Hi! I’m a mod at r/solarpunk on reddit, and we’re looking for a better platform on which to host the community. I’ve been browsing slrpnk.net and I really like it.

I’d like to start encouraging early adopters to register an account here. Any migration would certainly be gradual, but before I do anything I wanted to check and see how the current admin and other users feel about this plan.

How’s the instance running? What rate do you think this instance could take on new users? How is your moderation capacity at the moment?

  • poVoq@slrpnk.netM
    34·
    1 year ago

    So the quick answer is: yes people interested in Solarpunk are very welcome here 👍

    The slightly longer one is: The server this Lemmy instance runs on is currently far from overloaded. My current guestimate is that without major changes the setup can maybe take 10x as many active users. With some optimisations I have in mind for a dedicated database server probably also a few more (maybe around 10k monthly active users???), but that’s about the maximum I am willing to scale it as long as this is just a hobby project with no compensation for my time spend.

    Thus if you want to further promote this instance on /r/solarpunk please try to explain that people can also make accounts on other Lemmy instances and access our communities from there. So if they are really active contributors that identify strongly with the Solarpunk movement, then by all means let them make an account here. But if they are only an occasional poster & lurker, another Lemmy instance (maybe a regional one?) works just as well and this helps spreading the server load onto more shoulders (as server to server communication is lighter on server resources).

    As for moderation help: yes additional community moderators are likely needed, as not all of the current ones seem very active. Additional site admins would be also nice, but I am a bit hesitant to add people for that role that are not already longer term members of this instance and seem sufficiently trustworthy. For now, the approval of new accounts doesn’t take that much time so I can easily manage it alone.

  • Mysteriarch ☀️@slrpnk.netEnglish
    12·
    1 year ago

    I’ve been encouraging some people of the subreddit, but just as a user. Seems like a good idea to me, it fits the solarpunk ideal too.

    It’s a nice instance, runs quite well in my experience (there are federation issues now and then, but I’m not sure what’s the cause, could be the other servers or some incompatibility between versions). Hosted in Europe. Also not too big either, which was important to me (almost everyone is flocking towards a few ‘flagship’ instances, forming new silo’s, which is against the federated ideal).

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netMEnglish
      13·
      1 year ago

      The federation issues between Lemmy instances are a known issue and largely boil down to Lemmy tripping over itself at a certain size. Since ActivityPub is mostly push based, these too large instance then fail to send federation updates to smaller instances like ours and are also sometimes too busy to accept our pushes (but the latter is AFAIK a smaller problem).

      There are some improvements for that in the upcoming 0.18.1 version, but since other admins are reporting some issues with the -rc test versions of it, I have been reluctant to upgrade until the official release it out.