First off, we are still looking for feedback on the Photon & Alexandrite alternative Lemmy UI trials. Please comment in the linked posts.

Technical server updates

Server migration was completed last month and it is generally working well on this new 8 threads, 16GB RAM machine. There is a problem left with occasional stalling of the database writes for which the source has been identified, but it will likely require some hardware replacement and thus a small down-time later this month. But having everything on a dedicated machine allows me in theory to give additional server admins access, but we first need to identify people willing and able to help out with that (more on that below)

Due to active ongoing upstream development the CSAM scanning tool was not yet enabled, but preparation work is complete and it should be easy to start soon.

XMPP chat integration

Still a work in progress, but the auth-script against the Lemmy database is functional and deployed here, so you can already use your regular SLRPNK Lemmy account ([email protected]) as an XMPP account since a few days. The Movim web-client is also up and running on https://movim.slrpnk.net, but it needs some further testing and a few known issues make it not ideal to use in combination with other XMPP clients until the next Ejabberd server release (Edit: updated, lets see if that fixes this problem). In case you want to use Movim on your Android or iOS device, use the install to homescreen option in your mobile browser's menu (Movim is a PWA with Webpush). End-to-end encryption is disabled by default, but can be enabled in the user settings and works reasonably well. However this feature is still somewhat experimental in Movim and you are probably better off using other XMPP clients for this. Audio and video calls are currently not fully functional yet, and will require a bit more work on our server setup.

Community wiki

Based on our previous discussion, work has started on a community wiki linked to our Lemmy communities. It is already available on https://wiki.slrpnk.net but the account integration is not yet functional. The plan is to create an individual namespace for each Lemmy community to have their own community specific wiki that community moderators can edit. The wiki will likely also be automatically synced with a git repository.

Fedi admin guild

One of the goals of the F-hub.org organisation hosting SLRPNK is to enable better community management of FOSS projects. To this end a new service was recently added that allows creating coordination forums. As a trial, I created one such group with the goal to invite active Fediverse admins and moderators. The general idea is to have a better managed space for exchange and mutual-aid in server administration as well as to make the decision making process for topics like instance defederation more transparent. If you are interested in this please DM me here and I will send you an invite email. I hope that the moderators of the most active communities here might be also interested in this, as it is not only meant for sysadmins.

Additional site mods

I would also like to ask if any of the already a bit longer active community moderators here would be interested in becoming site moderators for SLRPNK. Additional responsibility would be to help with account approvals (not many lately) and reacting to user reports for communities that have not very active moderation. Ideally it would be also nice to have some sort of vote by the other currently active community mods on who they would trust as a site mod, as it comes with quite a lot of power in regards to moderation decisions in all communities.

Open discussion

If you have any other topics related to our community here on slrpnk.net please comment below. Feel free to also highlight some new communities here on SLRPNK you have recently created.

Similar to the Photon UI, we are currently running a trial of the Alexandrite UI here: https://alexandrite.slrpnk.net/

Please let me know what you think about it.

Recently, I guess also because climate, health, financial crisis etc. make people more edgy and anxious, I have been witnessing an increase in domestic abuse in real life.

I believe there is a clear and urgent need for support and as I believe there cannot possibly be enough open doors for victims I would like to offer this support here on slrpnk as well and create a group for it.

Thought I'd ask before as I don't want to spam slrpnk with more groups and/or trigger people who might not consider this to be the right space for it. Relationship Anarchy could be a place for this as well, but I'd rather want to have a dedicated safe space where people can ask 'Am I actually in an abusive relationship?' and where they can find materials to help them decide what to do.

And of course, I would love to work together with others on this. I have started to write down some stuff but I really think it would be best to have different voices on this.

Also interesting from a [*]-punk perspective: the interweaving of abuse in personal life and abuse in society. Recognizing the abuse in my personal life was key in understanding similar processes in society.

If not I'd create it, anyone else wants to join in?

Edit: Okay, here it is https://slrpnk.net/c/herbalism

I'm happy to discuss integrating this into a solarpunk medicine community if preferred.

Please join us! And share at [email protected]

You can now test the alternative Photon UI for Lemmy on:

https://photon.slrpnk.net

It's one of the few alternative UIs for Lemmy that includes moderation features, so that makes it interesting as a replacement for the default Lemmy-UI.

Right now it is still early days and Photon is very actively developed, so don't expect a perfectly polished experience. Once it stabilizes, there is a chance we will switch over to it as the main UI for Slrpnk though, as the current official Lemmy-UI is not very actively maintained any more with the main developer working on a re-write.

Update: Linked in the sidebar now. Will probably take a few more weeks/months before it can be used as a full replacement of the lemmy-ui though. Looking very nice overall though.

As a matter of community building, lets make this a monthly thing 😊

Community gardening

As stated in our Wiki, we allow members to create their own communities as a way to encourage contributions, but this comes with the responsibility of active moderation. The site admins can't moderate all communities and unless a posts gets reported, they might not even know about spam etc. Thus we will regularly prune seemingly abandoned communities.

The current list set for pruning is:

• ~~Buy it for life~~ volunteer found
• Dumpster Diving <- removed
• OpenSourceEcology <- removed
• ~~Rat Zone~~ volunteer found
• ~~Board games~~ volunteer found
• Solar Powered Vehicles <- removed

So unless someone wants to step up and take them over for moderation and active contribution, they will be removed at the end of the month.

In addition there are these two communities that attract quite a bit of moderation workload and the current mods need support with that (otherwise it might be better to prune them as well):

• TwoXChromosomes
• Collapse of the old society

Technical updates

The originally planned move to a smaller dedicated server was only partially completed and ran into some issue with 8GB RAM being slightly too small for our current Lemmy database use. It might be just a a memory leak issue that should be fixed with the next Lemmy release, but given some related consideration I decided to try use another server with 16GB RAM instead. This move has not been started yet, but I will try to keep the down-time to a minimum.

This server also has a built in GPU that would likely allow automatic scanning for illegal images via Lemmy-safty. This image recognition script is fully local, so no data is transmitted to any 3rd party, but it will likely result in some false-positives (Likely NSFW / child themed ones, which seems not like a major problem for our instance). Any hits will be removed from the storage automatically so this will also protect our moderators from having to deal with such potentially traumatic imagery.

I also made some progress with the account integration between Lemmy and an XMPP/Jabber server. The idea is that you will be able to use your existing [email protected] ID also for federated chat via the Jabber network. This is more secure than the internal Lemmy DMs as Jabber clients support end to end encryption (like Signal more or less). If in the future some Lemmy clients will add privacy preserving UnifiedPush we can also support that via this XMPP server.

I also started trialling a Movim web-client for it, which besides being a nice chat interface for private 1:1 and group chats, can also act as a long-form blogging site (kinda like Medium or Substack) for our members. Lets see if there is an interest in that 🤔

In theory bridges to Matrix, Discord, Telegram etc. could also be added, but it will need some more testing and might not work out. Voice and video calls will also initially not be supported due to some technical issue, but I plan to fix that ASAP.

Draft code of conduct

I am also still looking for feedback on and maybe some contributions to our incomplete draft code of conduct.

Open discussion

If you have any other topics related to our community here on slrpnk.net please comment below.

A month ago, I made a post asking that c/twoXchromosomes be removed from the instance due to known concerns with the name in regards to trans people, and the mods' stated intention not to compromise on the name. Since then, the community's mods have gone inactive. u/[email protected] has only two posts on the website, and the most recent one is 2 months ago. u/GreatWhiteBuffalo41 has not commented on the site in 22 days, and has not been active on c/twoXchromosomes for 2 months. There have been 4 posts to the community in the time since my post about the community name a month ago. The modlog shows no mod activity in 2 months.

I would like to appeal to the admins that I may take over the community, set it to restricted mode, and make the only post on the community a sticky explaining the problems with the name and redirecting to other feminist communities across the Fediverse.

Monero is an also-ran cryptocurrency, in the same proof-of-work family as Bitcoin and Etherium.

Monero.town is a Lemmy instance whose main communities are: Monero, privacy, Monero Memes, Meta, and Monero Mining.

Enough has been written on the negative ecological effects of proof-of-work based cryptocurrency that I think it's not controversial to say it is incompatible with the Solarpunk vision.

Pictured inciting incident is a person advertising the crypto-capitalist Lemmy competitor "Nostr" in the anarchism community.

I don't personally mind a debate about Nostr, but like most of the content from Monero.town, it doesn't belong here. More sales pitches from a crypto-currency hype instance are going to be tedious, and crowd out the kind of progressive politics and human interactions we're looking to nurture here. Reddit's /r/anarchism had to constantly repel assholes trying to pass off their edgy capitalism as anarchist, Lemmy gives us the unique opportunity to send a strong message and nip this in the bud.

Fediverse sites that have already blocked Monero.town --

reject (10): solarpunk.moe, polyglot.city, freethought.online, icosahedron.website, sunbeam.city, vtuber.house, fruef.social, cutie.city, fuckcars.social, karas.social

followers_only (3): toot.cat, orbsafe.masto.host, partyparrot.social

I subscribed to a few smaller communities. When I visit them in an app or via slrpnk.net they show different posts/comments. In most cases its comments that seem to be missing.

I only noticed it in smaller communities, maybe because its more noticable there. Is this intentional/normal or a bug?

Examples:

https://slrpnk.net/c/[email protected] and https://feddit.de/c/polyamory (no comments when accessed via slrpnk.net)

https://slrpnk.net/c/[email protected] and https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/c/tranarchism (only my comment when accessed via slrpnk.net, which is missing when accessed via lemmy.blahaj.zone)

https://slrpnk.net/c/[email protected]?dataType=Post&amp;page=1&amp;sort=New and https://feddit.de/c/aufmuepfig?dataType=Post&amp;page=1&amp;sort=New (posts newer than 3 days are missing)

A place to chat about how your summer has gone, and what you've been up to.

Mine's been great. 3 vacations this summer, mostly just visiting family and making up for lost time for when I worked way, way, more, and everything was on hold all the time. Gone from just surviving to thriving the past two years.

Got to make a couple sets of good friends down the street, as our young neighbourhood starts to connect, and form a community. It's pretty exciting.

Hope things are going well for the rest of you.

TS

So there are a few topics that came up lately that I think would be nice to discuss with members of this community.

Basically this is part of writing a Code of Conduct for our instance and I think we need to talk about some specific type of posts:

Doomers

Naturally the themes discussed in our communities are attracting a lot of climate doomer comments and I would say we also have a significant number of "recovering doomers" here as community members.

Earlier this week I considered closing the /c/collapse community on SRLPNK, because it is not actively moderated and attracts a lot of these types, even though ex_06 (who asked me to have their account re-activated, but not as an admin) originally intended it to be more of a psychological self-help group for people trying to get to terms with the likely loss of many things that defined their life so far.

While the typical doomer could probably need some psychological support, they are usually still in a stage of grief that makes them lash out and not engage in a constructive exchange how to make the best of the current difficult situation we sadly find ourselves in.

Mostly I have been doing temporary bans for such doomers to cool down and not spread their doom and gloom endlessly in our communities, but I think we need to come up with a common idea how to deal with this better.

Discussing civil disobedience

aka Direct Action or the other man's "Eco Terrorist" (yeah right...).

Obviously this is a topic many climate activists find themselves more and more confronted with and you might already be involved with a group engaged in such actions of civil disobedience. And lets not forget about the punk in Solarpunk either :)

However, obviously this is a public web-site and thus easily monitored by law-enforcement and other people that might be interested in reporting such discussions to the local authorities. Thus to protect this service and also our users from themselves we can't really allow planning discussions with specific targets or generally calls for action against specific persons to happen here out in the open (or in the semi-public direct messages).

Obviously, we can never condone violence against persons, but aside from that please be careful with discussing climate activism on the clear-web and rather use fully end to end encrypted means with people you can trust!

However this has obviously a large grey area and people might have stronger views on what should and should not be discussed here.

Absolute Vegans

Vegans are obviously welcome on SLRPNK and I think we can all agree that strongly reducing the consumption of animal products is a worthy goal.

However, there are some very opinionated (online) Vegans / animal rights activists that (intentionally or not) are indistinguishable from trolls and generally very toxic to deal with. Please don't feel personally attacked by this, but I think we need to come up with something regarding this in our code of conduct.

So these were the three topics I had in my mind lately, but feel free to discuss others as well.

I am looking forward to your thoughts on this!

I know we're not federated with lemmygrad but hexbear seems more leftist in general rather than pure tankie/ML. They'll also be the biggest (or second biggest?) instance when they start federating.

What are the general thoughts on it? I personally wouldn't mind and browse hexbear every now and then already so I might be biased. I think there's a fair amount of likeminded people there though.

I've been searching for communities using https://lemmyverse.net, but lately every time I click on a link I get the error shown above (I've edited out my username because it's not really important). For instance the above error was shown when I clicked on the link https://slrpnk.net/c/[email protected]

After I refresh the page I can see the content of the community, but I appear to be logged out. Then I hit refresh again and I log in, but sometimes the posts all disappear so the community appears to be empty.

Seems like something weird is going on here. I assume it's a bug. I'm happy to give any extra details you might need to figure out the problem.

EDIT: Turns out I couldn't see posts after logging in because my language wasn't set properly, and the other errors have disappeared with time.

I'd like to gauge interest for a nice solarpunk wiki - an easily searchable repository of knowledge for everything solarpunk. While a lemmy instance is great to share articles, links, meet like-minded folk, give quick tech advice, there is a lot of useful slrpnk knowledge worth collecting in a more systematic manner. Are we enough active people here to get that started yet? It might be early at this point, as @[email protected] mentioned in a comment elsewhere, but as a wiki fan I'll put that out here. Or are there other wikis out there worth supporting instead?

Since it is safer to self-host these alternative web-clients, I decided to give mlmym a try and it turned out quite easy to add.

Please report back any issues with it here.

Edit: https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym is the source code for this.

Hi SLRPNK,

This post has two purposes. First, I wanted to introduce a new community I just created, [email protected]. This community is for all things tree related, similar to /r/marijuanaenthusiasts which many former redditors may know.

Also, I have a few questions about community creation

1. Since we're a small instance, other instances won't be able to see any posts from before anyone from that instance has searched for this community, correct? If so, maybe I should have waited before creating the introductory post. Is there any solution to this problem?

2. I tried to upload a banner but it doesn't seem to appear. Any thoughts as to why that could be? Are there any limitations to size, file type, or dimensions?

3. I thought I had a third one but I can't remember... I'll edit if it comes to me!

Unclear reason, slrpnk.net is also effected.

Edit: Doesn't seem like an active attack, but rather a database overload issue caused by someone deleting their old and previously very active account, and those deletion requests being federated out to other instances as well. At least that seems the most likely theory right now.

Edit: seems to be mostly resolved, but I hope there will be a bug fix to prevent this from happening again.

/c/twochromosomes explains its name with the following:

The name XX was chosen just because it illustrates the essence of this subreddit and its target Redditors–girly and geeky, and subtly awesome.

Connecting girliness with a genotype and bragging about being cisgender is not my idea of what the solarpunk movement stands for. This is gender essentialism and subtle transphobia. And the beginning of the community and of SLRPNK is the perfect time to be getting rid of transphobic names.

Admins, if you are reading this, please remove this transphobic community.

Everyone else, do you know how I can get in touch with the SLRPNK admins?

The author of the tool states that body text of a post is weighted higher than the title. Add your submission statements or summaries to affect your ranking in the engine (for people managing communities or creating content).

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/1605286

I keep see people complaining about not being able to find active communities that match their interests. So I've added a new feature to https://www.search-lemmy.com/ that allows you to search posts for a particular topic and then it tells you which communities have the most posts matching your search query.

And assuming that you've set your home instance correctly, those links will even open up in your home instance, so that you can subscribe directly to them.

For example, if you search for 'linux' (https://www.search-lemmy.com/find-communities/results?query=linux&page=1) it gives you a link to each community, tells you which instance it's on and how many matches it found for your query.

All of the same filters that you can use on the normal search can be used here as well. So if you just want to find the best community that mentions linux on lemmy.world (https://www.search-lemmy.com/find-communities/results?query=linux+instance%3Alemmy.world&page=1), you can filter by just that instance. Click on the Search Tips button to see a list of all of the available filters.

P.S. I'm aware of https://lemmyverse.net/ etc... and while those are great as well, this allows you to search to see what people are actually talking about on the various communities.

Again, if you have any feature requests or find any bugs, PLEASE reach out or ideally go to my github (https://github.com/marsara9/lemmy-search) and log a bug there.

There is a solarpunk music community, but what about solarpunk movies? From top of my head I could list a few titles:

• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
• Castaway on the Moon
• Woman at War

Thoughts about this?

Is there interest in a community for permacomputing projects and discussion? I feel like it fits perfectly with the principles of solarpunk.

PS. if yes, can someone create it? it looks like I don't have the option since my account is in another instance

Music is a huge part of my life, and I would love to know what you fine folks here listen to and what inspires you!

I'd get the ball rolling on a c/ if there's interest.

EDIT: you can find the c/ at [email protected]

I believe hydrogen will part of your better future. I was thinking about dedicated community for hydrogen related stuff? What do you all think?

You can read the official release annoucements here.

This is mainly a security release, but it fixes some important flaws in the frontend code. Thus while there are not many changes from a user perspective, it is still a quite significant improvement 👍