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:
Buy it for lifevolunteer found- Dumpster Diving <- removed
- OpenSourceEcology <- removed
Rat Zonevolunteer foundBoard gamesvolunteer found- Solar Powered Vehicles <- removed
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.
Should we ban some bots?
I find external cross post bots from Reddit annoying (if not explicitly set up by the community moderators themselves) and the link fixer bot is also a bit too spammy for my taste (edit: linkfixerbot is banned now).
What about the tl;dr bot?
Any other bots any of you would like to have removed from this instance?
I like the tl;dr bot. Its only once per post and can easily be blocked by people who dont like it
I agree, tl;dr bot is alright in my book.
the rest of them can fucking go though, IMO
How about: https://slrpnk.net/u/PipedLinkBot@feddit.rocks
I think as much as alternative front-ends are a good idea for privacy, the actual links tend to break more often then not and this bot also only links to one specific alternative, meaning all the links it posts are probably going to be broken in a few weeks.
Edit: I banned the piped bot as it was spamming communities. No big loss I think.
I personally find the link fixer bot quite helpful for what it’s worth.
About the link-fixer bot, I’ve tried editing my links like it says and they didn’t work after. When I moused over the link it provided the actual url looked like the slrpnk.net one I’d been using. Is there a good format I should use that will actually work? What’s best for federation?
In my experience they work if the community they reference is already known to the instance. Since this is often not the case, it isn’t the default behaviour of Lemmy to make links like that, even though they are more convenient across instances that do know the community already.