There will be a short down-time (1-2h) for the upgrade to Lemmy version 0.19.6 this weekend, learn more about the changes here: https://join-lemmy.org/news/2024-11-08_-_Lemmy_Release_v0.19.6

The server on which our Movim, XMPP server and the Wiki runs will be down for 1 hour this weekend as I am swapping out the CPU and cooler for a stronger one.

SLRPNK Lemmy, the alternative frontends and the Etherpad will not be effected.

There will also be a few other short disruptions in the coming days as I am switching around a few other things with the hardware, but those should be only a few seconds to minutes at most.

Edit: Double-checking the specs I just now realized that I have to do it in a different way.

Edit2: Will still do a short maintenance to replace the CPU cooler, but not the CPU as the new one needs a different type of memory.

October 2024 meta post

October is upon us! And with it, a new Monthly Meta Post! Us admins check the comments to this post frequently, so in addition to having some of the latest news and announcements, it also acts as a sort of community square to discuss anything and everything related to the instance.

Onto the news of the month.

Communities in need of new mods

We regularly prune abandoned communities, but sometimes there are those that have been quite active in the past and would benefit from someone new taking the over and doing moderation. For example, these communities have seemingly inactive moderators:

• /c/composting
• /c/food
• /c/offgrid
• /c/birding
• /c/bootstrappable

So speak up if you would like to take over these communities as a mod, or maybe you are one of the mods of these communities and have just been lurking for several months? In both cases please let us know below, or otherwise we will consider pruning these communities next month.

Language specific Solarpunk communities

Since SLRPNK is primarily English speaking, we would like to take this opportunity to highlight some non-english Solarpunk communities on other Lemmy instances:

• Solarpunk francophone on jlai.lu
• Polish speaking Solarpunk community on szmer.info
• Solarpunk Lusófona on lemmy.eco.br
• Defunct German speaking Solarpunk community on feddit.de

If you know any others, please let us know in the comments.

If you are interested in opening a language specific Solarpunk community here on SLRPNK (and are willing to moderate it well, given we admins are likely unable to support in languages we don't speak), let us know and we can discuss the details. Some Asian language communities for example would probably cover an interesting niche that is currently not served at all.

Photon as primary frontend for SLRPNK? (Update)

As mentioned in last month's update, we are considering to move our Photon frontend to the domain root to replace the current frontend. @punkisundead was so kind to develop a custom color scheme for it, emulating our current theming. So far there seem to be no blockers for this switch and neither were there any objections, so we will probably go ahead in the coming weeks and do the switch. The current frontend will be moved to a sub-domain most likely, and remain accessible there for those who prefer it.

Technical Updates

The previous issues with the NVMe drives and the wiki have been resolved, and currently the server is running without issues. This leaves us with the opportunity to play around with some new stuff and maybe fix the remaining smaller login issues with the wiki. One plan is to improve the audio/video call features of our Movim instance. We currently don't run our own STUN/TURN infrastructure, making it fail to connect sometimes, but that should be a relatively simple addition. Furthermore, it would be a nice preparation for the peer-to-peer group-call feature that is likely to land in Movim before the end of the year. There is also a new Matrix to XMPP gateway that might be worth exploring. It would allow contacting Matrix users in 1:1 chats and for Matrix users to enter our XMPP group-chats. Due to technical issues with the Matrix network, we will probably disable the reverse to prevent overloading the resources of our server. The support for incoming 1:1 messages might be interesting as Lemmy currently only has built in support for Matrix accounts/addresses in the profile (although we would love if that would change).

On a side note: lemmy.eco.br is the first additional Lemmy instance that implemented our XMPP account linking script and now also offers XMPP accounts to all of their approximately 2000 members. If you know a Lemmy instance admin that might be also interested in this, please let us know and we are happy to help set it up. The needed Ejabberd server is very low resource use, so it can be run next to Lemmy without problems.

Open Discussion

It’s now your turn to tell us what’s new! Any topic related to this community, our infrastructure, or the Fediverse at large is fair game. If you’ve created a new community, this is a great thread to tell us about it. All comments will get extra visibility up until the beginning of next month. Got questions? Ask’em!

New Communities

This month two new communities sprouted from the SLRPNK soil: [email protected] by first time moderator @[email protected], and [email protected] by veteran contributor @[email protected].

We're excited for both of these communities. Hydroponics allows solarpunks to practice cultivation even in urban environments. It also appears Hydro's close relative Aquaponics (a closer to closed loop system that involves aquatic life) is also welcome there. This technology may be the key to reducing food transportation pollution, and allow our civilization to rewild much of the land that is now dominated by industrial agriculture.

Fungus has always been part of the solarpunk/lunarpunk aesthetic, and the related aesthetic [email protected]. The [email protected] community takes this in a much more practical direction, with a focus on how technologies that incorporate fungus can provide an alternative to plastic, leather, and other problematic materials, as well as provide fuel and clean our air and water. Thanks @[email protected] for your regular posts and comment contributions.

We look forward to the verdant growth of both of these communities.

Solidarity with Lemmy.World Vegans

Administration and moderation is necessary, but difficult and underappreciated. SLRPNK has strict guidelines on behavior we don't tolerate on this instance, such as fascism, racism or genocide denial, but we avoid broadening those limits so that we can encourage people with a wide variety of ideas, ideologies, and beliefs to discuss their differences in good faith. We delegate most of the responsibility for keeping a community healthy to the moderators of each community. We have consistently supported the moderators when their decisions have been challenged, even if we don't personally agree with the decision. As admins, we could not keep an instance this large so full of productive conversation without the bond of trust we've built with SLRPNK moderators to consistently respect their agency and judgement.

Federation means that each instance can have its own rules and culture, and we don't seek to impose our rules and culture on the instances of others. We typically don't comment on the behavior of admins and moderators on remote instances.

Lemmy.World is a special case, as it is the largest and best known threaded discussion forum in the Fediverse. It is the default instance for mobile apps like Voyager, and it is the instance that outsiders tend to think of when they characterize the Threadiverse. This puts an unenviable burden of responsibility on the admins of this central instance.

For a more detailed account, you can follow this post in [email protected], but to summarize, a Lemmy.World moderator reversed the actions of !vegan@LW mods, and then de-modded them. They were re-moded after the admin apologized once he realized the vegan comments he removed were supported by science. LW is now changing their TOS and Site Bylaws, and Threadiverse vegans are justifiably concerned with the implications of these changes.

The Fediverse is a progressive social movement. People who practice veganism play an essential role in all progressive social movements, and are a valued part of what makes the Fediverse great. This is non-negotiable and should be obvious, even if one doesn't agree with some of their beliefs.

We federate with VeganTheoryClub and Lemmy.vg. SLRPNK.net and Lemmy.vg federate with World while VeganTheoryClub does not. We welcome vegan refugees and host a [email protected] community actively moderated by SLRPNK member @[email protected]. Joining SLRPNK means sharing a space with non-vegans, and the potential friction that entails. If you justifiably want less of that, we recommend having a look at the two above mentioned instances.

Federation with Mastodon issues

With a recent change in Lemmy v.0.19.4/5 Lemmy started to add a (hidden in the Lemmy interface) hashtag of the community name to each post. The results is much better visibility of Lemmy posts from ActivityPub Microblogging software like Mastodon that use hashtags for discoverability.

This has various implications for us here on Lemmy. First of all when creating a new community, you should consider the choosing the community name according to the hashtag you would like to have associated with it.

This higher visibility across the Fediverse also comes with downsides, especially when the community name happens to be a popular hashtag. A new community post will appear to Mastodon users (that have subscribed to the specific hashtag) completely out of context as they can not easily see other posts in the same community, nor have visibility of the details outlined in the sidebar, sticky threads etc. Other comments on the same posts are also often invisible to Mastodon users due to the lack of back-filling support on that software. So let's try to be a bit understanding with remote users handicapped that way.

Of course, this wider reach also has attracted some unwanted trolling from microblogging instances that previously didn't really bother to interact with Lemmy communities. As a result, we already identified an instance that we decided to defederate from due to repeated trolling from their members, and we will likely have to be on the lookout for further ones.

Photon as primary frontend for SLRPNK?

You might be aware of the alternative Photon frontend we have been running for a while now. It recently surpassed the default web-UI from Lemmy in regards to available features and general usability. It is also significantly better maintained than the official Lemmy frontend, which has been languishing for a while now, with work on a full rewrite being prioritized.

We are therefore considering to make Photon our primary frontend that people will reach when navigating to the root slrpnk.net domain. The transition should be seamless and we would likely continue running the original frontend as an alternative on a subdomain. Of course, other apps will continue working as usual.

We would therefore like you to try out the current version and give us feedback on this general plan. No final decision has been made yet, so get your voice heard. And if you are interested in making a custom color theme for us, you can do so right inside the Photon theme settings easily. Please don't hesitate to post the results here!

Technical Updates

There are currently some technical issues with our database NVMe drives. This will likely entail some shorter down-times as we need to install additional heat sinks and probably replace one of these SSDs. After monitoring the drive utilisation and talking to other Lemmy admins, we are a bit worried about the long-term sustainability of running Lemmy. Very little effort seems to have gone into optimizing database writes, resulting in an excessively high load compared to other fediverse software. SSDs by their technical design only have a limited quantity of writes they can do during their lifetime, so optimizing this is quite essential to avoid having to replace them regularly.

There is also a login issue with our wiki, that we need to get around fixing. Sorry for the delay in tackling that issue, but various other things came up unexpectedly in recent weeks, so that had to be put on the back-burner.

We also started blocking common bots from large tech companies known for AI scraping. For now it is a rather simple block based on the user-agent they report themselves, so the bad actors can easily get around it. We are still investigating further means to improve this, although for now it isn't that high of a priority.

Open Discussion

It’s now your turn to tell us what’s new! Any topic related to this community, our infrastructure, or the Fediverse at large is fair game. If you’ve created a new community, this is a great thread to tell us about it. All comments will get extra visibility up until the beginning of next month. Got questions? Ask’em!

We seem to have run into some issues with one of the NVMe drives the main Lemmy database runs on. It's still being investigated, but we might have to take down the site for some hours later today to transfer the database to another SSD raid temporarily.

Let's see...

Edit: Did some preparation work today to minimize the impact/downtime, but I will do the main work that will require a hopefully short down-time tomorrow. But the NVMe drive in question is probably toast, quite litterally as it seems to have been an overheating issue. The new one will have to have better cooling I guess.

Edit2: decided to wait for some spare-parts to arrive first.

Edit3: got the first spare-part today and the other one should be arriving by mail yesterday... so probably tomorrow (edit: has arrived). Currently a bit busy with other things, but latest on the weekend the new parts will go into the server.

Heyho! With Lemmy version v0.19.4 alt texts for image posts got finally added to Lemmy.

Apps and web frontends such as Jerboa, Voyager, Photon and the standard web UI have now the option to provide alt text for an image post and to display alt texts.

I hope slrpnk.net users will use this feature <3

A (short) FAQ to alt text

What is alt text?

"Alternative text (alt text) is used to describe non-textual elements, like photos, icons, and data visualizations." (Source)

How does it look when used in an image post?

In App or the standard web UI: https://slrpnk.net/post/12145982 Photon: https://photon.slrpnk.net/post/slrpnk.net/12145982

Who benefits from alt texts?

Alt text in social media is primarily used to make posts more accessible to users with vision impairment. They can access the text with screen readers. Users with limited bandwidth and metered internet connections also benefit by saving data. Additionally, in case the image itself is not available (e.g. the host is down), the alt text still provides context for the post or comments. Another point is that the alt text is compatible with other parts of the fediverse and will for example federate with Mastodon instances which benefits everyone interested in the interoperability of the fediverse.

How to write alt text?

I myself am not an expert on this, but a good rule of thumb would be to focus on whats important for the context of the image. Giving a detailed description of the clouds in the background might be not so useful when posting the image of a plant in plant focused community. Besides that, here are some guides from more experienced folks:

• How to Write Good ALT Text
• How To Write Alt Text For Memes
• Write helpful Alt Text to describe images

Is alt text solarpunk?

I think yes and it fits really well with the "be empathic: empathy is more rebellious than a middle finger" rule of the slrpnk.net server.

Do you think alt text should be mandatory?

No, but I will remind posters in the communities I mod to use the feature with this post as a reference.

I want you to add something to this post or have more questions.

Please let me know in the comments. Questions are very welcome :)

There will be some minor server maintenance this weekend, which could result in some short temporary unavailability of the our Lemmy service. The works are related to the previously mentioned new firewall and changes with the reverse-proxy.

In addition, the user-login connection with our Wiki is currently broken and we need to do some troubleshooting to figure out why.

Is there a community or other platform to coordinate working on the wiki linked in the sidebar?

I'm not able to log in to the wiki, getting incorrect password error even though it's the same login as here, which works fine

Introduction

Every month we have a community check-in, to talk about the instance and how things are going, and to create a space where you can share stuff too. This post will be pinned and we'll check it regularly over the course of the month for new comments to read and respond to. We're really grateful that all of you have chosen this instance, and are making it such a great place to hang out thanks to your contributions. I get a serious hit of dopamine when I encounter someone who's made a great comment in a remote thread, and recognize the username is from this instance. It's a pleasure to admin for so many intelligent, thoughtful people.

Snippets from Last Month's Canvas

A 'Canvas Event' is a participatory time-limited art-form where individuals can alter one pixel at a time, and through competition, negotiation, or coordination with each other, create coherent images together. Now that the event is over, here's some featured results:

Nice job converting @roguecache's solarpunk logo to a manageably smaller pixel version. Bonus points for the neighborhood - the banner is in good company.

Where's Wally? Martin Handford's world traveling scamp is right at home in this visually noisy tableau.

Does this image fill you with unease and confusion? Read the The Illuminatus! Trilogy, and you too will have seen the fnords.

No communal canvas is complete without Kilroy! Graffiti and Canvas have a lot conceptually in common, and Kilroy may be the oldest meme to survive into the digital age. For more adorable rebel art, check out !grasweeti.

We're so consonant with the earth, we compost our vowels! Thanks for giving us even more space to shine :)

Canvas is a reflection of the zeitgeist of the Fediverse, and it's rewarding to see our communities, causes, and memes represented there. Thanks to everyone who participated this year.

Community Highlights: !disaserresponse, !conservation, and !fungus

This month we added three more communities to our directory. Our gracious host @poVoq created Disaster Response, because we know it's going to get worse before it gets better. It's going to be a source of information about getting yourself and your community prepared so you're in a position to help others as well as yourselves. Shout out to @JacobCoffinWrites for the great community banner.

It wasn't too long ago that @Midnight joined the moderation team on !collapse, and has done a great job giving that community new life. They've created a new community about wildlife conservation and protection, you can check it out at !conversation.

For the latest in Toadstool technology, check out !fungus, recently created by @solo. Special thanks to both @solo and @Midnight for bringing so many great posts to all of the communities on this instance.

Welcome New Mods!

As demonstrated by Reddit's decline and Feddit.org's revival, moderators are the life-blood of social media. There are few things you can do that will increase the Fediverse's success than joining a moderating team, and learning the skills to nurture and manage healthy communities.

This last month, a number of new people have stepped up to take over abandoned and undermoderated communities. Check out what's new in these classic communities:

• No Lawns: A community devoted to alternatives to monoculture lawns, with an emphasis on native plants and conservation. It continues to get posts weekly, and @quercus and @LibertyLizard are now the active mods.
• Writing: A community for writers, to discuss writing approaches and what’s new in the writing world, and to help each other with writing. Solarpunk author @grrgyle has taken the helm, and is leading monthly writing club goals, the first one ending today. Congrats to everyone who participated!
• 15 Minute City: an urban planning concept in which most daily necessities and services is 15-minutes from any point in the city. The new active mods are @vudu and @solo. Thanks to both for keeping this going.
• Art, Aesthetic: @WanderingPhoenix has added @SolarMonkey to the mod group.
• Buy It For Life: @ProdigalFrog has also added @SolarMonkey to the mod group.
• Utility Cycling: @Nemo joins @JacobCoffinWrites as an active mod.
• Podcasts: in addition to !nolawns, @LibertyLizard is keeping an eye one !podcasts as well.

Our goal is to have at least one active moderator supporting every community on SLRPNK. Unmoderated communities can attract spam and abusive behavior, requiring us to freeze or shut them down. Thanks to everyone who stepped up, we love having a vareity of communities on this little instance.

Movim blogs

Our supplementary Movim service which can be used as a federated XMPP chat app and a long-form blogging site now has some early adopters for the blogging feature. You can follow the personal blogs two of our members here:

• @jacobcoffinwrites' Movim blog

• @blair's Movim blog

Any SLRPNK member can automatically use their Lemmy account to log into our Movim instance and thus use their XMPP account to chat and blog. Say hi on our Solarpunk group chat :)

Technical Updates

We did some behind the scenes changes with the firewall setup which will make it easier to identify and block scraping attempts and other such abuses of our technical setup.

Background tasks of the Lemmy backend now also run in a dedicated process, which should enhance the responsiveness of the site a bit.

Our hosted alternative Photon and Mlmyl backends got some nice updates lately.

Open Discussion

It’s now your turn to tell us what’s new! Any topic related to this community, our infrastructure, or the Fediverse at large is fair game. If you’ve created a new community, this is a great thread to tell us about it. All comments will get extra visibility up until the beginning of next month. Got questions? Ask’em!

[email protected] is live! If you missed the previous discussion, it's a community with a robot moderator that bans you if the community doesn't like your comments, even if you're not "breaking the rules." The hope is to have a politics community without the arguing. [email protected] has an in-depth explanation of how it works.

I was trying to keep the algorithm a secret, to make it more difficult to game the system, but the admins convinced me that basically nobody would participate if they could be banned by a secret system they couldn't know anything about. I posted the code as open source. It works like PageRank, by aggregating votes and assigning trust to users based on who the community trusts and banning users with too low a trust level.

I've also rebalanced the tuning of the algorithm and worked on it more. It now bans a tiny number of users (108 in total right now), but still including a lot of obnoxious accounts. There are now no slrpnk users banned. It's a lot of lemmy.world people, a few from lemmy.ml or lemm.ee, and a scattering from other places.

Check it out! Let me know what you think.

Introduction

Another month has passed, which means the old Meta Community Discussion will be replaced with a new Community Discussion, which gives an update on the happenings of the instance, and to provide a place to talk and comment your thoughts on the instance, or for anything else that doesn't warrant its own c/Meta post.

Now, let us have a quiet moment in remembrance of the June discussion thread as we release it from its pinned status, back into the wilds of the fediverse.

...Right, that's quite enough remembering.

Slaps server

Let's bust out July.

Feddit.de is limping! Long live Feddit.org!

A few months ago, Feddit.de suffered a partial error, while the main admin was unavailable due to longer work related travel. As the Feddit.de admin is still missing, several of the site's moderators collaborated with the Fediverse.foundation and last week, Feddit.org was launched to cover many of the same communities as the old Feddit.de hosted. This is an inspiring development, and demonstrates one way a federated social network can respond to damage.

Community Highlights

We had some new communities pop up on the server last month!

• [email protected], created by @Emotet, who, I would like to point out, has a really cool animated avatar and profile background. Their community is focused on competent people doing things competently in media.

• [email protected], created by @sabreW4K3, which focuses on news and discussions on EV's.

• [email protected], created by @reallykindasort. A place to discuss and share history of ancient peoples!

In other news, @countrypunk is looking for new moderators for [email protected]. If that topic interests you, why not throw them a message? I'm sure they'd appreciate the help!

We'd also like to thank @JacobCoffinWrites for graciously taking over as moderator for [email protected], and to @Midnight for becoming part of the [email protected] moderation team! Good stuff y'all :)

If you're already a mod, joining the SLRPNK XMPP chat is a great way to grow your moderation team and share tips with other moderators. (it's also usable by all members of the instance, and you can use it for non-solarpunk chatrooms too, it's totally federated!)

If you're not already a mod, and see a community that you would like to support with moderation, don't hesitate to contact the current mods, or us admins.

Some examples of abandoned communities in need of new moderators are:

• [email protected], devoted to avoiding monoculture lawns (fairly low activity, would be a great community for a beginner moderator!) EDIT: !nolawns now has a new mod, @[email protected] ^^

• [email protected], which is for... podcasts. (slightly higher activity, but still quite manageable) EDIT: !podcasts has found @[email protected] for its new moderator!

Again, if any of those seem like your bag, slap a comment down below, and we'll mod you up! Having those extra set of eyes and developing your community into whatever your creative vision holds is not only a tremendous help to us admins, It's quite fulfilling in its own right! :D

Technical Updates

Last month we updated our instance to Lemmy version 0.19.4/5, which brought some minor technical issues that were mostly fixed in the latter release. One major change was the introduction of an image proxy. This means that images in newly added posts (and new user/community avatars) are no longer directly downloaded from the federated servers, but rather first mirrored on our server. This has some privacy advantages and should also improve site loading speed a bit. We will have to see how this will affect our image storage capacity in the medium term, but so far it doesn't seem to have had a big impact and with our recent server upgrade, we do have quite a lot of storage space.

We also experimentally increased maximum upload size to 10mb and allowed small video files as well. We need to see how the impact of this is, though. If it results in too much bandwidth and/or storage space use, we might have to reconsider this.

Open Discussion

Aaaand... Yeah, that's the news for July. It was pretty chill, pretty snazzy, even! But now it's your turn to share whatever snazziness is happening on your mind. Anything related to the instance, the fediverse, or the server you'd like to ask about or discuss? Create a new community you want everyone to know about? Then mosey on down to the comments, my dude!

Everything you post here will be highlighted until the start of next month, which is like, a really long time (until it isn't. Time is cruel, cruel mistress).-

There is clearly a problem that most of the politics and news communities on Lemmy are unpleasant places to take part in discussion. People yell at each other. The tone of disagreements is that of saying what your opinion is, and insulting the other person if they don't agree with your opinion, or a bunch of people giving quick one-off statements like "well I think it's this way" or "no you're wrong" which adds nothing. I've heard more than one person say that they simply don't participate in politics or news communities because of it.

Well, behold:

I have made some technology which attempts to take a much heavier handed approach to moderation, by just detecting assholes or people who aren't really contributing to the conversation, in other communities, and just banning them pre emptively en masse. In its current form, it bans about half of hexbear and lemmygrad, and almost all of the users on lemmy.world who post a nonstop stream of obnoxiously partisan content. You know the ones.

In practice it's basically a whitelist for posting that's easy to get on: Just don't be a dick.

I'd like to try the experiment of having a ~~political~~ community with this software running the banlist, and see how it works in practice, and maybe expand it to a news community that runs the same way. There's nothing partisan about the filtering. You can have whatever opinion you want. You just can't be unproductive or an asshole about the way you say your opinion. And the bans aren't permanent, they are transient based on the user's recent past behavior.

(Edit: I think making a general news community might fit better with slrpnk than politics. In thinking about it and talking with people, I think electoral politics just doesn't belong in the slrpnk feed, but maybe general news specifically with the political bickering that comes along with it being muted, would be a positive for the instance at the same time as I get to test out my little software project.)

I don't want to explain in too much detail how the tech works, because I think some segment of assholes will want to evade the tech to come into the community and be assholes again. But I'd also want to set up a meta community where anyone who did get banned can ask questions or make complaints about it. (As long as that offering doesn't turn into too much of a shit show that is.)

Is slrpnk a place where a little experiment like this could find a good home? What does everyone think of the idea?

We will have a scheduled downtime this weekend 8/9th of June to upgrade our instance to the latest Lemmy version.

It requires some smaller under the hood changes and testing, but shouldn't take longer than 2-3 hours.

I'll comment below when I can say more precisely what time this will take place.

Introduction

Every month, we retire the pinned community meta post from the last month, and create a fresh one with updated news. We summarize the state of the instance, and create a space for public comments and discussions that don’t merit their own meta post.

Software Status

There have been some smaller updates on the Wiki and Movim last month, and we added a new Voyager frontend for mobile use.

For June, it looks like the long awaited Lemmy v0.19.4 will be released with a lot of bugfixes, so there will likely be a short scheduled down-time while we upgrade our instance. There will be another announcement on /c/meta about this once we know more. Edit: Upgrade completed on 2024-06-09.

Community Highlights

With the start of the summer, maybe it's time to start that DIY project you always dreamed off? Or you found the perfect Buy it for Life item to share? But maybe if it isn't quite that durable, you still have a great Fixing story to tell? If anything, Anti-consumption might be your thing.

Alternatively, now is a great time to start with In person Activism, or at least plan a nice Solarpunk Travel this summer? If camping and hiking is your thing, don't forget to share pictures of The Great Outdoors.

Special Welcome to Feddit.de refugees

We regret the technical issues that brought you here, but it's great to have you on board! Willkommen ihr Zuhausies 🥰

We have been following the technical issues that caused this lengthy partial outage of feddit.de for some time now and hopefully they will find a solution or make an alternative German language instance soon.

Slrpnk.net actually had a similar situation in November 2023, which luckily only caused 12h of down-time, but it was pretty stressful for all people involved. Since then we have been testing out different means to let more admins have remote access to our servers, however finding the right balance between security and ease of use isn't easy. Especially means to increase security such as fail2ban and two-factor-authentification tend to lock people out with the worst timing as people make errors in unfamiliar and stressful situations. But I think we found a reasonable compromise now and will soon give it a try.

Open discussion

It’s now your turn to tell us what’s new! Any topic related to this community, our infrastructure, or the Fediverse at large is fair game. If you’ve created a new community, this is a great thread to tell us about it. All comments will get extra visibility up until the beginning of next month. Got questions? Ask’em!

We are testing the Voyager alternative Lemmy UI on https://voyager.slrpnk.net/

There is not a huge difference compared to using the official .apk but some users on alternative platforms like Ubuntu Touch might appreciate having this option directly in the browser. It should be also possible to install it as a PWA this way.

Of course it also works in a desktop browser, but Voyager is really more optimized for mobile touch screens.

Please let us know if there are any issues with it.

On the weekend of the 11/12th of May the server which runs the XMPP, Movim and Wiki will undergo extended maintenance and will not be available for a few hours. We need to upgrade the main OS and improve some other things.

The main Lemmy service should not or only minimally affected and we will likely migrate the wiki over to that server to make it available more quickly again.

As usual, no exact time frame, but it will likely happen on Saturday or Sunday morning UTC timezone.

Introduction

Every month we retire the pinned community meta post from the last month, and create a fresh one with updated news. We summarize the state of the instance, and create a space for public comments and discussions that don't merit their own meta post.

International Worker's Day is May 1st!

In 1886, a May 1st general strike called by the American Federation of Labor saw a significant response in New York, Detroit, and Milwaukee. But in Chicago, due to the International Working People's Association founded by the anarchist Albert Parsons, the number of people who went on strike was larger than twice all of those other cities combined. On May 3rd, Chicago police fired indiscriminately into a crowd of striking workers, killing several. On May 4th, the anarchists held a peaceful street meeting where several luminaries spoke. But near the end of the meeting in the Chicago Haymarket, police arrived in formation to forcibly disperse the peaceful crowd and order they desist their first amendment-protected activity in the name of the law.

Whoever it was who threw the bomb into the crowd of officers, all sides agree they were not one of the anarchist leaders who were later arrested, put on trial, and executed. The blast killed one, but 7 more officers and 4 working people would die of wounds from police bullets fired in the smoke and confusion. In the legal farce that followed, the capitalists of Chicago demonstrated through their ghoulish reaction how much they feared working people when they band together. The Haymarket heroes became not just a regional cause célèbre, but coverage of their show trial and martyrdom spread the message of the strike internationally, perhaps the most significant and successful general strike in history. It ended the common practice of 12-hour workdays, and lead the 8-hour workday, your average 9 to 5, to become the international standard.

On this day, we celebrate their sacrifice, and remember the power of working people everywhere. Celebrated in almost every country on this day, it is a symbol of cooperation between people unrestricted by national borders. In the spirit of solidarity, the admins at SLRPNK wish everyone a happy International Worker's Day!

Activity and Data

It continues to be a pleasure supporting you as an admin. When looking at data, it's easy to draw unqualified conclusions, and worse, use them as benchmarks and goals. The most important thing is the unquantifiable vibe of the instance, and whatever the numbers say, I'm pretty satisfied with that metric.

That being said, I know people are curious about the numbers, and the numbers are indeed curious. It's now official: the increase in new and active members was not a quirk of the change of reporting code at the beginning of the year. It appears there's been a reversal, and every month since January has seen the number of active members increase over the previous month. The growth is small but steady, and is even more curious due to the trend of declining or stagnant reported growth over the same period in larger instances with better funding and fame.

In addition to the growth of active members, our total number of posts continues to grow in a fashion suggesting an exponential curve. Fun.

We don't do any kind of deep analytics where we could pin down more accurately what's driving growth and why, so it's irresponsible to make too big a deal out of this data -- but it's definitely not bad. Whatever is happening, there's a good chance some of it is due to trends outside of our control, similar to Reddit's API exodus that brought most of us here almost a year ago. My advice is ignore the numbers and keep doing what you're doing. Whatever it is, it's making SLRPNK qualitatively a great place to hang out.

Software Status

@poVoq has done a wonderful job keeping Lemmy and Movim software up to date while screening new versions for major bugs. He has added a collaborative editing application Etherpad to the suite of community tools, available at https://pads.slrpnk.net/. Hedgedocs at https://docs.slrpnk.net/ will be retired due to lack of activity from the software maintainers. I'd like to personally thank @poVoq for hosting SLRPNK and keeping the software working and up-to-date.

The wiki on https://wiki.slrpnk.net remains a bit rough around the edges, as we have not yet gotten around to fixing the remaining issues with the login and easy page editing, but a few people started updating their community wikis anyways. Please let us know if you run into specific other issues. It will likely take some to get them fixed, but at least we can document the various issues for now.

Community Highlight

Check out these two communities created last month: [email protected] created by long-time member @toaster - a place to find great short-form self-publishing, and [email protected] by @activistPnk, a great idea that complements our vibrant [email protected] community by @ProdigalFrog.

I'd also like to draw attention to [email protected], a forum the authors @andrewrgross and @JacobCoffinWrites are using to imagine a fantasy future to build collaborative stories in. They've put a lot of work into their world-building and are eagerly seeking public participation in the project. Congratulations to FA on being boosted by famous sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow!

Finally, [email protected] I think deserves more attention. I have a great deal of admiration for @poVoq, and part of that is the alternative vision he has from most of the rest of the Fediverse and Lemmy instances. While some instances compete for position as the largest general purpose forum, others are happy to be small niche subject instances. SLRPNK falls into the latter category, but with a twist - with us, the medium is also the message. We will hit capacity one day, but we want the Fediverse to continue to grow in spite of us. We're very transparent about our administration decisions in XMPP moderator chat, and that's partly because of our social compact with you, but also to teach by example. Projects like [email protected], the Fedi-admin guild, and the wiki are part of the technology side of this goal -- to allow anyone who is interested to replicate what we're doing here, and improve on it.

The Solarpunk project is bigger than us, and we think Lemmy's ability to scale through federation is key to allowing us to grow without putting too much power and responsibility into the hands of a few people. Cloud services take away your agency and lock you in to their platforms while violating your privacy. Self-hosting is a way around that technology trap, and the skills you learn can also be applied to eventually host part of the Fediverse as well. If you're curious about what's possible, subscribing to [email protected] is a great place to start.

Call for Moderators

Moderating a community here is a great way to build skills useful for online community management. We love to see new communities people are passionate about - but that's not the only way to get involved. Several communities are undermoderated despite continuing to attract activity. We didn't get around to closing any communities this month, but will likely start that again soon. Joining the moderation team will help keep the communities you love alive. The first step is joining XMPP chat and asking around. The moderators channel is extremely active, and a great way to coordinate and get support from us and other moderators. You'll also get a peek at what's likely to show up in the next monthly meta.

We are still planning to build a new a space for women on SLRPNK since we closed !twoxchromosomes two months ago. @punkisundead has started a discussion on Loomio to gather resources, and @schmorp has also joined the Fedi-admin guild to contribute. We are actively seeking more voices, as this is an important project, and the more people who cooperate on it, the greater chance it will have of success.

Open discussion

It’s now your turn to tell us what’s new! Any topic related to this community, our infrastructure, or the Fediverse at large is fair game. If you’ve created a new community, this is a great thread to tell us about it. All comments will get extra visibility up until the beginning of next month. Got questions? Ask’em!

We had some issue with the SSD pool that our Pictrs image storage runs on, which required some server restarts and a recovery of the Pictrs postgres database from backup.

We are still investigating the root cause of this, but for now everything seems to be back working.

Edit: looks like replacing the SATA cable did the trick, no further issues so far.

As some of you might remember, we experimented with hosting the alpha version of Hedgedocs2 over here: https://docs.slrpnk.net/

It never worked out very well and was originally intended as an alternative for our Wiki, which wasn't working well back then either.

Now with the Wiki issues mostly resolved and Hedgedocs2 not developing as expected, we decided to sunset it by the end of this month. I don't think anyone was really using it, but if you were, please ensure all the documents are saved somewhere else.

However since working together on texts in real-time can be a useful tool for drafting documents, we decided to add an Etherpad installation instead: https://pads.slrpnk.net

It's still being tested and we will likely add an automatic expiration to pads, but overall it seems to be working fine. You can even export the text as Markdown for easy cut&paste into Lemmy posts.

Introduction

Each month we pin a post to give all members an update on the state of the instance, as well as a place to direct public comments and discussions, so let's get to the updatin'!

Community highlights

This month we thought to shake up our usual routine to highlight new communities and instead decided to highlight some nice, but older communities. So have a look at these and maybe add them to your list of subscriptions:

• /c/Fixing
• /c/ZeroWaste
• /c/Writing

Any other communities you would like to highlight? Comment below!

Transfer to new server

After our last attempt to move our Lemmy instance to a new server had to be reverted at the end of 2023, we tried again this month. The new server has been hosting the Pictrs image backend and the various frontends for a while now, but yesterday we finally also migrated the main database and the backend to it.

The new server (a refurbished Intel Xeon with 64GB RAM) is probably somewhat oversized for a small Lemmy instance like ours, but it looks like the multiple times faster NVMe database storage array finally fixes the performance issues we had before.

Let's hope this time we will not run into hardware issues like with the previous dedicated server.

A brand spankin' new Wiki

SLRPNK now hosts a fully functional wiki for our communities to utilize, based on the DocuWiki project.

Currently, only community Moderators can edit the wiki, and like our XMPP instance, you'll be able to use your SLRPNK login to access it, along with editing privileges for your community automatically given.

We have a quick-start guide written that should help you with the first steps of how to create your community wiki.

A few plugins have been added to the wiki to extend its functionality, such as a WYSIWYG editor in addition to the standard markup editor, along with some other bells and whistles. You can find a complete list of the plugins used here.

If you need any help getting your community page setup, you can either leave a comment in this thread below, or message one of the admins, and we'll do our best to get you up and running. :)

Other technical additions

You might have noticed the new bot account that was added as an instance admin last month. This account is currently connected to two additional services that we added:

An automatic RSS feed poster that can be added to communities. Let us know if that is something you are interested for a community you moderate here.

An instance level auto-moderation bot that scans new posts and comments for spam. The software behind this is still a bit of a work in progress, but it should allow us to react more quickly to future spam-waves from multiple accounts.

If you have other suggestions on how to utilize this bot, let us know.

Server Stats

With another month, comes another round of stats!

Right off the bat, the hardware upgrade is having a noticeable effect on the latency of the server, which is pretty darn sweet.

And 65 new solarpunks joined us last month, bringing the total up from 1,138 members to 1,203. Hopefully they find this to be a good home. :)

The monthly users are holding steady, with a slight increase up from 290 to 299. With that amount of people, there always seems to be something interesting to see or read on the server just from our users alone. Counting people coming in from other instances, it really is booming around here!

The Big News

We're proud to announce that Slrpnk.net is now officially sponsored by Exxon Mobile™ as part of their Global Green Outreach for Innovative Forward Thinkers™ program.

In collaboration with them, we'll be featuring new eco-friendly technologies that were produced with net-zero emissions as a long-term goal, which has only been made possible thanks to Exxon's Big Heart Good Guy Partner™ initiative.

Starting us off this month is this fine Gasoline powered Alarm Clock, which gets an unthinkable 24 hours to the gallon! The efficiency wizards at Exxon have truly outdone themselves. Hopefully we'll see one of these pop up in every home in the coming decades.

Open discussion

That about wraps up this month's news. If you have anything you'd like to ask regarding the site, our new tools, or anything else related to this community, let us know.

If you've created a new community or would like to make your own announcements about something happening on the server, you're also welcome to post them down below!

All comments will get extra visibility up until the beginning of next month.

Have a great April, everyone! ^^

Is it just me or is it impossible to use slrpnk accounts on the Voyager app? I can login with the same username and password on the slrpnk website but not on the voyager alp

Edit: Sorry, this week was a bit too annoying to work on this, but the plan is now to do it over the Easter weekend.

There will be another planned down-time this coming weekend as we continue migrating this Lemmy instance to our new server.

Last weekend's Pict-rs image storage migration resulted in a noticeable performance improvement, and we also already quietly migrated the various front-ends to the new server.

However due the large size of the main Lemmy database and a need to upgrade to PostgreSQL version 16.2 to fix a memory leak issue with it, the down-time will be slightly longer this time. I expect it to last around 3 hours, during which our Lemmy backend will be completely down.

As our XMPP accounts are directly linked to our Lemmy database, it will also not be possible to log into your slrpnk.net XMPP account during this time.

I will probably do a small write up in the next monthly post about the changes to the hardware we did and what performance improvements we expect from it.

All in all, I hope this time the move will be successful and not like last year when we had to revert back to the old server on short notice due to hardware issues. So far the new server runs well though.

In order to upgrade and transfer the Pict-rs image storage backend of the SLRPNK Lemmy instance there will be an approximately 1-2 hour partial down-time this weekend.

Most likely the Lemmy instance itself will continue to function, but there will be broken images and no option to upload images during this time.

Lets hope everything goes according to plan.

The new image storage backend will be on a faster server that we are currently testing and we plan to also transfer our Lemmy instance itself there before the end of this month.