone who has been around for more than a few weeks, should be obvious. Pylova is a piefed fork and AN used to run on piefed.
The time has come though, for a new design. Piefed’s time has come and gone for us and we’d like to have something that fits us bit better.
A call to action for artists
While we may not use anything that comes in, we are asking anyone who would like to submit a proposal for the new logo design. I won't offer guidance on what this should new logo should look like, other than that it should be recognizable as an icon when sized the same as the current pie logo. Obviously we'd want it to be memorable pretty, and related to the site and its mission.
If possible (contingent on submissions and a bit more work from Mia, probably), we have discussed hosting a rotation of submissions that would load a different logo each time the page reloads.
To make a submission, do art, then comment it here, or in a DM, or on one of our Matrix channels.
When not preoccupied with fighting fascists, Quill has also been spending some time reading. In his absence he has left us with some notes he has taken. A trigger warning: Rape is discussed in this short synthesis, although purely as a concept.
Quill's Notes: The Broken Teapot
It is important for our support to be real and not performative. We must support each other in deed, and not just in language. This means we cannot follow algorithms in how we structure our accountability — methodologies need to be dynamic enough to not be useful bludgeons in patterns of abuse and revenge. And as we navigate what accountability means for us, we must remember that we arrive into these spaces born into a fucked up world. In every situation, we must center context and avoid trapping ourselves in orthodoxies that we stringently abide.
Abuse is a dynamic between parties — a form of relationship structure. Other unhealthy forms can lead to abuse, and abuse can lead to other unhealthy structures. Examples include jealousy and obsession, which can go unnoticed by the people experiencing it because of the addictive nature of how good it feels to be the object of another's obsession. A common pattern that has arisen in anarchist spaces is avoiding confrontation in order to protect people's feelings. But this approach disregards people's agency as moral actors. We must instead value healthy direct confrontation — it fosters new understandings, cathartic release, and eventually forgiveness.
We cannot truly create safe spaces in a world as broken as the one we live in. The best we can do for each other is to respect each other's autonomy. Processes must not neuter confrontation to overvalue mediation, and consequences ought not have their roots in the pool of police coercion.
When we apply labels like "abuser" and "survivor" to people as mutually exclusive signifiers, we coerce ourselves into treating people without the full nuance they deserve as human beings. This reduction of nuance removes the power of healing from all who need it, and thus is itself an expression of violence. Perp/survivor structuring defaults us into black-and-white thinking that eliminates nuance and places us into the same mental approach as the patriarchal hierarchies we are resisting. The goal should be healing for all parties involved.
Harm is a spectrum. Some harms are more violent than others, but all harms are serious and deserve serious treatment. Making small tweaks within the overall structure of the system we exist in will only make aesthetic changes in our language without addressing the roots of how these problems arise. Addressing harm must center harm reduction, harm prevention, and healing — and how a community fosters these activities is through empathy.
What could I have done to not have hurt this person?
If someone hurts another person and they are not emotionally present in the aftermath, it is impossible to take their feelings into consideration. We need to focus not on blaming others or ourselves, but on making things better.
Part of what makes rape so horrible is it disregards someone's will to self-determination. When we ask questions about rape, we must focus on how to prevent the conditions that allowed it — not speculating on situations outside our ability to influence. Our brains experience memories in non-linear time and can fabricate memories to fit our current experiences while tying them to real traumas. Consent is a dynamic framework of communication and part of a healthy sexual practice — giving and receiving consent is fun when it's done well.
A community is a network of inter-dependencies. Part of getting better at addressing harm is understanding that sometimes we won't ever be able to reach a satisfactory consensus about a situation or a person, and that conflict is not an inherently bad thing. It is better to be flexible and knowledgeable than it is to be consistent.
There are no easy answers, no perfect categories. The world we live in demands flexibility, compassion, intelligence, bravery, and patience.
The D Quuuuuill says more stuff about consent, empathy, and moral agency:
These are not notes on any particular reading, but instead a reflection on what it means to put the above into praxis with others. They can be thought of as being notes I took in my own real life about what it means to be me
I just read through y0kai's notes on my notes, and I found myself in a really funny position. It was an extremely accurate condensation of what I had written, which itself was a condensation of what I had been reading when I wrote it. However, I also found myself thinking the person who had written them (myself) had been naive. I still stand by all of them, but they have some VERY challenging nuances when put into practice in real life that I'm still navigating and formulating. When I wrote what I sent y0kai, I had just spent the whole weekend locked in my house reading and writing and reading and thinking. Since then, I've spent my entire week existing in space with my neighbors trying to address the very same problems that had me thinking about all this. One thing we're finding is that in order to follow this advice on how to approach accountability is that empathy alone is not enough. With empathy, but no strong sense of self, you become vulnerable to manipulation tactics weaponized against your empathy. So I would add the additional addendum to the above that when you are starting a process of community healing, to make sure you spend some time healing yourself. To love other people enough to seek they redress the issues they have caused in your life, you have to love yourself enough to know what it is your relationships with other people should look like rather than letting yourself fall into toxic patterns just because they feel good in the moment. You need to have the self confidence to communicate with the world what your needs and boundaries are, and you must have the strength of resolve to act against those who disregard your needs and boundaries, as well as the needs and boundaries of anyone you love.
Anyone who tells you this will be easy is full of shit. All of this is really hard. You will have to contend with that some people will want to trend toward carceral solutions. You will need to contend with that some people will want to avoid having there being any consequences at all, mistaking consequences for punishment. I don't have answers for you. I don't know that answers exist. If anyone has any philosophical or practical theory they want to send my way, I actually welcome it.
EDIT: Late breaking! Please help donate to the development of !pylova@quokk.au here
