Introduction

Every month we have a community check-in, to talk about the instance and how things are going, and to create a space where you can share stuff too. This post will be pinned and we’ll check it regularly over the course of the month for new comments to read and respond to. We’re really grateful that all of you have chosen this instance, and are making it such a great place to hang out thanks to your contributions. I get a serious hit of dopamine when I encounter someone who’s made a great comment in a remote thread, and recognize the username is from this instance. It’s a pleasure to admin for so many intelligent, thoughtful people.

Snippets from Last Month’s Canvas

A ‘Canvas Event’ is a participatory time-limited art-form where individuals can alter one pixel at a time, and through competition, negotiation, or coordination with each other, create coherent images together. Now that the event is over, here’s some featured results:

Nice job converting @roguecache’s solarpunk logo to a manageably smaller pixel version. Bonus points for the neighborhood - the banner is in good company.

Where’s Wally? Martin Handford’s world traveling scamp is right at home in this visually noisy tableau.

Does this image fill you with unease and confusion? Read the The Illuminatus! Trilogy, and you too will have seen the fnords.

No communal canvas is complete without Kilroy! Graffiti and Canvas have a lot conceptually in common, and Kilroy may be the oldest meme to survive into the digital age. For more adorable rebel art, check out !grasweeti.

We’re so consonant with the earth, we compost our vowels! Thanks for giving us even more space to shine :)

Canvas is a reflection of the zeitgeist of the Fediverse, and it’s rewarding to see our communities, causes, and memes represented there. Thanks to everyone who participated this year.

Community Highlights: !disaserresponse, !conservation, and !fungus

This month we added three more communities to our directory. Our gracious host @poVoq created Disaster Response, because we know it’s going to get worse before it gets better. It’s going to be a source of information about getting yourself and your community prepared so you’re in a position to help others as well as yourselves. Shout out to @JacobCoffinWrites for the great community banner.

It wasn’t too long ago that @Midnight joined the moderation team on !collapse, and has done a great job giving that community new life. They’ve created a new community about wildlife conservation and protection, you can check it out at !conversation.

For the latest in Toadstool technology, check out !fungus, recently created by @solo. Special thanks to both @solo and @Midnight for bringing so many great posts to all of the communities on this instance.

Welcome New Mods!

As demonstrated by Reddit’s decline and Feddit.org’s revival, moderators are the life-blood of social media. There are few things you can do that will increase the Fediverse’s success than joining a moderating team, and learning the skills to nurture and manage healthy communities.

This last month, a number of new people have stepped up to take over abandoned and undermoderated communities. Check out what’s new in these classic communities:

  • No Lawns: A community devoted to alternatives to monoculture lawns, with an emphasis on native plants and conservation. It continues to get posts weekly, and @quercus and @LibertyLizard are now the active mods.
  • Writing: A community for writers, to discuss writing approaches and what’s new in the writing world, and to help each other with writing. Solarpunk author @grrgyle has taken the helm, and is leading monthly writing club goals, the first one ending today. Congrats to everyone who participated!
  • 15 Minute City: an urban planning concept in which most daily necessities and services is 15-minutes from any point in the city. The new active mods are @vudu and @solo. Thanks to both for keeping this going.
  • Art, Aesthetic: @WanderingPhoenix has added @SolarMonkey to the mod group.
  • Buy It For Life: @ProdigalFrog has also added @SolarMonkey to the mod group.
  • Utility Cycling: @Nemo joins @JacobCoffinWrites as an active mod.
  • Podcasts: in addition to !nolawns, @LibertyLizard is keeping an eye one !podcasts as well.

Our goal is to have at least one active moderator supporting every community on SLRPNK. Unmoderated communities can attract spam and abusive behavior, requiring us to freeze or shut them down. Thanks to everyone who stepped up, we love having a vareity of communities on this little instance.

Movim blogs

Our supplementary Movim service which can be used as a federated XMPP chat app and a long-form blogging site now has some early adopters for the blogging feature. You can follow the personal blogs two of our members here:

Any SLRPNK member can automatically use their Lemmy account to log into our Movim instance and thus use their XMPP account to chat and blog. Say hi on our Solarpunk group chat :)

Technical Updates

We did some behind the scenes changes with the firewall setup which will make it easier to identify and block scraping attempts and other such abuses of our technical setup.

Background tasks of the Lemmy backend now also run in a dedicated process, which should enhance the responsiveness of the site a bit.

Our hosted alternative Photon and Mlmyl backends got some nice updates lately.

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!

  • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
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    3 months ago

    I get a serious hit of dopamine when I encounter someone who’s made a great comment in a remote thread, and recognize the username is from this instance.

    I love this feeling, too! Seeing someone from the home instance while “abroad.” It makes the fediverse feel so much more peopled.

  • XNX@slrpnk.net
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    3 months ago

    Great job on everything! Love those communities and i never heard about fungus tech before! Movim sounds interesting and i havent heard of it before going to check it out.

    Any chance the photon backend will become the default? Its so much cleaner and easier to use. I often want to invite people to use slrpnk.net but i know the default theme and ui will be too much for them to understand/handle :/

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netM
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      3 months ago

      Making Photon the default is a consideration, yes. But everytime I think about bringing it up, the developer decides to refactor something major which breaks things 😑

      • XNX@slrpnk.net
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        3 months ago

        Oh, maybe you could bring it up to them so they could keep that in mind or help you set it as default in a way that wont get broken?

        • poVoq@slrpnk.netM
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          3 months ago

          I used “broken” a bit loosely to mean excessive change that breaks peoples usage work-flow. Luckily actual breaking changes that sometimes make it into the releases are always quickly fixed upon filing an bug report.

          • XNX@slrpnk.net
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            3 months ago

            Oh thats good. The dev also mentioned they reached out to you

      • Xylight (Photon Dev)@lemm.ee
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        3 months ago

        Why would me refactoring something break things? Are you applying custom patches or something? Or have you just noticed it being unstable?

        • poVoq@slrpnk.netM
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          3 months ago

          I was mainly referring to the big UX refactor that (until a lot of people complained) made desktop use significantly worse. Now it is much better again, but that episode felt a bit like change for the sake of change.

          Don’t get me wrong though, I appreciate you putting a lot of effort into development, and I will continue running it as a secondary frontend. But with the latest news that you want to rewrite things in Swelte v5, I shelved any short term plans to use the current version as the primary frontend. I agree though that on technical grounds Swelte v5 sounds very nice.

          • Xylight (Photon Dev)@lemm.ee
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            3 months ago

            The “rewrite” is actually gonna be a fully separate project because it has a very different idea than Photon, and I’ll maintain them separately. I’ve learned since v1.29 not to make big UX changes, since the response was widely negative.

            I’m not asking you make this the default frontend, I was just wondering what issues you were talking about.

    • dillekant@slrpnk.net
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      3 months ago

      Just going to echo this. It’s a tough balancing act to allow a bit of fun and shit posting while also preventing abuse and the mods are doing amazing, and the instance is in great technical health too. Thanks all. Really love being in this online space which is actually pretty tough to achieve.

  • Corvus (he/him)@slrpnk.net
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    3 months ago

    I joined this great community a couple months ago with a lot of enthusiasm but then fell off the map - too much going on. I just finished two weeks without wifi or cell service and I’m ready to engage. Thanks for being there SLRPNK!

  • keepthepace@slrpnk.net
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    2 months ago

    Hey all, not really an announcement, but I am looking for communities/people who are interested in the non-profit parts of robotics. There are many interesting projects out there that care more about the impact than the profitability and I would really love to find a community that talks about robotics without orbiting around the last silicon valley fad. I am also a bit at loss that this content is mostly on twitter. I wish we could somehow help them get free from it, and allowing me to delete my account there on the same occasion.

    Is there something convenient to repost things from twitter into the fediverse, preferably without inciting people to create a twitter account to follow the original content?

    Our supplementary Movim service

    👀

    Was looking for a light blogging platform that did not have the ephemeral mindset of twitter/mastodon in order to post progress on my own projects. May give it a try!

  • CurlyWurlies4All@slrpnk.net
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    3 months ago

    Just a quick question. I got my tax return and wanted to kick a few bucks towards the running costs of the server. Is there a PayPal or something I can send it?

  • ex_06@slrpnk.net
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    3 months ago

    isn’t the 15minute city just a concept that is part of solarpunk urbanism? 👀

    Yes I should open movim more lol

    • Five@slrpnk.netOPM
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      3 months ago

      They do have a link to !urbanism in the sidebar. Now that you mention it, I should add a link to !15minutecity in the !urbanism sidebar too.

  • activistPnk@slrpnk.net
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    3 months ago

    We did some behind the scenes changes with the firewall setup which will make it easier to identify and block scraping attempts and other such abuses of our technical setup.

    Why is scraping being treated as abusive? I have actually been on the look out for a tool the scrape Lemmy servers so I can grab a copy of all my own messages, replies thereto, and parent messages of my comments. slrpnk can go down at any time. It would also be useful to be able to grep my own content to recall where I discussed something and to know where to expand on past discussions.

    • Five@slrpnk.netOPM
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      3 months ago

      Scraping absorbs our bandwidth and processing power, and is typically used for things we’re not excited about, like training AI models.

      What you’d like to do sounds like it can be much more efficiently achieved through an API rather than a web scraper. I support you backing up your chat history, and setting up countermeasures for non-consensual scraping doesn’t prevent us from whitelisting your tool or giving you an API key.

      • poVoq@slrpnk.netM
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        3 months ago

        Indeed, the API for that should be ActivityPub S2S (or the Lemmy client API for personal content) and people signing up for our service have only agreed to sharing their contributions with the ActivityPub network and not anyone that scrapes the HTML frontend. Not everything that can be publicly accessed is free to take for whatever purpose.

        But the main reason we set up this advanced firewall is to prevent AI scraping of a git server that also runs on our internal network and which has been repeatatly attacked like this in recent weeks and those scraper bots ignore robots.txt, spoof their identification and utilise a globally distributed network of cloud servers to make IP based blocks difficult.

        On the Lemmy side we have not yet noticed any such attempts. They probably exist, but have not been as extreme as those git scrapers.