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 Justincase_2008@lemmy.world 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.

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. This month is special in that it's the first monthly meta to involve input from moderators in chat.

Update to Lemmy 0.19.3

We waited to update until mid-January due to federation bugs in the update, but we've now been running the latest Lemmy for the last two weeks. There was an issue during the upgrade with Login cookies, which can be resolved by resetting browser cookies. Issues we were having with cross-version federation have been solved. Special thanks to @poVoq for successfully navigating the technical hurdles for this achievement.

For a list of new features, check out @nutomic and @dessalines post on the update. Of particular interest is scaled sort. This may be a boon for communities on SLRPNK, as it promises to bring more attention to small but active communities.

Other Updates

Just before the time of posting, the XMPP web chat portal Movim was updated to version 0.23. The database supporting Lemmy was also updated with a workaround to fix a memory leak issue.

We plan to upgrade to Postgres16 shortly, along with a move to a server with improved features.

Growth of SLRPNK XMPP

movim.slrpnk.net continues to grow as an invaluable tool for coordinating the moderation and management of this instance. All SLRPNK members are encouraged to join, there are public channels for general chat, introductions, and technical support. While the web client is adequate and can be used in any browser, you can also use any third-party app that supports XMPP to connect and participate.

We're working on more tools to expand the utility of the SLRPNK link aggregator, but I can't emphasize enough how useful a chat back-channel is for casual conversation, conflict resolution, coordination, and cooperation. Come join us!

Call for Moderators

As the instance continues to grow, we need more hands make the necessary labor of moderation a light burden. We are seeking moderators for !solarpunktravel and !twoxchromosomes. If there's any community you would like to support directly, consider joining XMPP chat and reaching out the the community moderators. Managing successful communities well is easier with more people, and chat is a tool that supports communication and coordination necessary to make that work. Moderation is a great exercise for developing interpersonal communication and group coordination skills - essential abilities for a solarpunk future.

Both @spaduf and @silence7 have started testing the use of bots for moderation support. We look forward to progress on that front.

New Communities

Shout out to new communities and moderators: !inperson by @awk, !projects by KryptonBlur, !fullyautomatedrpg by @andrewrgross, !conscripts by @hex_m_hell, Mutual Aid Society (TePeWu) by 8Petros. Welcome back 8Petros!

Long time member @spaduf has been busy with !digitalcommunitybuilding, Digital Community Building Wiki, and a supplement to the popular !opencourselectures, !autodidact. He is active on XMPP chat, so if you'd like to get involved with his projects, that's an ideal medium to connect over.

User Stats

I'd like to preface this section by saying as administrators, we don't pay too much attention to user metrics. I've noticed a culture of competition among some instances, and I think this leads to activity for activity's sake, engagement for the sake of numbers. The fortunes of the Fediverse rely just as much on things outside our control, like the policy mis-steps of corporate giants or software performance and development cycles, as they do on our contributions and participation. The quality of a community is difficult to quantify, but by my unscientific reckoning, you are all doing a great job.

This graph comes from Fediverse Observer, and it should be noted that the uptick in January coincides with a change in how Lemmy 0.19 reports activity. Voting accounts that do not post or comment are now included in the total.

This graph is typical for all instances across the Fediverse - a large uptick in new members during the Reddit blackout, and while people continue to join, more accounts are becoming inactive. This is indicative of Lemmy finding its audience. While we crossed 1K members in December, less than 200 members are actively posting or commenting. That's a healthy amount, and as we'll see, it doesn't mean activity is waning.

January was our biggest month yet in terms of post volume with over 2,000 new posts since December 23rd last year. According to FediDB, activity on the instance is growing. I guess a subset of people are growing more comfortable with the platform and their exponentially growing activity makes up for the mild downward trend suggested by the active users line on the previous graph.

As stated earlier, 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, which we hope is much bigger than what we're capable of measuring with JSON requests.

Performance Stats

This graph from Fediverse Observer is particularly reassuring. Uptime measures what percentage of time the SLRPNK Lemmy service is live and reachable, and we've always stayed in the high 90's on that metric thanks to @poVoq's excellent sysadmin skills. Latency measures how long a typical web request takes to resolve, and generally the faster the response, the more usable the web application feels. Some of you have mentioned the lag in the Lemmy interface, and we've noticed it too. There's only so much hardware a sysadmin can afford to throw at this number, it's largely a product of the software quality.

The server is hosted in Europe, but for most of 2022, it was hosted closer to the Observer. The farther away a server is has an effect on latency. The rise in latency in August is probably related to a now resolved server hardware issue. Hopefully the downtick in request time this last month is an indication that performance bugs in the underlying software are being identified and addressed. This number is an average, and we've only been running the new version for two of those four weeks. The recorded average number is likely to be even lower next month. This is one of those factors that's mostly out of our control, but all the same we're pleased when the wind is in our sails.

Open discussion

Thanks again for continuing on this adventure with us. This is your space, any questions or ideas you'd like to share are welcome here. All comments will get extra visibility up until the beginning of next month. Tell us what's new!

Background: yesterday, there was heated discussion in the thread "military-industrial complex is a supervillain of causing the climate crisis" (link).

Among others, the thread creator posted a comment to the Guardian article "The climate costs of war and militaries can no longer be ignored", commenting it thusly:

If you want more context or won’t take my word on how militarism will kill is all, you can read this article.

I replied, a copy of my reply is below for your judgement. My reply got moderated by someone with the reason "Comment does not address intent of original post and promotes weapons industry / war in Ukraine."

I think my comment both addressed the topic, did not promote the weapons industry but helping Ukraine defend itself (ironically, tools for military self-defense come from the weapons industry) and did not promote the war (in fact, I noted that war is expensive, resource-intensive and stupid), but did explain the dynamics of war and revolutions.

I consider this moderator misconduct, likely motivated by their political views - and have asked a server administrator to talk with the moderator involved, to ascertain if they can refrain from using moderator powers as a political club to hit people, or to secure their demotion from a moderating role.

The removed post, for your judgement:

The article is fine, and I second the recommendation to read it, but from the article to the slogan you present, things do not follow a logical path.

Yes, war is both an incredibly expensive activity (diverting money that could be used) and a resource-intensive activity (the money goes into actual materials that almost surely destroy something or get destroyed) and an incredibly stupid activity (and it can snowball)...

...but the problem is that successful unilateral disarmament during a war tends to result in a situation called "defeat". If the defeat is not an attack being defeated, but defense being defeated, that is called a "conquest". Now, letting a conquest succeed has a historical tendency of the conqueror having more experience at conquest, and more resources to conquer with... which has, several times in history, lead to another conquest or a whole series of conquests. A regional war in Ukraine resulting in Ukraine being taken over by Russia has a high probability of producing:

1. a bigger regional war later, in which Russia, using its own resources and those of Ukraine, proceeds to another country, gets into a direct conflict with NATO and then indeed there is a risk of a global war

2. an encouraging effect after which China, noting that international cooperation against the agressor was ultimately insufficient, and deeming itself better prepared than Russia, decides that it can take Taiwan with military force

However, a war ending with inability to show victory tends to produce a revolution in the invading country. For example, World War I produced a revolution in Russia and subsequently a revolution in Germany, with several smaller revolutions in between, empires collapsing and a brief bloom of democracy in Europe, before the Great Depression and the rise of fascism ate all the fruits. The Falklands War produced a revolution in Argentina. The Russo-Japanese war produced the 1905 near-revolution in Russia.

It is better for Ukraine to not get conquered. It is better for Russia to be unable to conquer Ukraine. That result is also better for everyone around them. It's even better globally because it sets a precedent of large-scale cooperation defeating an agressive superpower, discouraging agressive superpowers from undertaking similar wars until memory starts fading again.

Unfortunately, until we see indications that Russian society is getting ready to stop the war (this could involve starting negotiations on terms palatable to Ukraine, a change of leadership, a withdrawal, a revolution, etc)... the path to achieving that outcome remains wearing out the agressor: producing enough weapons and delivering them to Ukraine.

Ultimately, both sides in a war wear each other down. The soldiers most eager to fight are killed soonest. The people most unwilling to get mobilized or recruited, and soldiers most unwilling to fight - they remain alive. If they are pressed forever, some day they will make the calculation: there are less troops blocking the way home than in the trenches of the opposing side. After that realization, they eventually tend to mutiny. Invading troops tend to do that a bit easier than defending troops, because they sense less purpose in their activity. In the long run, if nothing else happens, that will happen. There is just (probably, regrettably) no particularly quick shortcut to getting there.

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:

• @toaster@slrpnk.net started !asksolarpunk@slrpnk.net
• @activistPnk@slrpnk.net started !climate_action_individual@slrpnk.net

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 !grasweeti@slrpnk.net community. Take a trip around the world without leaving your kitchen with new member @pip's !culinary_cultures@slrpnk.net channel! And expand your knowledge with @spaduf's !opencourselectures@slrpnk.net OER list.

Also, a shout out to @toaster for starting the thriving !balconygardening@slrpnk.net 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.

SLRPNK recently received a registration request for @CommunityBoost -- the bot for Lemmy Community Boost, which we've denied.

What is Lemmy Community Boost?

Lemmy Community Boost (LCB) is a system written by @iso, admin of lemy.lol. The purpose is to put new communities into the "All" feed of more Lemmy instances. All SLRPNK communities appear in SLRPNK's "All" feed, but SLRPNK only requests content from a remote community if at least one of our members has subscribed to that community. If no-one on SLRPNK has subscribed to a remote community, then no-one will see posts on that remote community in the "All" feed.

LCB seeks to change this by creating a bot account on SLRPNK that subscribes to every new community on instances that have been pre-screened by Fediseer, a Fediverse Web-of-Trust system maintained by @db0 of lemmy.dbzer0.com (we are members of Fediseer.) The goal would be to make new communities more easily discoverable through the "All" feed, and in theory easier and less discouraging to grow.

As of this writing, more than two dozen instances have registered a @CommunityBoost user, including midwest.social and lemmy.blahaj.zone. More than a handful have either not registered or declined, including lemmy.dbzer0.com, lemmy.world, and beehaw.org. LCB keeps a roster at https://boost.lemy.lol/ with up to date information on participating instances.

We've decided to join the latter group for now. Our concerns fall into two categories.

Locally flavored All tab is a feature

While one might expect the "All" tab to act as the Threadiverse firehose, when visiting multiple instances to find a home, I found clicking on the "All" tab gave a short-hand of the kind of community hosted by the instance. Whatever the official intention for the tab, narrowing it to communities your fellow instance members find interesting is an imperfect but very efficient method of algorithmic suggestion without invasive tracking and click analysis. Perhaps future UI renaming it "suggested" with an alt-text "posts from communities chosen by your instance" would make the tabs' behavior more intuitive.

This unique "All" tab behavior expresses itself most noticeably on smaller instances. These are also the instances whose communities are likely to be most greatly affected by LCB, meaning the smaller instances would be forced to make a trade if all other things stayed the same. But even keeping the previous functionality and renaming the "All" tab, creating a "Firehose" tab may still be an anti-feature.

Hopefully invisible to most users is the battle that admins and moderators fight against spam and abuse. The tools native to Lemmy and Kbin software are less than adequate for the job, and admins coordinate efforts across instances on matrix and XMPP to fight the flow. While some attacks are obvious, others are confusing and subtle. Since most instances allow unsupervised community creation, allowing anyone who creates a new community to broadcast that community name and content across the Threadiverse could open a new vector for spam and abuse.

The vast majority of communities on Lemmy are abandoned, created in a flurry of activity 4 months ago. There are more people willing to create communities than there are people willing to contribute posts to them, or even stick around and moderate them. The communities on lemy.lol seem to follow this pattern. This is the problem LCB is supposed to solve, but is the issue that people can't find these communities, or that there aren't enough people with free time available to keep them alive in the first place?

Some communities in the Threadiverse have reached a critical mass and feel vibrant, others feel like they are on life support -- supported by one or two regular contributors, while many are verifiably dead. LCB doesn't seem like it would bring new users to Lemmy, only redistribute where existing users spend their time. Is this what Lemmy needs, or would it be more prudent to prune dead communities and encourage consolidation of scarce volunteer resources into a smaller number of vibrant and growing communities?

Concerns about performance

While the number of Lemmy instances grows linearly, the connections between them have the potential to grow geometrically. This leads to concerns about software efficiency and hardware performance.

Take the example of a Threadiverse ecosystem with ten instances, each with 100 communities each. A bot user would bring the remote subscription count to 900 for each of the instances, for a total of 9,000 database entries. For each instance, the traffic would be expanded to a potential 9,000 community updates every update cycle, for a total of 90,000 community updates across the Threadiverse each cycle. There are significantly more than ten instances, and if you run the hypothetical example again with 1000 instances, you can see how database requirements and cross-instance traffic can get out of hand.

A firehose style "All" tab could limit the development of smaller instances by requiring them to handle the kind of traffic and database churn only seen by the largest Threadiverse instances. The financial and technical burdens could create a barrier to entry that may have the opposite effect than what was intended.

Caveats about criticism

I'm really impressed by the work @iso put into this tool. The Threadiverse needs more developers to help solve its many problems, and I'm grateful he was willing to write code and share a solution.

As an admin, moderator, and community contributor, I recognize that starting new communities and keeping them alive takes work, and welcome tools that make those activities easier. I think this tool was developed with good intentions.

These concerns are based on our intuitions about the needs and limitations of our instance, and our vision for the Threadiverse. While I stand behind the concerns, I admit they are not the result of a rigorous study. We reserve the right to change our mind if the benefits of LCB become more evident, but we're planning to sit out the experimental phase.

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 @edhelas@slrpnk.net!

Everyone is encouraged to join, but especially moderators who share communities. We've created an invite room for all moderators moderators@chat.slrpnk.net, 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, @Xylight@lemmy.world, 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!

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

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.

Hi SLRPNK,

This post has two purposes. First, I wanted to introduce a new community I just created, !treehuggers@slrpnk.net. 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!

Search isn't showing me anything for the obvious terms.

I'd like a climbing-specific sublemmy(?), ideally, but I appreciate that's a bit niche! Just somewhere for chatting about general fitness would be cool. I'd start one myself, but it doesn't seem very solar-punky.

I just saw that lemmy.ml has pre-emptively defederated from threads. Are there any plans to do that here? I personally want nothing to do with Meta/Facebook, and I'm sure that's not an unpopular opinion around here.

edit: y'all, please pay attention to where you are when coming from all.

edit again: kbin really ought to make a post's home instance more clear.

Hello to all new members. I've just created a Lunarpunk community for the darker / nightime aspects of Solarpunk that can be found at the link above or c/lunar_punk

https://slrpnk.net/c/lunar_punk

As a former Redditor looking for a new home - I was first directed to Lemmy.ml - which has a stickied post asking users to find another instance to join. I was directed by an r/solarpunk moderator to this instance (makes perfect sense!) and had also seen suggestions in similar spaces to make a kbin.pub instance for myself.. somewhere in there I was thrown the idea to join Mastadon as well.

As I’ve come to understand, these all exist within Fediverse, and wherever I join I’ll be able to see and post and comment to the content of other Fediverse alt instances (although I haven’t really tried, I still don’t quite follow this - although I’m going to read up on this reply https://slrpnk.net/comment/133314 and search around myself too) - so no reason to get to caught up on where to sign it would seem.

This preface is actually somewhat a question itself (as I still don’t fully ‘get it’) and to maybe give people who have the same questions a space to ask away… at the same time it might help to contextualize my newcomer questions:

Questions on the Community

• Are you comfortable with the Reddit refugees joining here? Is there any qualms or worries you (or anyone else, for that matter) has about this instance and an influx of users?
• A: https://slrpnk.net/comment/133084 Be a good people here and on all of Fediverse. Join here if interested in the communities on this server

Platform/Interface Questions

• I don’t know if this will work, @poVoq@slrpnk.net (doesn’t look like it worked) how can we @ a user?
• A: Unknown to me, OP!
• Are you able to sticky threads? If so, is that an admin only ability or is it possible for moderators within (or without, even) the communities too?
• A: Unknown to OP

Questions about Subbing/Moderation

• Is there a way to [un]subscribe, show or hide certain communities within this instance? And is there a way to track how many users are “subbed” to these communities?
• A: Yes, if you go to a community you have the option to sub - this applies to the main pages “Subscribed” content and is the main way to see content within the beta [iOS] app. I believe there are ways to subscribe to communities in other Fediverse instances but I don’t know the easiest or most efficient way to do that yet, will update if I figure it out.
• only way I’ve found how to subscribe to other instances is through the iOS app
• Can certain communities be labeled as essentially “not currently active” and/or “pending moderation?” And can we see who are the moderators of any community?
• A: I, OP, don’t know about the first part yet. But you can see who moderates each sub when you go to the sub - it has its own sidebar too
• I would assume that the influx of expats from Reddit would be overwhelming for just the admin to ultimately manage. Is that the case? *Do moderators help?
• A: Unknown to me the OP

Questions on Admin and Server

• Do I have it correct that you are the sole admin? If so, thanks! And are you looking for help in the longterm or shortterm even?
• A: https://slrpnk.net/comment/133500 on history of the server and admin.. unsure about if future help needed
• Can there be multiple independent servers ‘hosting’ SLRPNK? Can different admins with different servers provide support (or “host”) for this instance? Would there necessarily always be a head admin? A: Unknown to me, OP
• Is there a cap to how many users can join an instance/this instance?
• A: https://slrpnk.net/comment/134156 nowhere near the cap, ideas for if it were reached include pausing new users or (if donations are provided) hosting on a bigger server
• With the authority of having your own server (seemingly) and having a sole admin, is there anything we should note in terms of how this instance is hosted such as, under any circumstances if it were shut down? As kind of a floor-level question, what happens if the server goes down? Does the instance get wiped? Is it basically unusable but still archived?
• A: Unknown to OP

I hope my questions weren’t too much!

Edit: Will add in questions post-OP noted with an *. Putting in answers (both for other users and for myself to tinker with formatting and organizational structure) any missed answers may in full be due to this OP’s lack of reading comprehension.

Also these questions aren’t just for the Admin so if anyone of you know anything that would help please leave a comment and edumacate me. Also for anything unanswered, it can take some time and know-how to get this info from others and myself in my own research, I am being patient and am suggesting as well to other newcomers please be friendly and patient too!

Does anyone know the official way to search for topics in this app?

I was able to search and add something but it doesn't seem right.

When I "search" it can't find https://lemmy.ml/c/sopranica

I also can't get the official Lemmy app to find slrpnk.net as an instance.

After being hosted by the Lemmy devs since March 2022 (thx!), I finally got around moving this instance to my own server today.

It is a quite beefy server (8core 32gb RAM) currently shared with a few other services provided by F-hub.org (still somewhat under construction).

Registrations are also open again (with admin approval) and I will try to approve them ASAP during the coming days.

What other services would people be interested to have available via slrpnk.net?

Keeping in mind that it should not be too resource heavy on the server I was thinking of maybe a Bookstack Wiki for collaborative writing of fiction and non-fiction?

A XMPP chat service would also be easy to add.

Sadly Lemmy currently AFAIK offers no account integration options, so that will make things a bit annoying.