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!

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.

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

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.

New moderators / communities

Anyone who accepts the responsibility outlined in the SLRPNK rules can start their own community on this instance. Several people have started communities in the last month you may want to check out:

• Anti-car living - !anticars by @wildcherry
• BreadTube - !breadtube by @ProdigalFrog
• Geoengineering - !geoengineering by Mambabasa
• Not voting (in your election) - !notvoting by @punkisundead

Also, @maanskyn of The Radical Storytelling Crew has set up shop on our instance, and while they have not decided how much participation they want from the rest of us, their community !thersc may be something interesting to watch.

Controversy Over !NotVoting

Anarchism is an philosophy of horizontal organization and consensus building. While anarchists have historically taken several positions on engaging in electoral politics, many have and still do view it as a distraction from the grassroots organizing that brings real change. The strongest expression of this tendency is to promote non-involvement in all elections.

Last month, a couple posts expressing this opinion in !anarchism have been downvoted and rage-posted in from accounts outside the !anarchism community. @punkisundead, a long-time contributor and valued member, created !notvoting to try and solve this problem. Whether it will help or merely compound the issue remains to be seen.

In addition to aspiring to be a space where anarchists feel welcome, we are also struggling with the dilemma of how to both encourage good-faith engagement and protect communities from out-group harassment. Lessons learned from @punkisundead's moderation strategies may help us with other communities with similar problems. We recently closed !twoxchromosomes due to lack of moderators to respond to similar abuse.

As admins, we support @punkisundead in holding unpopular but principled positions, and have put the fate of !notvoting in their hands. They've volunteered to discuss their vision for the community with anyone with questions in the comments below.

User Stats

In the last monthly meta, I included a member-requested 'user stats' analysis. Because we switched to Lemmy 0.19 mid-January, the way that activity was reported changed, making the sudden inflection in the activity graph suspect. I thought it would be interesting to check in on that again this month.

Fediverse Observer continues to report an upward trend, though not as steep as it was in January when all the members who voted but didn't post or comment were first added to the count.

The total post count continues its exponential growth pattern from last month, which I interpret as a linear trend of members becoming geometrically more comfortable with using the platform to share news.

As I said last month, our goal is not to be the biggest or best by metrics, but to build a healthy community of support and solidarity. You're all part of an exclusive group. @poVoq has expressed the intention to limit membership at a certain point so that the community doesn't get too big - so ultimately the success of SLRPNK will be judged by what its members are enabled learn and build with the help of this community.

It's nice to see numbers going up, but what is important to us is mostly intangible. I'm pretty happy with the vibe of this instance, and your words of kindness and encouragement are well-received and appreciated.

Community Pruning

When gardening, it's customary to remove weaker or redundant branches to give healthy branches more room to expand, and allow the crop to focus resources on growing bigger fruit with less plant. We've been doing this throughout our tenure as admins to local communities that are both inactive and unmoderated so that it is easier for people to find active and engaging communities on SLRPNK, and reduce our attack profile for spam and trolling.

Usually there's some discussion in Movim chat, attempts to contact the moderators, and we're now listing the communities on the Loomio forum so members can stay abreast of what communities are in the shears. The following communities will be pruned next month unless their moderators return or someone steps up to moderate them.

• !decaf
• !rat_zone
• !castiron
• !boardgames

We're also pruning some long-unmoderated communities that are significant enough that we considered them worthy of their own !meta posts:

• !cornelwest2024
• !twoxchromosomes

Discussion of those communities future should happen in the CornelWest2024 pruning post and the TwoXChromosomes pruning post.

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!

As outlined in the SLRPNK Rules, any member of this instance can create communities, but doing so comes with responsibilities:

• Active moderation of communities you create (you can add additional moderators yourself though)

• Please add a community avatar and a basic side-bar text explaining what the community is about

• Make a short introduction post to tell us a bit about yourself and why you created this community (this is mandatory!)

Occasionally we prune communities that do not meet these requirements. I’ve reached out to both current moderator accounts via PM, and neither GreatWhiteBuffalo41 or [email protected] have replied or shown any activity on SLRPNK in 5 months or more. We often prune communities without public comment, but in this case we felt it deserved special mention.

A Brief History of Reddit's TwoXChromosomes

When Reddit started, its primary archetype was Slashdot, a site whose tagline was "News for Nerds" and whose format included voting on comments, user-assisted moderation, and user submitted stories for the admins to directly sign-off on, but the categories for posts were admin controlled. When Reddit started, one of its early communities was Programming, which remained a regular presence on the front page even after Reddit changed its architecture to allow user-created communities. Both Slashdot and to a lesser extent Reddit continue to be heavily male-dominated spaces and toxic to women. A common justification for this toxic dynamic was that there was something about STEM other than the male fragility, hostility, and domination that caused the lopsided representation.

Into this milieu appeared TwoXChromosomes - the name was catchy and immediately conjured both womanhood and tech-savvy, educated, nerdy fun. Posts from this community quickly became a regular fixture of Reddit's front page, demonstrating an outpouring of demand for a threaded discussion forum for women interested in technology and science.

But the victory was not effortless; complaining about 2XC became a favorite pastime for fragile men on the site. As their minority community grew, they had to constantly deal with men wanting to re-hash long-settled debates, have toxic masculinity personally explained to them, and other kinds of bad-faith engagement -- in addition to the undisguised harassment. 2XC instituted a heavy-handed (for the time) moderation policy that allowed men to participate, but only if they respected the community as a women's space. This represented one of the earliest and largest online spaces that participated in a larger discussion platform while protecting its minority members. For that reason 2XC was a trailblazer when it came to protected online spaces.

Is TwoXChromosomes Transphobic?

This was an early concern arising from the name, and the gender-essentialist attacks against transgender women. The early moderators of 2XC took the controversial (in 2008) stance that trans-women are women, and committed to be a trans-inclusive space. Trans-women were added as moderators, and trans-women's issues were frequently included in the topics of discussion. All women were shielded by the mods from male harassment, and trans-exclusionary women were not welcome.

Still, some trans-women and their allies felt excluded by the name, and for good reason. Defining femininity based on what chromosomes and how many one has is more than a dog-whistle - it's a naked form of aggression towards all women. But I'd argue that by normalizing "two x-chromosomes" as a synecdoche for all women rather than a bigoted attack, the community name is furthering the cause of transgender people.

How did the Fediverse's 2XC become unmoderated?

The activity-pub version of 2XC was created in June 2023 during the height of the first Reddit exodus. The creator established it with the intention of carrying on Reddit 2XC's legacy, and was soon joined by a mod from Reddit's 2XC. They were quickly challenged by members of the transgender community about the name, but most significantly, were overwhelmed by eager participation by inconsiderate men.

On Reddit, TwoXChromosomes typically is dominated by self-posts, where women are seeking validation from other women, or want to hear women's opinions on news or ideas. AP-2XC quickly became a place for men to come and seek validation from women, share their opinions on women's issues, or debate women about their opinions.

The original AP-2XC mods called out for additional moderators, but couldn't find women interested in sharing the responsibility to bring AP-2XC closer to the standards set by the original. Both mods have since returned to being active on Reddit.

Is the Fediverse hostile to women?

Yes, obviously. But not more than Slashdot, Reddit, or other similar platforms. I hope in the future on this platform or somewhere else in the Fediverse, a group of women will pick up the mantle of 2XC again and build a community better than its template. This set-back should serve as a reminder that the fight for women's spaces online isn't over. They require above-average tending by committed moderators, or any new minority space is likely to experience the same fate.

As admins, we procrastinated longer than we probably should have to close AP-2XC. We had hoped that it would find new champions, and could eventually make a full recovery. We were hesitant to step in and moderate in their stead, based on the land-mines inherent in men trying to moderate women's spaces.

Leaving the 2XC unmoderated creates a situation where new female participants are quickly chased away by the heavy male participation, and each new visitor is given the false impression that SLRPNK, (or worse) the Fediverse, is devoid of women. Both Blahaj.zone and Beehaw have done a great job of creating protected spaces for women, and are pushing for more moderators and better software support to improve their record. At SLRPNK, we're eager to also create healthy spaces for women, and are talking over XMPP about the best way to move forward with that.

Watch here for updates

We usually close unmoderated communities, but in the case of TwoXChromosomes, we plan to disable public posting and lock all threads. New participants will be redirected to this thread, and when the situation changes, we will post here with updates.

I'd like to thank the Activity Pub-2XC moderators for attempting this task, and for choosing SLRPNK as the place to try it. I'd also like to thank the women and non-binary people who participated in our disappointing simulacrum of 2XC despite its failings, and to men from SLRPNK and other more progressive corners of the Fediverse, who I feel helped push back against the waves of toxic and less enlightened men who dominated the community.

We're always looking for more moderators from among SLRPNK members, and there are a number of other communities that are undermoderated. If you enjoy a community’s existence, consider joining the XMPP chat on Movim, people are eager to accept whatever help you can give.

As outlined in the SLRPNK Rules, all members are free to create communities, but doing so comes with responsibilities:

• Active moderation of communities you create (you can add additional moderators yourself though)

• Please add a community avatar and a basic side-bar text explaining what the community is about

• Make a short introduction post to tell us a bit about yourself and why you created this community (this is mandatory!)

Occasionally we will prune communities that do not meet these requirements. The sole moderator of !cornelwest2024, Lumpen2's account has not posted or commented for 3 months. I've reached out to the account via PM, and have not received any sign that they are still involved on the platform.

While we don't always make a !meta announcement when pruning an unmoderated community, due to the approaching monumental U.S. election, we decided it was prudent to boost our usual transparency in this case.

With each new community, SLRPNK further defines its niche in the ecosystem of the Fediverse. While the structure of the software we use creates distinct roles, new members may eventually become community moderators. Unlike corporate social media, they may even one day become admins here, or of their own instance that we would like to federate with. We like to encourage this 'social' mobility, and support the exploration of community creation and moderation duties. This is part of the reason we tolerate some communities even when their relationship to Solarpunk may be tenuous at best.

Solarpunk is an international ideal. While we don't keep accurate demographics, I would be shocked if the majority of our members were from the United States. Of those from the States, statistically many are disenfranchised. It is famously a democracy of universal suffrage with exceptions, such as asylum seekers who are forced to live undocumented for years while their cases are heard, migrant farm workers who pick most of the nation's crops, H-1B visa knowledge workers who bolster the nation's tech corporations and universities, citizens who have committed a felony like graffiti on federal property, and citizens residing in unincorporated US territory like Puerto Rico or Guam. I'm sure there are more, those are off the top of my head. My point is that the percentage of SLRPNK members who can vote in U.S. elections combined with our small size means the audience for communities to promote presidential candidates here is pretty small.

It should also be noted that there is a significant anarchist presence here. Anarchism is a political ideology of horizontal organizing and resistance to rulers, and most anarchist tendencies are hostile or indifferent to hierarchical electoral politics. They are not the best audience to pitch political hopefuls to if their upvotes are needed to graduate beyond the local feed.

So I don't know exactly why the !cornelwest2024 community languished and was abandoned, but the things I listed were probably contributing factors. Its fate should be a warning to others considering starting similar U.S.-focused political communities on SLRPNK. We're probably not the most fertile ground for that kind of seed to sprout.

To those who feel passionate about campaigning for a third-party candidate or uniting behind the incumbent U.S. president, I don't intend to advocate political apathy. Part of the beauty of federation is that you can create communities on other instances with more fertile demography, or at least a larger audience among which to find people eager to engage with your message.

I'd like to thank Lumpen2 for participating in our experiment for the short time they did, and hope they continue their political fight on other online platforms or in revolutionary or reform organizations offline.

If any SLRPNK member would like to experience Lemmy from the position of a moderator, there are a number of other communities that are undermoderated. If you enjoy a community's existence, consider joining the XMPP chat on movim.slrpnk.net, people are eager to accept whatever help you can give.

I don't know if you need this info, but I was pretty disturbed to see unexpected child pornography on a casual community. Thankfully it didn't take place on SLRPNK.net directly, but if anyone has any advice besides leaving the community in question, let me know. And I wanted to sound an alarm to make sure we have measures in place to guard against this.

Happy new year and > 1000 members

First off, happy new year to everyone 😊

We also surpassed 1000 members on slrpnk.net near the end of last month. This is a nice milestone and another reason to celebrate.

While we had some server issues last month and also did not yet upgrade to the latest version of Lemmy (due to federation bugs with it), we can still welcome more users in 2024.

Of course the actually active number of users is quite a bit lower, as many of the Reddit migrants did not stick around. But I think we managed to get a healthy number of regular posters and our communities are also well subscribed to in the larger Fediverse.

I also managed to promote our instance a bit on the 37C3 congress in Hamburg a few days ago. Great Fediverse presence there and good solarpunk vibes as well.

New moderators / communities

We got two new communities in recent weeks that seem to be quite popular:

• @[email protected] started [email protected]
• @[email protected] started [email protected]

Technical updates

Besides the upcoming upgrade to Lemmy 0.19.x we thought a bit about other services to host. One idea is a collaborative text editor, for which the new Hedgedocs2 alpha is being tested on https://docs.slrpnk.net (BEWARE users and documents might be wiped without notice during the test period). We will update you when this service stabilizes sufficiently and also if we find a way to integrate accounts with the main Lemmy user database like we do for the XMPP & Movim service. Stay tuned 👍

Open discussion

As always, this is your thread. You’re welcome to comment about any meta stuff you don’t think is big enough for its own post. New communities, Lemmy or Movim issues, personal news, and questions for the community will be visible to the entire community here through the month of January.

Introduction

As the December solstice approaches and twilight consumes more of the northern hemisphere's day, SLRPNK continues to grow brighter! New users have continued to join the platform at a pretty constant rate of ~1/day, and we've been very proud of your activity here and across the Threadiverse. Not only do we rarely get negative reports about you, remote admins and mods have noticed your positive contributions across their Lemmy instances. You are making the Fediverse and the world a better place. Thank you for making that happen.

New moderators / communities

I'd also like to acknowledge new communities that have recently appeared on SLRPNK. Check out adorable graffiti in @punkisundead's [email protected] community. Take a trip around the world without leaving your kitchen with new member @pip's [email protected] channel! And expand your knowledge with @spaduf's [email protected] OER list.

Also, a shout out to @toaster for starting the thriving [email protected] community the previous month.

Movim#Moderators chat is growing

There are now a dozen accounts in the Moderators channel in XMPP chat. It has acted as a useful channel for casual meta discussion, and remained up when the Lemmy software had unscheduled downtime earlier this month. When things are working normally, join Movim with your Lemmy username and password and message either me or @poVoq to get an invite to Moderators chat.

There may be some issues related to the unscheduled downtime that affect Movim account creation that need to be resolved. We've received your reports and are working on getting everyone who wants to be involved connected.

Tools for moderators coordination

In addition to the #Moderators channel, I've created #mod-urbanism and #mod-documentaries private channels to coordinate the Alt Urbanism and Documentaries (Solarpunk) communities. So far they have been useful for discussing policy and keeping shared post backlogs with my fellow mod. Sharing community duties and ideas with you continues to be a pleasure, @ProdigalFrog :)

You're all encouraged to follow my example. Naming it mod-community-name keeps the community namespace open in case people decide to make that a thing. If you add me and @poVoq to the chat room, we can better assist with moderation duties. As admins, we see all the reports you do, but tend to hold off on acting to respect your agency in your own communities. With that channel of communication open, it's easier for us to get feedback about how we can best support you.

Unscheduled Downtime (text @poVoq)

As outlined here in more detail, we unfortunately had an lengthy unscheduled downtime on the 26th of November. The ultimate cause was not directly related to Lemmy but rather an issue with the SSD boot disk of the new server that we recently migrated to. We identified the likely cause, but it will not be possible to fix in the next few weeks, so as a workaround we restored our instance from a daily backup on the old server. So on the upside, we were able to confirm that the backups work as expected 🤓

Open discussion

As always, this is your thread. You're welcome to comment about any meta stuff you don't think is big enough for its own post. New communities, Lemmy or Movim issues, personal news, and questions for the community will be visible to the entire community here through the month of December.

Thanks for continuing on this adventure with us.

Introduction

Greetings everybody! Slrpnk.net now has two Admins! On the 16th of October @poVoq gave me admin privileges, and I'm now involved in approving applications, responding to report tickets, and coordinating with other instance administrators. Your main admin is continuing to do those things as well, in addition to sysadmin tasks and technology improvements, and we are coordinating over XMPP to keep our actions consistent and in line with Slrpnk's values. Thank you @ProdigalFrog and @punkisundead for your warm endorsements, your support means a lot to me.

XMPP chat integration

As mentioned last month, Slrpnk.net is running an Ejabberd service. Movim.Slrpnk.net hosts a web-client you can use with your current username and password. After logging in to the Movim client, your XMPP account will be active, and you can access Slrpnk chat with any XMPP compatible Android or Apple client. You can find a list of suggested clients at joinjabber.org. Cheogram from F-Droid is a recommended choice.

Audio and video calls are still not fully functional yet, but we've been experimenting extensively with the chat options, and it has been invaluable for coordinating administrative activities. In addition to directly chatting with other users, there are public chat rooms, and you can create invite-only private rooms. The interface is not bug-free, but we've had direct help from the author in troubleshooting problems and fixing bugs. Thanks @[email protected]!

Everyone is encouraged to join, but especially moderators who share communities. We've created an invite room for all moderators [email protected], and when demand requires, rooms for each community like "mod-memes" and "mod-anarchism" are available for community-specific coordination.

Call for moderators

We've noticed a rise in spam - this is good news as it is an indication of the Threadiverse's rising popularity, though it is of course also a challenge. There has also been a rise in hate speech and genocidal language due to recent tragic events. Palestinians and Israelis, Jews and Muslims are all people deserving of dignity and respect, and are all explicitly welcome here. I'm proud of the inter-admin solidarity particularly with Lemmy.world and Beehaw.org in responding to reports. I'm also proud of all of you who have participated in discussions, flagged spam and hate speech for us, and shown humanity to others in this trying time. You are an inspiration to me.

To grow and become better, we need people to mod. If you enjoy posting in a community, consider asking the owner of the community if you can help mod; if you're a moderator and you notice a person who you think would be a good moderator, don't be afraid to ask them to join you. If you're already a mod, consider reaching out to other mods to help them with their communities. Our Lemmy feature requests are improvements to the moderation tools, and the XMPP chat significantly improves the ease of inter-moderator coordination. More mods in a community usually means overlapping coverage when there's a diversity of time-zones and sleep schedules, and is a great opportunity to get to know other members of the community and learn social custodial skills from each other.

Fedi-Admin Guild

Since @poVoq announced it last month, we've added admins from four other Lemmy instances to the Fedi-admin guild, with a fifth likely to join soon. The guild runs on the open-source forum software Loomio, which is designed to facilitate online decision-making. It was designed for community governance, and though it is still a work in progress, the developers have been very responsive. If you're looking for another reason to volunteer as a mod, access is still open to you even if you're not an admin. Both Lemmy and Loomio are fascinating software concepts, if you're curious about that sort of thing, I think you'll like learning the features and seeing the clockwork.

I'm a big fan of the guild initiative as a form of prefigurative politics and for its potential for improving the general Threadiverse stability and performance. It's also an opportunity to build consensus on community norms in this new form of social technology we're all building together.

No UI change this month

We're sticking with the default Lemmy UI for at least another month. You can continue to experience site navigation in Photon and Alexandrite. There's a feedback post for Photon, and the developer, @[email protected], is active in the threads. There's also an Alexandrite feedback post.

Open discussion

This is the monthly meta thread, 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. Got questions? Ask'em!