New Communities

This month two new communities sprouted from the SLRPNK soil: !hydroponics@slrpnk.net by first time moderator @Guenther_Amanita@slrpnk.net, and !fungus@slrpnk.net by veteran contributor @solo@slrpnk.net.

We’re excited for both of these communities. Hydroponics allows solarpunks to practice cultivation even in urban environments. It also appears Hydro’s close relative Aquaponics (a closer to closed loop system that involves aquatic life) is also welcome there. This technology may be the key to reducing food transportation pollution, and allow our civilization to rewild much of the land that is now dominated by industrial agriculture.

Fungus has always been part of the solarpunk/lunarpunk aesthetic, and the related aesthetic !goblincore@lemmy.blahaj.zone. The !fungus@slrpnk.net community takes this in a much more practical direction, with a focus on how technologies that incorporate fungus can provide an alternative to plastic, leather, and other problematic materials, as well as provide fuel and clean our air and water. Thanks @solo@slrpnk.net for your regular posts and comment contributions.

We look forward to the verdant growth of both of these communities.

Solidarity with Lemmy.World Vegans

Administration and moderation is necessary, but difficult and underappreciated. SLRPNK has strict guidelines on behavior we don’t tolerate on this instance, such as fascism, racism or genocide denial, but we avoid broadening those limits so that we can encourage people with a wide variety of ideas, ideologies, and beliefs to discuss their differences in good faith. We delegate most of the responsibility for keeping a community healthy to the moderators of each community. We have consistently supported the moderators when their decisions have been challenged, even if we don’t personally agree with the decision. As admins, we could not keep an instance this large so full of productive conversation without the bond of trust we’ve built with SLRPNK moderators to consistently respect their agency and judgement.

Federation means that each instance can have its own rules and culture, and we don’t seek to impose our rules and culture on the instances of others. We typically don’t comment on the behavior of admins and moderators on remote instances.

Lemmy.World is a special case, as it is the largest and best known threaded discussion forum in the Fediverse. It is the default instance for mobile apps like Voyager, and it is the instance that outsiders tend to think of when they characterize the Threadiverse. This puts an unenviable burden of responsibility on the admins of this central instance.

For a more detailed account, you can follow this post in !vegan@slrpnk.net, but to summarize, a Lemmy.World moderator reversed the actions of !vegan@LW mods, and then de-modded them. They were re-moded after the admin apologized once he realized the vegan comments he removed were supported by science. LW is now changing their TOS and Site Bylaws, and Threadiverse vegans are justifiably concerned with the implications of these changes.

The Fediverse is a progressive social movement. People who practice veganism play an essential role in all progressive social movements, and are a valued part of what makes the Fediverse great. This is non-negotiable and should be obvious, even if one doesn’t agree with some of their beliefs.

We federate with VeganTheoryClub and Lemmy.vg. SLRPNK.net and Lemmy.vg federate with World while VeganTheoryClub does not. We welcome vegan refugees and host a !vegan@slrpnk.net community actively moderated by SLRPNK member @thisfro@slrpnk.net. Joining SLRPNK means sharing a space with non-vegans, and the potential friction that entails. If you justifiably want less of that, we recommend having a look at the two above mentioned instances.

Federation with Mastodon issues

With a recent change in Lemmy v.0.19.4/5 Lemmy started to add a (hidden in the Lemmy interface) hashtag of the community name to each post. The results is much better visibility of Lemmy posts from ActivityPub Microblogging software like Mastodon that use hashtags for discoverability.

This has various implications for us here on Lemmy. First of all when creating a new community, you should consider the choosing the community name according to the hashtag you would like to have associated with it.

This higher visibility across the Fediverse also comes with downsides, especially when the community name happens to be a popular hashtag. A new community post will appear to Mastodon users (that have subscribed to the specific hashtag) completely out of context as they can not easily see other posts in the same community, nor have visibility of the details outlined in the sidebar, sticky threads etc. Other comments on the same posts are also often invisible to Mastodon users due to the lack of back-filling support on that software. So let’s try to be a bit understanding with remote users handicapped that way.

Of course, this wider reach also has attracted some unwanted trolling from microblogging instances that previously didn’t really bother to interact with Lemmy communities. As a result, we already identified an instance that we decided to defederate from due to repeated trolling from their members, and we will likely have to be on the lookout for further ones.

Photon as primary frontend for SLRPNK?

You might be aware of the alternative Photon frontend we have been running for a while now. It recently surpassed the default web-UI from Lemmy in regards to available features and general usability. It is also significantly better maintained than the official Lemmy frontend, which has been languishing for a while now, with work on a full rewrite being prioritized.

We are therefore considering to make Photon our primary frontend that people will reach when navigating to the root slrpnk.net domain. The transition should be seamless and we would likely continue running the original frontend as an alternative on a subdomain. Of course, other apps will continue working as usual.

We would therefore like you to try out the current version and give us feedback on this general plan. No final decision has been made yet, so get your voice heard. And if you are interested in making a custom color theme for us, you can do so right inside the Photon theme settings easily. Please don’t hesitate to post the results here!

Technical Updates

There are currently some technical issues with our database NVMe drives. This will likely entail some shorter down-times as we need to install additional heat sinks and probably replace one of these SSDs. After monitoring the drive utilisation and talking to other Lemmy admins, we are a bit worried about the long-term sustainability of running Lemmy. Very little effort seems to have gone into optimizing database writes, resulting in an excessively high load compared to other fediverse software. SSDs by their technical design only have a limited quantity of writes they can do during their lifetime, so optimizing this is quite essential to avoid having to replace them regularly.

There is also a login issue with our wiki, that we need to get around fixing. Sorry for the delay in tackling that issue, but various other things came up unexpectedly in recent weeks, so that had to be put on the back-burner.

We also started blocking common bots from large tech companies known for AI scraping. For now it is a rather simple block based on the user-agent they report themselves, so the bad actors can easily get around it. We are still investigating further means to improve this, although for now it isn’t that high of a priority.

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!