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:

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):

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 username@slrpnk.net 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.

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    I just became aware of a bug in Lemmy that (sometimes?) prevents some moderation actions to propagate to other instances. I was getting a lot of reports for posts on /c/twoxchromosomes that I had already moderated and banned the users.

    My current guess is that it might be caused by me as a site admin taking moderation action instead of the community moderators doing it, which is quite bad as especially the not actively moderated communities often need site admin intervention.

    Not sure what the best way forward for this is, but it is quite serious especially for /c/twoxchromosomes as the misogynists are running rampant on other instances and there seems to be little I can do about it from our side 😭

    Edit: seems like my guess was right and the Lemmy devs pushed a fix for this. Hopefully they will make a minor release with it as the upcoming big version 19.0 is still a heavy work in progress.

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      Ok, we deployed lemmy 0.18.5 here that should in theory fix this bug. Lets see if it helps.

  • RoboGroMo@slrpnk.netEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    would be a real shame to see Open Source Ecology go, it’s a great project - would be happy to help by removing spam and keeping an eye on things, i’m not affiliated with them but could post any news updates i see and possibly reach out to Marcin to see if anyone on the team wants to take an active role.

  • cel@slrpnk.netEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    a movim instance would slay so hard 🙏 i’ve wanted to use it more but the network seems even more monocultured than fedi. would you restrict it to people part of this instance though? i would love to be able to log in with my existing jabber account

  • JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.netEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Just wanted to say thank you very much for your work on this instance, both the community and technical side. I’m really glad you’re keeping the system current and figuring out new features. I don’t have any objections to the community gardening thoughts, and will review the draft code of conduct soon.

    Movim sounds cool and I’m interested to try it out, I have a free WordPress site but wouldn’t mind moving to a federated alternative of some sort and I really like it here so that could be great.

  • hazeebabee@slrpnk.netEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    This all looks super awesome! I appriciate all the work you are doing & look forward to being able to use my srlpnk login for a variety of fediverse services :)

    Also its really cool db0 created a automated photoscanning tool. No one should be forced to personally review content for things like csam 🤢

    Also here are some code of conduct points that could maybe be useful:

    1. Solarpunk is about looking towards brighter futures. Please try to find optimism in what can be very grim realities. This means moving away from doomer talk about how all hope is lost. We all know there are problems so lets work together to create solutions.

    2. Stay civil when talking to others. We all have different views, and many of us are passionate about them. This does not give you the right to insult, brigade, or bully another person. If something is truely harmful, disgusting or hateful, please report it to moderators so it can be removed.

    3. Activism puts the punk in solarpunk. As all punks know though, some plans must be made in secret. Lemmy is an inherently open and accessible space. ANYONE can read when is written here: the FEDs, lawyers, even the company youre planning on sabatoging. Do not use this space to plan activist work. Use secure channels instead, such as an end to end encrypted messaging service.

    4. Encourage others to take positive steps, even if they are small ones. Lets lift each other up and make this a welcoming space for people to explore how we can make tomorrow a better place.

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    Sorry for the 30 minutes down-time or so. As explained above I moved the database to a different server and I underestimated how big it had gotten again (30GB 🤯 why? 🤔). It should be all back working again now, lets hope we didn’t miss any important federated messages 😬

    With this move all the vital parts are now on one dedicated server (8 threads, 16GB RAM), meaning it will be easier to get additional system-admins on board for server maintenance (before on the shared server that was not something I was willing to do, given the security implications). More details on that to follow soon 😎

    In unrelated news: I started experimenting with a community wiki here: https://wiki.slrpnk.net Not much to see yet, but the plan is that community moderators will be able to log in with their existing Lemmy account and edit their own dedicated sub-section for each community they moderate. This subsection can then be linked in the community sidebar.

    • schmorp@slrpnk.netEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      Thanks for your work in creating this comfy online space.

      30GB is mad - text, images, video, what makes the major chunk of this?

      Thanks for adding a wiki! If you want any help with that I’d be happy to spend a couple of hours a week (better not promise more because life).

  • beSyl@slrpnk.netEnglish
    0·
    1 year ago

    slrpnk.net takes a while to load. I am referring to the initial load. I tested without a VPN connection and it seems to only happen when I am connected to the VPN… I am using Mullvad.

    Any idea why this might be? Can you do something about it?

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      No idea to be honest. The only thing I could imaging is the location of the VPN. Hypothetically if you are EU based for example, but chose a US based location for your VPN, then a non-VPN connection would be much faster as our servers are located in Portugal.

      • beSyl@slrpnk.netEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        I am actually connected to a VPN server in Portugal! Are you Portuguese by any chance?

        Also, there is something wrong with slrpnk.net, I think? I am seeing some behavior that I used to see on lemmy.world, namely, replying is taking forever (https://lemmy.world/post/90611). I click on “Reply” and it keeps on spinning. I don’t remember how he fixed that, but I think it had something to do with the config file. I think he had debugging enabled or something to that point?

        EDIT: It seems like this only happens from the Inbox screen.

        EDIT2: Found the post to which I am referring: https://lemmy.world/post/288652. TLDR: “Federation debugging” was enabled. Should be disabled.

        • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
          3·
          1 year ago

          EU citizen living in Portugal.

          It’s definitely not the “Federation debugging”, but I also noticed some odd stalls from time to time since moving the main database to a different server 3 days ago. I think I’ll need to do some more database tuning on this new server as it isn’t quite as CPU performant as the previous one. Edit: ok did some database tuning, lets see if that helps.

          Edit2: Looks like we are occasionally running into this issue (as many other Lemmy instances it seems). I guess the previous database server was just fast enough to usually respond in < 10s, and on the new one it happens more frequently and thus is more noticeable. It doesn’t look like this can be fixed by tweaking the database and rather needs the mentioned Lemmy code improvements that are likely coming in version 0.19 sometimes in the coming weeks.