October 2024 meta post

October is upon us! And with it, a new Monthly Meta Post! Us admins check the comments to this post frequently, so in addition to having some of the latest news and announcements, it also acts as a sort of community square to discuss anything and everything related to the instance.

Onto the news of the month.

Communities in need of new mods

We regularly prune abandoned communities, but sometimes there are those that have been quite active in the past and would benefit from someone new taking the over and doing moderation. For example, these communities have seemingly inactive moderators:

So speak up if you would like to take over these communities as a mod, or maybe you are one of the mods of these communities and have just been lurking for several months? In both cases please let us know below, or otherwise we will consider pruning these communities next month.

Language specific Solarpunk communities

Since SLRPNK is primarily English speaking, we would like to take this opportunity to highlight some non-english Solarpunk communities on other Lemmy instances:

If you know any others, please let us know in the comments.

If you are interested in opening a language specific Solarpunk community here on SLRPNK (and are willing to moderate it well, given we admins are likely unable to support in languages we don’t speak), let us know and we can discuss the details. Some Asian language communities for example would probably cover an interesting niche that is currently not served at all.

Photon as primary frontend for SLRPNK? (Update)

As mentioned in last month’s update, we are considering to move our Photon frontend to the domain root to replace the current frontend. @punkisundead was so kind to develop a custom color scheme for it, emulating our current theming. So far there seem to be no blockers for this switch and neither were there any objections, so we will probably go ahead in the coming weeks and do the switch. The current frontend will be moved to a sub-domain most likely, and remain accessible there for those who prefer it.

Technical Updates

The previous issues with the NVMe drives and the wiki have been resolved, and currently the server is running without issues. This leaves us with the opportunity to play around with some new stuff and maybe fix the remaining smaller login issues with the wiki. One plan is to improve the audio/video call features of our Movim instance. We currently don’t run our own STUN/TURN infrastructure, making it fail to connect sometimes, but that should be a relatively simple addition. Furthermore, it would be a nice preparation for the peer-to-peer group-call feature that is likely to land in Movim before the end of the year. There is also a new Matrix to XMPP gateway that might be worth exploring. It would allow contacting Matrix users in 1:1 chats and for Matrix users to enter our XMPP group-chats. Due to technical issues with the Matrix network, we will probably disable the reverse to prevent overloading the resources of our server. The support for incoming 1:1 messages might be interesting as Lemmy currently only has built in support for Matrix accounts/addresses in the profile (although we would love if that would change).

On a side note: lemmy.eco.br is the first additional Lemmy instance that implemented our XMPP account linking script and now also offers XMPP accounts to all of their approximately 2000 members. If you know a Lemmy instance admin that might be also interested in this, please let us know and we are happy to help set it up. The needed Ejabberd server is very low resource use, so it can be run next to Lemmy without problems.

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!

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
    0·
    24 days ago

    Looks like those previous DNS issues are a repeated “feature” now 😭

    I am currently looking into some mitigations I can do, but if this now happens every 3 weeks I will need to talk to our ISP about finding another solution…

  • perestroika@slrpnk.netEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    Regarding c/offgrid - I would be willing to moderate it, since it’s a topic “close to home” for me (I’m off grid too).

    But at the current moment, I’m not terribly active on Lemmy, I only log in once per day. It seems like a low-volume community, so I imagine that a moderator checking things once per day might be OK…

    • ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.netMEnglish
      0·
      2 months ago

      You’re now a mod of c/offgrid!

      Most of the communities here are pretty laid back when it comes to moderation load. Your activity level should be more than enough. Thanks for volunteering! :)

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
    0·
    2 months ago

    On another technical note: I finally got around installing the solar-panels on the roof of the place that acts as the “datacenter” for the SLRPNK servers. The servers were already running on battery charged at night since March of this year (mostly wind and geothermal grid power then) and now I will try to run them fully on solar-power.

    It’s not a complete off-grid system, so if there is a power shortage it will still pull from the grid (which at peak times is sadly still 60% fossil fuel here), but I am reasonably confident that most of the time this will not be necessary as the battery has sufficient capacity.

  • tofu berserker (he/they)@slrpnk.netEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    i check in here pretty regularly but am largely a lurker; if that’s okay, i could take on moderating c/composting. i’m no expert but i am an enthusiastic amateur…

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
      0·
      1 month ago

      Thanks for volunteering. I made you mod on /c/composting just now.

      Please post a bit about your composting efforts :)

      • tofu berserker (he/they)@slrpnk.netEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        i built a compost bin out of free pallets from the neighborhood and compost my household’s food waste as well as yard waste from family members. i also follow the lazy compost “method” of collecting kitchen scraps, coffee grounds, and etc and adding them to my pile. my in-laws regularly contribute lawnmowing scraps and leaves. i look forward to really putting it to work in the spring!

      • Track_Shovel@slrpnk.netEnglish
        0·
        1 month ago

        I can provide support if needed. No composting experience, but strong science background in organic amendments

  • Track_Shovel@slrpnk.netEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    I can take on birding if needed. Not skilled at this at all, but I can deal with comment reports etc.

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
    0·
    1 month ago

    Sorry for the repeated outages today… we did some work on the firewall server and encountered some unexpected DNS issues. It should be mostly back now, but since DNS propagation can take some time, you might still have issues depending on your ISP.