Meta (slrpnk.net)

Not sure whats the bottleneck but lately its been pretty slow to open comments on posts from other instances

We are planning to swap out some components on the server running this Lemmy instance to see if that solves the stability issues we are seeing lately.

This will result in 2-3 hours downtime sometimes this weekend assuming everything goes according to plan.

Edit: Postponed to Monday morning (hopefully).

Edit: Was finally done on Tuesday afternoon 🫠

This thread was inappropriately censored by either @punkisdead@slrpnk.net or @mambabasa@slrpnk.net claiming:

“Reason: Reason: Literally the opposite of anti-work is "over employment" which OP is arguing for”

There is an English comprehension problem by the mod. Would someone whose first language is English please:

1. notice that over employment is actually the problem that the thread’s thesis seeks remedies for. Being forced into a full-time or nothing ultamatim is a very common problem that oppresses anti-work proponents. It’s the single most common problem we face. Appalling that a mod would block the discussion.
2. undo the improper mod action

The mod’s action to suppress is actually a pro-work action, as it prevents discussion around solutions to over-employment.

This started a couple days ago. I tried clearing the browser cache, which did not change the behavior. The counts show up normally in the Lemmy UI. My slrpnk account is my only Lemmy account so I have no visibility as to whether this is an issue on other instances.

Every month, we post an update on the happenings of the instance, as well as provide a sort of town square to share news and happenings in your own life.

With January comes a new year, and this time even a new quarter-century! While the last year brought with it many things to grumble about (to put it mildly), this new year brings new hopes as well; China's emissions could peak this year due to solar installations being constructed at an unprecedented scale, The fall of Assad's regime may bring a reprieve for Rojava, Unions are forming and growing at a rate we haven't seen in decades across the globe, and mutual aid organizations are experiencing an influx of new people looking to help due to recent events.

So let us face this new year together, and continue to build up, piece by piece and no matter how small, the world we want to live in.

📡 Technical updates 📡

Not much to report for technical updates, other that we updated to Lemmy version 0.19.8 last month. For the coming month we plan an update to our Movim enabling so called "stories", a form of time limited micro-blog popular on some other messengers.

Due to various reasons, we didn't finish the prototype donation page yet, but it will be available soon. Due to the high amount of submissions we also did not yet hear back from Nlnet if our grant application for adding GNU Taler donation support has been successful or not.

⚡Solar-powered servers ☀️

Last month has been again rather rainy and cold at out server location, therefore only 41% of the total electricity needs could be covered by the solar panels we installed in early October. The average over the last three months was 50%, which isn't too bad considering that these were all unusually rainy winter months. The additional grid-power was mostly wind and geothermal energy. It should be noted that these figures include the total electricity usage on the site, not only those strictly for the server that this Lemmy instance runs on.

🗣️ Open Discussion 🗪

Remember, this post is also a place for you! If you have something to share, a new community to show off, a thought about the instance, or a story to tell, then please do tell!

Happy New Year, everyone.

I've been trying to follow two groups on slrpnk.net using my (main) account on hachyderm.io. The groups initially show as followed, but I get no posts in my feed. I've tried creating new test accounts, one on mastodon.social, one on hachyderm.io, to follow those groups - the account on mastodon.social starts getting posts right away.

Are there known federation issues with hachyderm.io? I've reached out to the admins on their side, they see some intermittent 503's from slrpnk.net, but not a general block.

The groups I'm trying to follow are https://slrpnk.net/c/electricvehicles and https://slrpnk.net/c/energy . I've reached to moderator ( @Sunshine@lemmy.ca before too and they weren't aware of any limitations placed.

Anyone?

This meta post isn't our typical monthly update.

📡 Technical updates 📡

The previously announced server maintenance of the supplementary services (Movim, XMPP, Wiki) had to be postponed to this month due to some difficulties encountered with the upgraded host system. We are currently looking into making it a bit more modular, but the PHP software doesn't lend itself very well to containerization.

We also started some slow improvements to our overall network structure to prepare for a potential upgrade to a 10 gbit fiber connection next year, but this will likely not have a big impact on SLRPNK itself as we are currently still far from exceeding the currently available bandwidth. It could allow for a sister Peertube site or something similar though.

💌 Donation support 💌

We hope to finally open a way to donate for helping to run the infrastructure that SLRPNK runs on this month. Initially it will be possible to donate through LiberaPay or directly to us through Stripe with a credit card. Since we are not a registered non-profit or so, we cannot provide you with a certificate for tax deductions though. If there is a big demand for alternative donation platforms like Patreon or KoFi etc. we can also consider it, but usually those just end up costing additional fees with little or no benefit to us.

We also applied for a small grant from NLnet to help us implement an option to donate through GNU Taler, which might become available to people in EU countries via a German coop bank sometimes mid 2025. We will keep you updated if that grant gets approved and how and when you can try it. If you are generally interested in GNU Taler, check out /c/money.

The United States elected a fascist government

SLRPNK is an international instance, and we try to avoid centering United States politics and news, as there is enough of that elsewhere in the Threadiverse. As the center of the world order, unfortunately much of what happens in the USA has resounding repercussions across the world. Sometimes those events are so big it becomes important to discuss them, even in our tiny corner of the internet.

During the campaign, the centrist Democratic Party appropriated a leftist talking point: Trump is a fascist. Now the Democrats are preparing for the peaceful transition of power to a fascist. This in unequivocally a bad thing for the people of the United States and the people of the world. A small cottage industry has arisen overnight of pundits giving post-election analysis. Here's what I think is relevant to you as a solarpunk:

You and I are in the midst of fomenting a media revolution through our participation in the Fediverse. It may sound self-congratulatory to compare the invention of ActivityPub to the printing press, the radio, internet, social networking sites, and micro-blogging. But I wouldn't be this committed to the platform if I didn't believe it was true.

Pay close attention to how fascists made extremely good use of emerging media messaging methods this election to disseminate false information to gullible voters. The last time fascists came to power, they did the very same thing with the new technology of radio broadcasting.

I believe there is a structural difference between Fediverse technology and those previous technologies - most of the fascists have already fucked off to their isolated islands, while our social graph continues to grow. If we can keep the Fediverse growing, the political revolutions it will eventually facilitate will have a much different character.

The other thing to notice is it wasn't just the United States where the incumbent party lost votes this election. Pundits have noted that during times of high inflation, it is typical for the electorate to blame their economic anxiety on the current government. This is backed by data.

[Image Description: Data showing historical and recent shift in vote share from incumbent parties across governments]

Every ruling party in every developed country got a smaller percentage of the votes than it did in the previous year. This is attributed to worldwide inflation and economic hardship.

As one of the few communities not in passive or active denial of the seriousness of global warming, we can recognize the climate catastrophe is directly responsible for a significant amount of this economic chaos. We can also predict that since little is being done to slow environmental collapse, economic conditions will get worse.

If there is an election in four more years, it is unlikely that fascists will stay in power. If there is no fair election, or Trump suspends elections, that does not change the facts on the ground. Ask Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain if autocracy saved them from popular unrest due to inflation. Trump is planting the seeds of revolt now by planning to dismiss his most competent generals and hundreds of thousands of female, gay, and transgender soldiers. If there is a revolution in the United States, it will probably involve the disbanded military.

Two years after the death of Hitler, Albert Camus published La Peste. It is a story where a plague overruns a city, only to disappear just as quickly, but with the looming threat to one day return. The plague is a excellent metaphor for fascism. I can't offer much solace, but I'm confident of this -- fascism is terrible but not sustainable. The silver lining of this tragedy is that it will one day be over. Let's continue our preparations so that day comes sooner, and that we and our loved ones survive to see it.

The preparations

The future is more difficult to predict than ever, but we can narrow down some essential preparations that could end up being the most critical. These recommendations are mostly based on Deviant Ollem's talk on Risk & Preparedness. I'd recommend watching that for more detail, if you have the time.

Find a good lawyer and memorize their phone number ⚖️

This goes for everyone, but especially if you are an activist, a minority, trans, an immigrant, a person who is publicly leftist, or any other person who is likely to be targeted by the new regime. If they use the legal system against you, already having a lawyer in mind and their number in your head (or a business card with their number on it inside your phone case or wallet) will give you a critical leg up if you're sitting in a jail cell without access to the contacts in your phone. This advice may become less useful as time goes on and the courts become sidelined entirely, but at least right now, I would consider it worth the effort.

Get your passport 🛂

If you've ever thought about getting a passport but have been putting it off, or you have one that's expired: get one. Get it soon. There may come a time when you need to flee the country quickly to save your life, and the most critical piece of documentation you will need is a valid passport, and the time to get one is long before you need it. If it eventually becomes possible or necessary to legitimately claim asylum in a less hostile country due to political persecution in the US, having a passport will be essential.

Also, though this is highly dependent on your lineage, if you have a parent, grandparent, or possibly even great-grandparent who was a foreign citizen, look into the process of applying to become a dual-citizen for that country by ancestry. Some countries make the process somewhat easy, and will even be willing to sorta fudge things a bit to grant you citizenship (Italy is one example, more details in the Deviant talk linked above). If you're able to take this route, this would give you the easiest escape route out of the US if it became too dangerous for you to stay. If this is a viable route for you, I would advise you to gather the required documents and begin the process as soon as possible, as some countries can take 6 months or more to get a foreign passport in your hand, while others can be quicker.

Consider acquiring the means to keep yourself safe 🛡️

Having a good can of pepper spray probably wouldn't be a bad idea; they're cheap, easy to learn how to use, non-lethal, and usually quite effective at giving yourself an opportunity to escape a bad situation (I would recommend POM, who also offer inert training canisters to practice with).

In addition, it may be worth considering taking a reputable self-defense class that teaches you how to fight with your hands or a melee weapon effectively. Learning how to take a punch will really help if things get physical.

Learn First Aid! ⛑️

It is equally, if not more important, to be able to keep yourself and others alive if they get hurt. This is a tremendously useful skill for anyone to learn, you can never have too many medics.

Tacticool Girlfriend provides a great introduction building a personal first aid kit, called an IFAK, which can deal with things like bullet wounds and other serious bleeding wounds. I also want to emphasize her recommendation of only buying medical gear from reputable sources (not Amazon!), such as North American Rescue to avoid fakes that could cost you your life.

But you'll need to learn how to use that equipment, too. The best resource for that is to take a local Stop The Bleed class, which are pretty widely available in most places. They may cost a small fee, but can also sometimes be free. Alternatively, if you cannot access a local class, this video by PrepMedic will give you a solid understanding of how to use Tourniquets and Gauze for wound packing.

Injuries are less harmful if they are tended to early. Learning first aid can help conserve resources when healthcare becomes unaffordable. Having several medics in case of harm by police is an extremely powerful morale booster during a protest that may become a police riot. When you become comfortable with the basics of first aid, riot medicine is the next suggested step.

Establish or join local Mutual Aid networks ✊

If you haven't already, get to know your neighbors. Mutual aid is a willingness to support and grow your community. This can include informal networks through friends, tenant/renter organizations, solidarity groups, and industrial unions.

These are groups using direct action to solve each other's problems. Building strong communities makes it difficult for fascism to take root. The actions of the government are going to hit every community hard, and the ones who build trust in each other and work together are most likely to survive. We've been building a list of resources in !inperson@slrpnk.net to help you on your way.

This isn't only for your own community protection. Your ability to organize today will change the political landscape tomorrow. When revolution occurs, the social organizations that show the greatest resilience through the regime are the ones typically calling the shots when the dust settles. When it comes to elections, get out the vote drives are useless if most of the voters are fascists. At some point, you have to do grassroots political education if you don't want fascist candidates winning elections. Mutual aid networks are excellent forums not only for teaching each other good political ideas, but demonstrating them in practice.

Open Discussion

You don't have to endorse my or any of our views to be welcome on this platform. Our fight for a better future brings us all together. This isn't just my soap-box though - it's your soap-box too. If you've got questions about the server or the Fediverse in general, this is a great place to ask them. If you notice an issue with the service, posting the problem here will get it visibility.

Seeking a bit of crowd wisdom here, as the topic may be of general interest.

What are the best methods to promote a new community on this instance? What behavior crosses the line? What practices seem to work best to grow a new community?

Thanks for any insights.

This weekend, probably on Sunday, we plan to swap out the mainboard, RAM and casing of the server that runs the supplementary services (XMPP, Movim and Wiki). This is done to save some space in the server shelf and free the bigger case for another server. The new mainboard and RAM is also a bit faster, but I don't expect that to make a noticable difference.

The main SLRPNK Lemmy instance and our Etherpad which runs on another server will be unaffected. At least if I don't accidentally trip over a power cord or so 😅

I expect the down-time to be around 2 hours as all the components and backup drives will have to be reinstalled in the new smaller casing.

Edit: this will be postponed to the coming week or the weekend after as the preparation work takes a bit longer than expected

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

Spooky nights have come and gone,
A new monthly thread, but we shan't drag on.
Come one, come all, do join us down below,
Us Admins read every comment, dontcha know.
Share your news, your fun, your most wondrous thoughts,
The server, by the by, lives now upon the cleanest solar watts!

And thus, let us welcome November.

🌟 Community Highlights 🌟

We have a new community thanks to @CurlyWurlies4All, who created !enshitification@slrpnk.net, a place to document and discuss the downward trend of the tech world as described by Cory Doctorow.

Or maybe you're interested in how you or your community can better respond to the upcoming changes due to climate change? You might want to check out !disasterresponse@slrpnk.net, which gathers together some excellent articles and guides on preps, mutual aid, and disaster response.

But what if you have a burning question about solarpunk problems, solutions, or ideas? Something that makes you do the chin grabby thing and ponder about the future? Well why not ponder about visiting !asksolarpunk@slrpnk.net and drop a big 'ol brain tingler in there! (I'm sorry).

⚕️ Experts & Fighting Misinformation 👩🏿‍🔬

We recently received a report for a post spreading potentially dangerous misinformation in !antidepressants@slrpnk.net, and as the creator and mod of that community is MIA, we had to determine ourselves if the report was legitimate. We eventually determined that the post wasn't misinformation, but as we admins are not medical experts, it took a fair amount of effort to research.

With how potentially dangerous medical misinformation can be, and with how widespread it is online, this situation highlights the importance of having someone qualified to root out that mis-info on subjects where it has the possibility of doing serious harm. We've decided to lock the community to prevent the possibility of that occurring in the future, at least until someone with the ability to weed out that harmful information wishes to take over moderating the community.

🛠️ Technical Updates 📡

Despite last month's announcements, not much actually happened so far. We are currently considering pushing back the Photon frontend migration until the new Svelte5 based version stabilizes, but are optimistic that it will bring a nice speed improvement.

We are currently struggling a bit with IP/DNS issues, as our contract with the glass-fiber internet provider does not guarantee a fixed IP (the joys of DIY hosting...). After nearly five years of never changing it, they seem to have made some backend changes and now it seems to randomly change some time. For now, we put an automatic monitoring and DNS updating in place as a mitigation, but this is not ideal on some slow updating DNS mirrors. It would be possible to upgrade to a contract with a fixed IP, but it would require some negotiations as their default offer for that has a lower upload bandwidth. On the upside, it might finally allow IPv6 connections. For now, we will probably wait and see how often this happens and how well our mitigation works.

Our Movim XMPP chat and blogging service has also seen some updates with some bug fixes and additions of "Briefs" as a sort of microblogging feature. This is not compatible with Mastodon etc., but you might have some fun with it nevertheless. The upcoming group video/audio calls are still a work in progress and will hopefully arrive by the end of the year or so. In addition, we updated the Ejabberd XMPP server to the latest 24.10 version, which includes some nice bug-fixes and a few new behind the scenes features.

⚡ Solar-Powered Servers ☀️

We have not really analyzed our power consumption via the newly installed solar panels, and it has been a bit rainy the last month, so production has not been optimal. By a guesstimate, we covered about 70-80% of the total electricity needs of our servers, with some days of significant surplus but insufficient battery storage capacity. In a few months we will probably have a clearer picture how well it fares over the winter, but so far it is better than expected.

💬 Open Discussion 🗨️

It wasn't just a poem, we really do like it when you share with us your news, questions, happenings and thoughts. If it's about the instance, the fediverse, or anything else you think is on topic (like how you created that new community? You know the one), this is the time to slam it (or gently place it, that's cool too) down below!

We hope you all had a great October and fun filled Halloween. If we're lucky, maybe November will start with a touch of Steve McQueen. :)

...I'll stop now.

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: !hydroponics@slrpnk.net by first time moderator @Guenther_Amanita@slrpnk.net, and !fungus@slrpnk.net by veteran contributor @solo@slrpnk.net.

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 !goblincore@lemmy.blahaj.zone. The !fungus@slrpnk.net 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 @solo@slrpnk.net 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 !vegan@slrpnk.net, 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 !vegan@slrpnk.net community actively moderated by SLRPNK member @thisfro@slrpnk.net. 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!

!pleasantpolitics@slrpnk.net 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. !santabot@slrpnk.net 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!

• !competenceporn@slrpnk.net, 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.

• !electricvehicles@slrpnk.net, created by @sabreW4K3, which focuses on news and discussions on EV's.

• !ancienthistory@slrpnk.net, created by @reallykindasort. A place to discuss and share history of ancient peoples!

In other news, @countrypunk is looking for new moderators for !nature_spirituality@slrpnk.net. 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 !utilitycycling@slrpnk.net, and to @Midnight for becoming part of the !collapse@slrpnk.net 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:

• !nolawns@slrpnk.net, devoted to avoiding monoculture lawns (fairly low activity, would be a great community for a beginner moderator!) EDIT: !nolawns now has a new mod, @quercus@slrpnk.net ^^

• !podcasts@slrpnk.net, which is for... podcasts. (slightly higher activity, but still quite manageable) EDIT: !podcasts has found @LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net 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.