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:

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.

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
    9·
    1 year ago

    Sorry for the 30 minutes down-time or so. As explained above I moved the database to a different server and I underestimated how big it had gotten again (30GB 🤯 why? 🤔). It should be all back working again now, lets hope we didn’t miss any important federated messages 😬

    With this move all the vital parts are now on one dedicated server (8 threads, 16GB RAM), meaning it will be easier to get additional system-admins on board for server maintenance (before on the shared server that was not something I was willing to do, given the security implications). More details on that to follow soon 😎

    In unrelated news: I started experimenting with a community wiki here: https://wiki.slrpnk.net Not much to see yet, but the plan is that community moderators will be able to log in with their existing Lemmy account and edit their own dedicated sub-section for each community they moderate. This subsection can then be linked in the community sidebar.

    • schmorp@slrpnk.netEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Thanks for your work in creating this comfy online space.

      30GB is mad - text, images, video, what makes the major chunk of this?

      Thanks for adding a wiki! If you want any help with that I’d be happy to spend a couple of hours a week (better not promise more because life).

      • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        No the images/videos are another 70gb right now. I am mainly surprised by the large database, because there was a recently fix in Lemmy that reduced the size to 3-4GB, so I am not exactly sure why it grew this big again.

        I will probably transfer a few general solarpunk related things on the landing page of the wiki (once it is actually working) and any help with that is appreciated, but the main idea of this wiki is to give community mods their own wiki-space to document things relevant to their communities.