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!
The amount of moderation I’m doing is higher than it was when I first became an admin, but that’s due mostly to my own initiative.
When I started, dealing with spam was an occasional shield icon whack-a-mole game. As an admin, I see all of the reports you collectively as moderators see, as well as reports by our members of remote posts and comments. I wasn’t feeling particularly burdened by it though.
I’ve since gotten involved with the the Lemmy.World Defense HQ Matrix channel, where spam reports are shared between instances. The fewer people exposed to spam posts, the less likely they are to continue, but the structure of Lemmy means only the instance hosting the spam can federate a post delete, and only the instance hosting the spammer can ban the user from the Fediverse.
So LWDHQ exists where admins report spammers and the most egregious troll accounts, and all other instances in the channel can choose to take action without relying on the originating instance. To decrease the effectiveness of the spam, admins will take the report, verify it, and then ban the user and remove the posts federated to their own instance. Other instances can still see it until the originating instances act, but it means as members of this instance, you have a less spammy experience as you navigate the Fediverse.
Likewise, I’m eager to escalate spam reports by SLRPNK members to other admins. If we clock a spammer before anyone else, it increases SLRPNK’s clout in the Defense Matrix. The faster we respond to spam makes the Fediverse less attractive to spammers generally, and thus lowers our workload further. So while there’s not a lot of spam for you to report, the occasional report does make a difference. SLRPNK has an incredibly low spammer/account ratio despite our relatively small size (1 spam account ever, dealt with internally before it had a chance to escalate to LWDHQ), and our members have an incredible reputation thanks to a history of positive interactions with remote moderators and admins. In an ecosystem where federation is not a guarantee, this puts us in a privileged position in negotiating access for our members to the best conversations on the Fediverse.