Each month, we create a post to keep you abreast of news and happenings regarding the server, discuss recent events, and to act as town square for the community.
Hope everyone had a good New Years :)
๐ Community Highlights ๐
- !FoodNotBombs@slrpnk.net - a community for news, discussion and media regarding the international mutual aid network of collectives called food not bombs.
- !PolarPunk@slrpnk.net - inspired by the far North and South regions of the globe and the unique challenges, adaptations, and resilience of practicing Solarpunk ideals in harsh environmental, social, or political climates.
- !theboondocks@slrpnk.net - The new home of The Boondocks comic strip on the fediverse.
โ๏ธ Writing Community Resources ๐
The moderators of our !writing@slrpnk.net community have started collecting some resources on possible Solarpunk story and world-building elements on our wiki. They are still looking for additional ideas, so please share good resources on the community.
โธ๏ธ Meta Post Image: Children Ice Skating on Frozen Canals โ๏ธ
The City of Amsterdam has over 100km (62 miles) of waterways intersecting the city, built initially as defensive moats that grew in concentric rings as the city increased in size. Today, they are part of an integral transportation network, and many inhabitants get around by boat.
When the weather forecast is cold enough, boat traffic is stopped in select canals to allow the water to freeze. It doesn't happen every year, and the last time it occurred was in 2021, when this picture was taken. The primary activity is communal ice skating, but it's possible to travel across the entire city on ice skates once enough of the waterways are frozen.
The choice of post image was inspired by the wiki additions of JacobCoffinWrites, specifically the section on seasonal roads. You can find more examples and ideas for imagining Solarpunk cities -- and you can add your own as well!
๐ก Technical Updates ๐ก
In December we moved the Lemmy instance to a different server because we identified some odd hardware issues on the previous server (much slower than expected read speeds on the NVMe SSD raid). While doing so we also took the opportunity to upgrade the database and re-examine the database tuning at bit. While both together seems to have improved overall speed of the site, we are still seeing the regular out-of-memory issue of the database container that causes stalling of the site and temporarily breaks the XMPP account integration. Unfortunately, this issue seems to have become more acute, since the new server has a bit less free memory. We are still looking into possible workarounds but at least it has become a bit more clear now what the possible cause of this issue might be.
๐ How to Support SLRPNK.net ๐ฑ
If you'd like to donate to SLRPNK to help cover Internet, electricity, and domain name costs, you can now send a one-time or reoccurring donation via our F-hub donation site: https://contribute.f-hub.org/
We also offer Librapay as an option for those who already have an account there, which supports reoccurring donations: https://liberapay.com/F-hub.org/
(Note: the Librapay option supports the broader F-hub project, of which SLRPNK is a part of. If you'd like all of your donation to go toward SLRPNK, use the alternative F-hub donation link, and select 'slrpnk.net' in the 'reason' drop-down instead)
๐ฌ Open Discussion ๐ฌ
Now itโs your turn to share whatever youโd like down below; your thoughts, ideas, concerns, hopes, or anything related to the server. If you have a new community youโd like to shine a spotlight, shine away! If youโre a new user wanting to say hi, feel free to post an introduction :)
SLRPNK Community Resources:
- Community Wiki - Moderators, you can create your own Wiki here for your communities!
- Movim Chat - Open to all members (use your SLRPNK login credentials)
- Etherpad - Collaborative document editor
๐๏ธ Meta Archive ๐ฐ
Our Monthly Meta posts are sometimes home to more in-depth sections written by our admins. Many of our newer members may not be familiar with some of the past guides, so for those interested, we've compiled a list below.
- December 2024 - How to Prepare for a Fascist Regime
- February 2025 - How to avoid Big Tech and maximize your digital security & privacy
- June 2025 - A brief guide on Security Culture & Adopting FOSS as prefiguration
- July 2025 - How to build community with fun projects!
โฌ Union Resources ๐ฅ
These are unions from around the world who can train you to become an effective organizer to form a grassroots union with your co-workers!
I am new to SLRPNK, but not to Lemmy.
I began using SLRPNK because I wanted to use a Lemmy instance that would be friendly to my politics.
The comments in the post are the first mention I have encountered of a planned "Piefed migration". I have been happy using SLRPNK for the past few days or so since creating my account, and news of a migration gives me the feeling of the rug being pulled out from under me.
What is the rationale for the migration? As a new project, has Piefed achieved usability and featurefulness comparable to those of Lemmy? Will current users of the site have an option to continue using Lemmy, in case they prefer?
The migration to Piefed has been planned for quite a few months now, and has been brought up in previous Monthly Meta posts as far back as July 2025. I can see how it might seem like it's coming out of nowhere if you hadn't come across those threads.
The main reason we've been wanting to switch is the technical difficulties with hosting Lemmy itself, @poVoq@slrpnk.net goes into more details here. While poVoq has been able to manage the problems of Lemmy by diligently resolving odd issues and implementing workarounds as they come up, overall it has been a troublesome piece of software to host reliably.
Piefed has developed quite quickly, and nowadays is mostly comparable in features to Lemmy, as well as having some unique features of its own (the July 2025 link goes over the big ones). Piefed appears to be more stable than Lemmy due to using proven standard frameworks, and would bring with it some fairly dramatic improvements in efficiency and resource usage.
If the migration goes well, then it is unlikely that we would continue to host Lemmy in addition to the Piefed. However this should not cause too much disruption. Piefed is now 100% compatible with multiple popular Lemmy mobile apps, such as Voyager, Summit, Blorp, etc, so if you already use those apps, everything will still work exactly the same on that end. And Piefed is 100% federation compatible with Lemmy instances, so you will still be able to access all the same communities we have access to today from Lemmy. Our alternative Lemmy frontend Photon is also Piefed compatible, so that will remain the same as well for anyone who uses that. Even the creator of our Lemmy site theme is switching to Piefed, so that would carry over too. The only major change that would occur is the change to the main website UI from a browser, but Piefed is laid out fairly similarly, and shouldn't take much to get used to (you can try it out here).
Migrating an existing Lemmy instance to Piefed is still technically experimental, so we'll have to reevaluate if turns out to cause too many problems, but if everything goes well, we are likely to make the switch at some point.
Thanks for the explanation. Will the migration retain our post and comment histories in our profiles?
That is the plan at least. We might drop image uploads as that is a whole new can of worms with a seperate database and software in Lemmy.
Subscriptions is another aspect of user accounts that hopefully would be retained. If not, some users may wish to warned, so that they can make manual copies beforehand.
For sure we will remind people to export their profile settings, but I see no reason why subscriptions couldn't be retained. Everything that in in the main Lemmy database should be transferrable to Piefed without major issues once we figured out the difference in the data structure. The problem is just that the entire image part of Lemmy consists of a completely independent software called Pict-rs that would likely require as much effort to convert as Lemmy itself, for relatively little benefit (besides the fact that is is a horrible mess, and we have like 200GB of useless junk images stored right now with no way to properly sort them from community/user avatars and profile banners etc.).
If the image database goes kaput do we lose all images on the site from before the transition? Does that include movim and the wiki? If so, I should start backing up some of my lemmy and movim posts as I'm not sure I have another copy of those images or could rebuild them to look the same.
No, the Wiki and Movim are completely seperate.
If you have some Lemmy posts with images you want to keep, then yes, please make a backup.
Are you the first, to your knowledge, to undertake a migration from Lemmy to Piefed?
Yes, at least the first that tries to retain most of the data. There is one other Lemmy instance that switched last year, but AFAIK they just started with a fresh database.
If you succeed, others will want to reproduce the process.