!pleasantpolitics@slrpnk.net is live! If you missed the previous discussion, it's a community with a robot moderator that bans you if the community doesn't like your comments, even if you're not "breaking the rules." The hope is to have a politics community without the arguing. !santabot@slrpnk.net has an in-depth explanation of how it works.

I was trying to keep the algorithm a secret, to make it more difficult to game the system, but the admins convinced me that basically nobody would participate if they could be banned by a secret system they couldn't know anything about. I posted the code as open source. It works like PageRank, by aggregating votes and assigning trust to users based on who the community trusts and banning users with too low a trust level.

I've also rebalanced the tuning of the algorithm and worked on it more. It now bans a tiny number of users (108 in total right now), but still including a lot of obnoxious accounts. There are now no slrpnk users banned. It's a lot of lemmy.world people, a few from lemmy.ml or lemm.ee, and a scattering from other places.

Check it out! Let me know what you think.

Introduction

Another month has passed, which means the old Meta Community Discussion will be replaced with a new Community Discussion, which gives an update on the happenings of the instance, and to provide a place to talk and comment your thoughts on the instance, or for anything else that doesn't warrant its own c/Meta post.

Now, let us have a quiet moment in remembrance of the June discussion thread as we release it from its pinned status, back into the wilds of the fediverse.

...Right, that's quite enough remembering.

Slaps server

Let's bust out July.

Feddit.de is limping! Long live Feddit.org!

A few months ago, Feddit.de suffered a partial error, while the main admin was unavailable due to longer work related travel. As the Feddit.de admin is still missing, several of the site's moderators collaborated with the Fediverse.foundation and last week, Feddit.org was launched to cover many of the same communities as the old Feddit.de hosted. This is an inspiring development, and demonstrates one way a federated social network can respond to damage.

Community Highlights

We had some new communities pop up on the server last month!

• !competenceporn@slrpnk.net, created by @Emotet, who, I would like to point out, has a really cool animated avatar and profile background. Their community is focused on competent people doing things competently in media.

• !electricvehicles@slrpnk.net, created by @sabreW4K3, which focuses on news and discussions on EV's.

• !ancienthistory@slrpnk.net, created by @reallykindasort. A place to discuss and share history of ancient peoples!

In other news, @countrypunk is looking for new moderators for !nature_spirituality@slrpnk.net. If that topic interests you, why not throw them a message? I'm sure they'd appreciate the help!

We'd also like to thank @JacobCoffinWrites for graciously taking over as moderator for !utilitycycling@slrpnk.net, and to @Midnight for becoming part of the !collapse@slrpnk.net moderation team! Good stuff y'all :)

If you're already a mod, joining the SLRPNK XMPP chat is a great way to grow your moderation team and share tips with other moderators. (it's also usable by all members of the instance, and you can use it for non-solarpunk chatrooms too, it's totally federated!)

If you're not already a mod, and see a community that you would like to support with moderation, don't hesitate to contact the current mods, or us admins.

Some examples of abandoned communities in need of new moderators are:

• !nolawns@slrpnk.net, devoted to avoiding monoculture lawns (fairly low activity, would be a great community for a beginner moderator!) EDIT: !nolawns now has a new mod, @quercus@slrpnk.net ^^

• !podcasts@slrpnk.net, which is for... podcasts. (slightly higher activity, but still quite manageable) EDIT: !podcasts has found @LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net for its new moderator!

Again, if any of those seem like your bag, slap a comment down below, and we'll mod you up! Having those extra set of eyes and developing your community into whatever your creative vision holds is not only a tremendous help to us admins, It's quite fulfilling in its own right! :D

Technical Updates

Last month we updated our instance to Lemmy version 0.19.4/5, which brought some minor technical issues that were mostly fixed in the latter release. One major change was the introduction of an image proxy. This means that images in newly added posts (and new user/community avatars) are no longer directly downloaded from the federated servers, but rather first mirrored on our server. This has some privacy advantages and should also improve site loading speed a bit. We will have to see how this will affect our image storage capacity in the medium term, but so far it doesn't seem to have had a big impact and with our recent server upgrade, we do have quite a lot of storage space.

We also experimentally increased maximum upload size to 10mb and allowed small video files as well. We need to see how the impact of this is, though. If it results in too much bandwidth and/or storage space use, we might have to reconsider this.

Open Discussion

Aaaand... Yeah, that's the news for July. It was pretty chill, pretty snazzy, even! But now it's your turn to share whatever snazziness is happening on your mind. Anything related to the instance, the fediverse, or the server you'd like to ask about or discuss? Create a new community you want everyone to know about? Then mosey on down to the comments, my dude!

Everything you post here will be highlighted until the start of next month, which is like, a really long time (until it isn't. Time is cruel, cruel mistress).-

There is clearly a problem that most of the politics and news communities on Lemmy are unpleasant places to take part in discussion. People yell at each other. The tone of disagreements is that of saying what your opinion is, and insulting the other person if they don't agree with your opinion, or a bunch of people giving quick one-off statements like "well I think it's this way" or "no you're wrong" which adds nothing. I've heard more than one person say that they simply don't participate in politics or news communities because of it.

Well, behold:

I have made some technology which attempts to take a much heavier handed approach to moderation, by just detecting assholes or people who aren't really contributing to the conversation, in other communities, and just banning them pre emptively en masse. In its current form, it bans about half of hexbear and lemmygrad, and almost all of the users on lemmy.world who post a nonstop stream of obnoxiously partisan content. You know the ones.

In practice it's basically a whitelist for posting that's easy to get on: Just don't be a dick.

I'd like to try the experiment of having a ~~political~~ community with this software running the banlist, and see how it works in practice, and maybe expand it to a news community that runs the same way. There's nothing partisan about the filtering. You can have whatever opinion you want. You just can't be unproductive or an asshole about the way you say your opinion. And the bans aren't permanent, they are transient based on the user's recent past behavior.

(Edit: I think making a general news community might fit better with slrpnk than politics. In thinking about it and talking with people, I think electoral politics just doesn't belong in the slrpnk feed, but maybe general news specifically with the political bickering that comes along with it being muted, would be a positive for the instance at the same time as I get to test out my little software project.)

I don't want to explain in too much detail how the tech works, because I think some segment of assholes will want to evade the tech to come into the community and be assholes again. But I'd also want to set up a meta community where anyone who did get banned can ask questions or make complaints about it. (As long as that offering doesn't turn into too much of a shit show that is.)

Is slrpnk a place where a little experiment like this could find a good home? What does everyone think of the idea?

We will have a scheduled downtime this weekend 8/9th of June to upgrade our instance to the latest Lemmy version.

It requires some smaller under the hood changes and testing, but shouldn't take longer than 2-3 hours.

I'll comment below when I can say more precisely what time this will take place.

Introduction

Every month, we retire the pinned community meta post from the last month, and create a fresh one with updated news. We summarize the state of the instance, and create a space for public comments and discussions that don’t merit their own meta post.

Software Status

There have been some smaller updates on the Wiki and Movim last month, and we added a new Voyager frontend for mobile use.

For June, it looks like the long awaited Lemmy v0.19.4 will be released with a lot of bugfixes, so there will likely be a short scheduled down-time while we upgrade our instance. There will be another announcement on /c/meta about this once we know more. Edit: Upgrade completed on 2024-06-09.

Community Highlights

With the start of the summer, maybe it's time to start that DIY project you always dreamed off? Or you found the perfect Buy it for Life item to share? But maybe if it isn't quite that durable, you still have a great Fixing story to tell? If anything, Anti-consumption might be your thing.

Alternatively, now is a great time to start with In person Activism, or at least plan a nice Solarpunk Travel this summer? If camping and hiking is your thing, don't forget to share pictures of The Great Outdoors.

Special Welcome to Feddit.de refugees

We regret the technical issues that brought you here, but it's great to have you on board! Willkommen ihr Zuhausies 🥰

We have been following the technical issues that caused this lengthy partial outage of feddit.de for some time now and hopefully they will find a solution or make an alternative German language instance soon.

Slrpnk.net actually had a similar situation in November 2023, which luckily only caused 12h of down-time, but it was pretty stressful for all people involved. Since then we have been testing out different means to let more admins have remote access to our servers, however finding the right balance between security and ease of use isn't easy. Especially means to increase security such as fail2ban and two-factor-authentification tend to lock people out with the worst timing as people make errors in unfamiliar and stressful situations. But I think we found a reasonable compromise now and will soon give it a try.

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!

We are testing the Voyager alternative Lemmy UI on https://voyager.slrpnk.net/

There is not a huge difference compared to using the official .apk but some users on alternative platforms like Ubuntu Touch might appreciate having this option directly in the browser. It should be also possible to install it as a PWA this way.

Of course it also works in a desktop browser, but Voyager is really more optimized for mobile touch screens.

Please let us know if there are any issues with it.

On the weekend of the 11/12th of May the server which runs the XMPP, Movim and Wiki will undergo extended maintenance and will not be available for a few hours. We need to upgrade the main OS and improve some other things.

The main Lemmy service should not or only minimally affected and we will likely migrate the wiki over to that server to make it available more quickly again.

As usual, no exact time frame, but it will likely happen on Saturday or Sunday morning UTC timezone.

Introduction

Every month we retire the pinned community meta post from the last month, and create a fresh one with updated news. We summarize the state of the instance, and create a space for public comments and discussions that don't merit their own meta post.

International Worker's Day is May 1st!

In 1886, a May 1st general strike called by the American Federation of Labor saw a significant response in New York, Detroit, and Milwaukee. But in Chicago, due to the International Working People's Association founded by the anarchist Albert Parsons, the number of people who went on strike was larger than twice all of those other cities combined. On May 3rd, Chicago police fired indiscriminately into a crowd of striking workers, killing several. On May 4th, the anarchists held a peaceful street meeting where several luminaries spoke. But near the end of the meeting in the Chicago Haymarket, police arrived in formation to forcibly disperse the peaceful crowd and order they desist their first amendment-protected activity in the name of the law.

Whoever it was who threw the bomb into the crowd of officers, all sides agree they were not one of the anarchist leaders who were later arrested, put on trial, and executed. The blast killed one, but 7 more officers and 4 working people would die of wounds from police bullets fired in the smoke and confusion. In the legal farce that followed, the capitalists of Chicago demonstrated through their ghoulish reaction how much they feared working people when they band together. The Haymarket heroes became not just a regional cause célèbre, but coverage of their show trial and martyrdom spread the message of the strike internationally, perhaps the most significant and successful general strike in history. It ended the common practice of 12-hour workdays, and lead the 8-hour workday, your average 9 to 5, to become the international standard.

On this day, we celebrate their sacrifice, and remember the power of working people everywhere. Celebrated in almost every country on this day, it is a symbol of cooperation between people unrestricted by national borders. In the spirit of solidarity, the admins at SLRPNK wish everyone a happy International Worker's Day!

Activity and Data

It continues to be a pleasure supporting you as an admin. When looking at data, it's easy to draw unqualified conclusions, and worse, use them as benchmarks and goals. The most important thing is the unquantifiable vibe of the instance, and whatever the numbers say, I'm pretty satisfied with that metric.

That being said, I know people are curious about the numbers, and the numbers are indeed curious. It's now official: the increase in new and active members was not a quirk of the change of reporting code at the beginning of the year. It appears there's been a reversal, and every month since January has seen the number of active members increase over the previous month. The growth is small but steady, and is even more curious due to the trend of declining or stagnant reported growth over the same period in larger instances with better funding and fame.

In addition to the growth of active members, our total number of posts continues to grow in a fashion suggesting an exponential curve. Fun.

We don't do any kind of deep analytics where we could pin down more accurately what's driving growth and why, so it's irresponsible to make too big a deal out of this data -- but it's definitely not bad. Whatever is happening, there's a good chance some of it is due to trends outside of our control, similar to Reddit's API exodus that brought most of us here almost a year ago. My advice is ignore the numbers and keep doing what you're doing. Whatever it is, it's making SLRPNK qualitatively a great place to hang out.

Software Status

@poVoq has done a wonderful job keeping Lemmy and Movim software up to date while screening new versions for major bugs. He has added a collaborative editing application Etherpad to the suite of community tools, available at https://pads.slrpnk.net/. Hedgedocs at https://docs.slrpnk.net/ will be retired due to lack of activity from the software maintainers. I'd like to personally thank @poVoq for hosting SLRPNK and keeping the software working and up-to-date.

The wiki on https://wiki.slrpnk.net remains a bit rough around the edges, as we have not yet gotten around to fixing the remaining issues with the login and easy page editing, but a few people started updating their community wikis anyways. Please let us know if you run into specific other issues. It will likely take some to get them fixed, but at least we can document the various issues for now.

Community Highlight

Check out these two communities created last month: !zines@slrpnk.net created by long-time member @toaster - a place to find great short-form self-publishing, and !forced_obsolescence@slrpnk.net by @activistPnk, a great idea that complements our vibrant !buyitforlife@slrpnk.net community by @ProdigalFrog.

I'd also like to draw attention to !fullyautomatedrpg@slrpnk.net, a forum the authors @andrewrgross and @JacobCoffinWrites are using to imagine a fantasy future to build collaborative stories in. They've put a lot of work into their world-building and are eagerly seeking public participation in the project. Congratulations to FA on being boosted by famous sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow!

Finally, !selfhosting@slrpnk.net I think deserves more attention. I have a great deal of admiration for @poVoq, and part of that is the alternative vision he has from most of the rest of the Fediverse and Lemmy instances. While some instances compete for position as the largest general purpose forum, others are happy to be small niche subject instances. SLRPNK falls into the latter category, but with a twist - with us, the medium is also the message. We will hit capacity one day, but we want the Fediverse to continue to grow in spite of us. We're very transparent about our administration decisions in XMPP moderator chat, and that's partly because of our social compact with you, but also to teach by example. Projects like !selfhosting@slrpnk.net, the Fedi-admin guild, and the wiki are part of the technology side of this goal -- to allow anyone who is interested to replicate what we're doing here, and improve on it.

The Solarpunk project is bigger than us, and we think Lemmy's ability to scale through federation is key to allowing us to grow without putting too much power and responsibility into the hands of a few people. Cloud services take away your agency and lock you in to their platforms while violating your privacy. Self-hosting is a way around that technology trap, and the skills you learn can also be applied to eventually host part of the Fediverse as well. If you're curious about what's possible, subscribing to !selfhosting@slrpnk.net is a great place to start.

Call for Moderators

Moderating a community here is a great way to build skills useful for online community management. We love to see new communities people are passionate about - but that's not the only way to get involved. Several communities are undermoderated despite continuing to attract activity. We didn't get around to closing any communities this month, but will likely start that again soon. Joining the moderation team will help keep the communities you love alive. The first step is joining XMPP chat and asking around. The moderators channel is extremely active, and a great way to coordinate and get support from us and other moderators. You'll also get a peek at what's likely to show up in the next monthly meta.

We are still planning to build a new a space for women on SLRPNK since we closed !twoxchromosomes two months ago. @punkisundead has started a discussion on Loomio to gather resources, and @schmorp has also joined the Fedi-admin guild to contribute. We are actively seeking more voices, as this is an important project, and the more people who cooperate on it, the greater chance it will have of success.

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!

As some of you might remember, we experimented with hosting the alpha version of Hedgedocs2 over here: https://docs.slrpnk.net/

It never worked out very well and was originally intended as an alternative for our Wiki, which wasn't working well back then either.

Now with the Wiki issues mostly resolved and Hedgedocs2 not developing as expected, we decided to sunset it by the end of this month. I don't think anyone was really using it, but if you were, please ensure all the documents are saved somewhere else.

However since working together on texts in real-time can be a useful tool for drafting documents, we decided to add an Etherpad installation instead: https://pads.slrpnk.net

It's still being tested and we will likely add an automatic expiration to pads, but overall it seems to be working fine. You can even export the text as Markdown for easy cut&paste into Lemmy posts.

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, so let's get to the updatin'!

Community highlights

This month we thought to shake up our usual routine to highlight new communities and instead decided to highlight some nice, but older communities. So have a look at these and maybe add them to your list of subscriptions:

• /c/Fixing
• /c/ZeroWaste
• /c/Writing

Any other communities you would like to highlight? Comment below!

Transfer to new server

After our last attempt to move our Lemmy instance to a new server had to be reverted at the end of 2023, we tried again this month. The new server has been hosting the Pictrs image backend and the various frontends for a while now, but yesterday we finally also migrated the main database and the backend to it.

The new server (a refurbished Intel Xeon with 64GB RAM) is probably somewhat oversized for a small Lemmy instance like ours, but it looks like the multiple times faster NVMe database storage array finally fixes the performance issues we had before.

Let's hope this time we will not run into hardware issues like with the previous dedicated server.

A brand spankin' new Wiki

SLRPNK now hosts a fully functional wiki for our communities to utilize, based on the DocuWiki project.

Currently, only community Moderators can edit the wiki, and like our XMPP instance, you'll be able to use your SLRPNK login to access it, along with editing privileges for your community automatically given.

We have a quick-start guide written that should help you with the first steps of how to create your community wiki.

A few plugins have been added to the wiki to extend its functionality, such as a WYSIWYG editor in addition to the standard markup editor, along with some other bells and whistles. You can find a complete list of the plugins used here.

If you need any help getting your community page setup, you can either leave a comment in this thread below, or message one of the admins, and we'll do our best to get you up and running. :)

Other technical additions

You might have noticed the new bot account that was added as an instance admin last month. This account is currently connected to two additional services that we added:

An automatic RSS feed poster that can be added to communities. Let us know if that is something you are interested for a community you moderate here.

An instance level auto-moderation bot that scans new posts and comments for spam. The software behind this is still a bit of a work in progress, but it should allow us to react more quickly to future spam-waves from multiple accounts.

If you have other suggestions on how to utilize this bot, let us know.

Server Stats

With another month, comes another round of stats!

Right off the bat, the hardware upgrade is having a noticeable effect on the latency of the server, which is pretty darn sweet.

And 65 new solarpunks joined us last month, bringing the total up from 1,138 members to 1,203. Hopefully they find this to be a good home. :)

The monthly users are holding steady, with a slight increase up from 290 to 299. With that amount of people, there always seems to be something interesting to see or read on the server just from our users alone. Counting people coming in from other instances, it really is booming around here!

The Big News

We're proud to announce that Slrpnk.net is now officially sponsored by Exxon Mobile™ as part of their Global Green Outreach for Innovative Forward Thinkers™ program.

In collaboration with them, we'll be featuring new eco-friendly technologies that were produced with net-zero emissions as a long-term goal, which has only been made possible thanks to Exxon's Big Heart Good Guy Partner™ initiative.

Starting us off this month is this fine Gasoline powered Alarm Clock, which gets an unthinkable 24 hours to the gallon! The efficiency wizards at Exxon have truly outdone themselves. Hopefully we'll see one of these pop up in every home in the coming decades.

Open discussion

That about wraps up this month's news. If you have anything you'd like to ask regarding the site, our new tools, or anything else related to this community, let us know.

If you've created a new community or would like to make your own announcements about something happening on the server, you're also welcome to post them down below!

All comments will get extra visibility up until the beginning of next month.

Have a great April, everyone! ^^

Is it just me or is it impossible to use slrpnk accounts on the Voyager app? I can login with the same username and password on the slrpnk website but not on the voyager alp

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.

New moderators / communities

Anyone who accepts the responsibility outlined in the SLRPNK rules can start their own community on this instance. Several people have started communities in the last month you may want to check out:

• Anti-car living - !anticars by @wildcherry
• BreadTube - !breadtube by @ProdigalFrog
• Geoengineering - !geoengineering by Mambabasa
• Not voting (in your election) - !notvoting by @punkisundead

Also, @maanskyn of The Radical Storytelling Crew has set up shop on our instance, and while they have not decided how much participation they want from the rest of us, their community !thersc may be something interesting to watch.

Controversy Over !NotVoting

Anarchism is an philosophy of horizontal organization and consensus building. While anarchists have historically taken several positions on engaging in electoral politics, many have and still do view it as a distraction from the grassroots organizing that brings real change. The strongest expression of this tendency is to promote non-involvement in all elections.

Last month, a couple posts expressing this opinion in !anarchism have been downvoted and rage-posted in from accounts outside the !anarchism community. @punkisundead, a long-time contributor and valued member, created !notvoting to try and solve this problem. Whether it will help or merely compound the issue remains to be seen.

In addition to aspiring to be a space where anarchists feel welcome, we are also struggling with the dilemma of how to both encourage good-faith engagement and protect communities from out-group harassment. Lessons learned from @punkisundead's moderation strategies may help us with other communities with similar problems. We recently closed !twoxchromosomes due to lack of moderators to respond to similar abuse.

As admins, we support @punkisundead in holding unpopular but principled positions, and have put the fate of !notvoting in their hands. They've volunteered to discuss their vision for the community with anyone with questions in the comments below.

User Stats

In the last monthly meta, I included a member-requested 'user stats' analysis. Because we switched to Lemmy 0.19 mid-January, the way that activity was reported changed, making the sudden inflection in the activity graph suspect. I thought it would be interesting to check in on that again this month.

Fediverse Observer continues to report an upward trend, though not as steep as it was in January when all the members who voted but didn't post or comment were first added to the count.

The total post count continues its exponential growth pattern from last month, which I interpret as a linear trend of members becoming geometrically more comfortable with using the platform to share news.

As I said last month, 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.

It's nice to see numbers going up, but what is important to us is mostly intangible. I'm pretty happy with the vibe of this instance, and your words of kindness and encouragement are well-received and appreciated.

Community Pruning

When gardening, it's customary to remove weaker or redundant branches to give healthy branches more room to expand, and allow the crop to focus resources on growing bigger fruit with less plant. We've been doing this throughout our tenure as admins to local communities that are both inactive and unmoderated so that it is easier for people to find active and engaging communities on SLRPNK, and reduce our attack profile for spam and trolling.

Usually there's some discussion in Movim chat, attempts to contact the moderators, and we're now listing the communities on the Loomio forum so members can stay abreast of what communities are in the shears. The following communities will be pruned next month unless their moderators return or someone steps up to moderate them.

• !decaf
• !rat_zone
• !castiron
• !boardgames

We're also pruning some long-unmoderated communities that are significant enough that we considered them worthy of their own !meta posts:

• !cornelwest2024
• !twoxchromosomes

Discussion of those communities future should happen in the CornelWest2024 pruning post and the TwoXChromosomes pruning post.

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!

As outlined in the SLRPNK Rules, any member of this instance can create communities, but doing so comes with responsibilities:

• Active moderation of communities you create (you can add additional moderators yourself though)

• Please add a community avatar and a basic side-bar text explaining what the community is about

• Make a short introduction post to tell us a bit about yourself and why you created this community (this is mandatory!)

Occasionally we prune communities that do not meet these requirements. I’ve reached out to both current moderator accounts via PM, and neither GreatWhiteBuffalo41 or Justincase_2008@lemmy.world have replied or shown any activity on SLRPNK in 5 months or more. We often prune communities without public comment, but in this case we felt it deserved special mention.

A Brief History of Reddit's TwoXChromosomes

When Reddit started, its primary archetype was Slashdot, a site whose tagline was "News for Nerds" and whose format included voting on comments, user-assisted moderation, and user submitted stories for the admins to directly sign-off on, but the categories for posts were admin controlled. When Reddit started, one of its early communities was Programming, which remained a regular presence on the front page even after Reddit changed its architecture to allow user-created communities. Both Slashdot and to a lesser extent Reddit continue to be heavily male-dominated spaces and toxic to women. A common justification for this toxic dynamic was that there was something about STEM other than the male fragility, hostility, and domination that caused the lopsided representation.

Into this milieu appeared TwoXChromosomes - the name was catchy and immediately conjured both womanhood and tech-savvy, educated, nerdy fun. Posts from this community quickly became a regular fixture of Reddit's front page, demonstrating an outpouring of demand for a threaded discussion forum for women interested in technology and science.

But the victory was not effortless; complaining about 2XC became a favorite pastime for fragile men on the site. As their minority community grew, they had to constantly deal with men wanting to re-hash long-settled debates, have toxic masculinity personally explained to them, and other kinds of bad-faith engagement -- in addition to the undisguised harassment. 2XC instituted a heavy-handed (for the time) moderation policy that allowed men to participate, but only if they respected the community as a women's space. This represented one of the earliest and largest online spaces that participated in a larger discussion platform while protecting its minority members. For that reason 2XC was a trailblazer when it came to protected online spaces.

Is TwoXChromosomes Transphobic?

This was an early concern arising from the name, and the gender-essentialist attacks against transgender women. The early moderators of 2XC took the controversial (in 2008) stance that trans-women are women, and committed to be a trans-inclusive space. Trans-women were added as moderators, and trans-women's issues were frequently included in the topics of discussion. All women were shielded by the mods from male harassment, and trans-exclusionary women were not welcome.

Still, some trans-women and their allies felt excluded by the name, and for good reason. Defining femininity based on what chromosomes and how many one has is more than a dog-whistle - it's a naked form of aggression towards all women. But I'd argue that by normalizing "two x-chromosomes" as a synecdoche for all women rather than a bigoted attack, the community name is furthering the cause of transgender people.

How did the Fediverse's 2XC become unmoderated?

The activity-pub version of 2XC was created in June 2023 during the height of the first Reddit exodus. The creator established it with the intention of carrying on Reddit 2XC's legacy, and was soon joined by a mod from Reddit's 2XC. They were quickly challenged by members of the transgender community about the name, but most significantly, were overwhelmed by eager participation by inconsiderate men.

On Reddit, TwoXChromosomes typically is dominated by self-posts, where women are seeking validation from other women, or want to hear women's opinions on news or ideas. AP-2XC quickly became a place for men to come and seek validation from women, share their opinions on women's issues, or debate women about their opinions.

The original AP-2XC mods called out for additional moderators, but couldn't find women interested in sharing the responsibility to bring AP-2XC closer to the standards set by the original. Both mods have since returned to being active on Reddit.

Is the Fediverse hostile to women?

Yes, obviously. But not more than Slashdot, Reddit, or other similar platforms. I hope in the future on this platform or somewhere else in the Fediverse, a group of women will pick up the mantle of 2XC again and build a community better than its template. This set-back should serve as a reminder that the fight for women's spaces online isn't over. They require above-average tending by committed moderators, or any new minority space is likely to experience the same fate.

As admins, we procrastinated longer than we probably should have to close AP-2XC. We had hoped that it would find new champions, and could eventually make a full recovery. We were hesitant to step in and moderate in their stead, based on the land-mines inherent in men trying to moderate women's spaces.

Leaving the 2XC unmoderated creates a situation where new female participants are quickly chased away by the heavy male participation, and each new visitor is given the false impression that SLRPNK, (or worse) the Fediverse, is devoid of women. Both Blahaj.zone and Beehaw have done a great job of creating protected spaces for women, and are pushing for more moderators and better software support to improve their record. At SLRPNK, we're eager to also create healthy spaces for women, and are talking over XMPP about the best way to move forward with that.

Watch here for updates

We usually close unmoderated communities, but in the case of TwoXChromosomes, we plan to disable public posting and lock all threads. New participants will be redirected to this thread, and when the situation changes, we will post here with updates.

I'd like to thank the Activity Pub-2XC moderators for attempting this task, and for choosing SLRPNK as the place to try it. I'd also like to thank the women and non-binary people who participated in our disappointing simulacrum of 2XC despite its failings, and to men from SLRPNK and other more progressive corners of the Fediverse, who I feel helped push back against the waves of toxic and less enlightened men who dominated the community.

We're always looking for more moderators from among SLRPNK members, and there are a number of other communities that are undermoderated. If you enjoy a community’s existence, consider joining the XMPP chat on Movim, people are eager to accept whatever help you can give.

As outlined in the SLRPNK Rules, all members are free to create communities, but doing so comes with responsibilities:

• Active moderation of communities you create (you can add additional moderators yourself though)

• Please add a community avatar and a basic side-bar text explaining what the community is about

• Make a short introduction post to tell us a bit about yourself and why you created this community (this is mandatory!)

Occasionally we will prune communities that do not meet these requirements. The sole moderator of !cornelwest2024, Lumpen2's account has not posted or commented for 3 months. I've reached out to the account via PM, and have not received any sign that they are still involved on the platform.

While we don't always make a !meta announcement when pruning an unmoderated community, due to the approaching monumental U.S. election, we decided it was prudent to boost our usual transparency in this case.

With each new community, SLRPNK further defines its niche in the ecosystem of the Fediverse. While the structure of the software we use creates distinct roles, new members may eventually become community moderators. Unlike corporate social media, they may even one day become admins here, or of their own instance that we would like to federate with. We like to encourage this 'social' mobility, and support the exploration of community creation and moderation duties. This is part of the reason we tolerate some communities even when their relationship to Solarpunk may be tenuous at best.

Solarpunk is an international ideal. While we don't keep accurate demographics, I would be shocked if the majority of our members were from the United States. Of those from the States, statistically many are disenfranchised. It is famously a democracy of universal suffrage with exceptions, such as asylum seekers who are forced to live undocumented for years while their cases are heard, migrant farm workers who pick most of the nation's crops, H-1B visa knowledge workers who bolster the nation's tech corporations and universities, citizens who have committed a felony like graffiti on federal property, and citizens residing in unincorporated US territory like Puerto Rico or Guam. I'm sure there are more, those are off the top of my head. My point is that the percentage of SLRPNK members who can vote in U.S. elections combined with our small size means the audience for communities to promote presidential candidates here is pretty small.

It should also be noted that there is a significant anarchist presence here. Anarchism is a political ideology of horizontal organizing and resistance to rulers, and most anarchist tendencies are hostile or indifferent to hierarchical electoral politics. They are not the best audience to pitch political hopefuls to if their upvotes are needed to graduate beyond the local feed.

So I don't know exactly why the !cornelwest2024 community languished and was abandoned, but the things I listed were probably contributing factors. Its fate should be a warning to others considering starting similar U.S.-focused political communities on SLRPNK. We're probably not the most fertile ground for that kind of seed to sprout.

To those who feel passionate about campaigning for a third-party candidate or uniting behind the incumbent U.S. president, I don't intend to advocate political apathy. Part of the beauty of federation is that you can create communities on other instances with more fertile demography, or at least a larger audience among which to find people eager to engage with your message.

I'd like to thank Lumpen2 for participating in our experiment for the short time they did, and hope they continue their political fight on other online platforms or in revolutionary or reform organizations offline.

If any SLRPNK member would like to experience Lemmy from the position of a moderator, there are a number of other communities that are undermoderated. If you enjoy a community's existence, consider joining the XMPP chat on movim.slrpnk.net, people are eager to accept whatever help you can give.

I don't know if you need this info, but I was pretty disturbed to see unexpected child pornography on a casual community. Thankfully it didn't take place on SLRPNK.net directly, but if anyone has any advice besides leaving the community in question, let me know. And I wanted to sound an alarm to make sure we have measures in place to guard against this.

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!

Background: yesterday, there was heated discussion in the thread "military-industrial complex is a supervillain of causing the climate crisis" (link).

Among others, the thread creator posted a comment to the Guardian article "The climate costs of war and militaries can no longer be ignored", commenting it thusly:

If you want more context or won’t take my word on how militarism will kill is all, you can read this article.

I replied, a copy of my reply is below for your judgement. My reply got moderated by someone with the reason "Comment does not address intent of original post and promotes weapons industry / war in Ukraine."

I think my comment both addressed the topic, did not promote the weapons industry but helping Ukraine defend itself (ironically, tools for military self-defense come from the weapons industry) and did not promote the war (in fact, I noted that war is expensive, resource-intensive and stupid), but did explain the dynamics of war and revolutions.

I consider this moderator misconduct, likely motivated by their political views - and have asked a server administrator to talk with the moderator involved, to ascertain if they can refrain from using moderator powers as a political club to hit people, or to secure their demotion from a moderating role.

The removed post, for your judgement:

The article is fine, and I second the recommendation to read it, but from the article to the slogan you present, things do not follow a logical path.

Yes, war is both an incredibly expensive activity (diverting money that could be used) and a resource-intensive activity (the money goes into actual materials that almost surely destroy something or get destroyed) and an incredibly stupid activity (and it can snowball)...

...but the problem is that successful unilateral disarmament during a war tends to result in a situation called "defeat". If the defeat is not an attack being defeated, but defense being defeated, that is called a "conquest". Now, letting a conquest succeed has a historical tendency of the conqueror having more experience at conquest, and more resources to conquer with... which has, several times in history, lead to another conquest or a whole series of conquests. A regional war in Ukraine resulting in Ukraine being taken over by Russia has a high probability of producing:

1. a bigger regional war later, in which Russia, using its own resources and those of Ukraine, proceeds to another country, gets into a direct conflict with NATO and then indeed there is a risk of a global war

2. an encouraging effect after which China, noting that international cooperation against the agressor was ultimately insufficient, and deeming itself better prepared than Russia, decides that it can take Taiwan with military force

However, a war ending with inability to show victory tends to produce a revolution in the invading country. For example, World War I produced a revolution in Russia and subsequently a revolution in Germany, with several smaller revolutions in between, empires collapsing and a brief bloom of democracy in Europe, before the Great Depression and the rise of fascism ate all the fruits. The Falklands War produced a revolution in Argentina. The Russo-Japanese war produced the 1905 near-revolution in Russia.

It is better for Ukraine to not get conquered. It is better for Russia to be unable to conquer Ukraine. That result is also better for everyone around them. It's even better globally because it sets a precedent of large-scale cooperation defeating an agressive superpower, discouraging agressive superpowers from undertaking similar wars until memory starts fading again.

Unfortunately, until we see indications that Russian society is getting ready to stop the war (this could involve starting negotiations on terms palatable to Ukraine, a change of leadership, a withdrawal, a revolution, etc)... the path to achieving that outcome remains wearing out the agressor: producing enough weapons and delivering them to Ukraine.

Ultimately, both sides in a war wear each other down. The soldiers most eager to fight are killed soonest. The people most unwilling to get mobilized or recruited, and soldiers most unwilling to fight - they remain alive. If they are pressed forever, some day they will make the calculation: there are less troops blocking the way home than in the trenches of the opposing side. After that realization, they eventually tend to mutiny. Invading troops tend to do that a bit easier than defending troops, because they sense less purpose in their activity. In the long run, if nothing else happens, that will happen. There is just (probably, regrettably) no particularly quick shortcut to getting there.

Happy new year and > 1000 members

First off, happy new year to everyone 😊

We also surpassed 1000 members on slrpnk.net near the end of last month. This is a nice milestone and another reason to celebrate.

While we had some server issues last month and also did not yet upgrade to the latest version of Lemmy (due to federation bugs with it), we can still welcome more users in 2024.

Of course the actually active number of users is quite a bit lower, as many of the Reddit migrants did not stick around. But I think we managed to get a healthy number of regular posters and our communities are also well subscribed to in the larger Fediverse.

I also managed to promote our instance a bit on the 37C3 congress in Hamburg a few days ago. Great Fediverse presence there and good solarpunk vibes as well.

New moderators / communities

We got two new communities in recent weeks that seem to be quite popular:

• @toaster@slrpnk.net started !asksolarpunk@slrpnk.net
• @activistPnk@slrpnk.net started !climate_action_individual@slrpnk.net

Technical updates

Besides the upcoming upgrade to Lemmy 0.19.x we thought a bit about other services to host. One idea is a collaborative text editor, for which the new Hedgedocs2 alpha is being tested on https://docs.slrpnk.net (BEWARE users and documents might be wiped without notice during the test period). We will update you when this service stabilizes sufficiently and also if we find a way to integrate accounts with the main Lemmy user database like we do for the XMPP & Movim service. Stay tuned 👍

Open discussion

As always, this is your thread. You’re welcome to comment about any meta stuff you don’t think is big enough for its own post. New communities, Lemmy or Movim issues, personal news, and questions for the community will be visible to the entire community here through the month of January.

Introduction

As the December solstice approaches and twilight consumes more of the northern hemisphere's day, SLRPNK continues to grow brighter! New users have continued to join the platform at a pretty constant rate of ~1/day, and we've been very proud of your activity here and across the Threadiverse. Not only do we rarely get negative reports about you, remote admins and mods have noticed your positive contributions across their Lemmy instances. You are making the Fediverse and the world a better place. Thank you for making that happen.

New moderators / communities

I'd also like to acknowledge new communities that have recently appeared on SLRPNK. Check out adorable graffiti in @punkisundead's !grasweeti@slrpnk.net community. Take a trip around the world without leaving your kitchen with new member @pip's !culinary_cultures@slrpnk.net channel! And expand your knowledge with @spaduf's !opencourselectures@slrpnk.net OER list.

Also, a shout out to @toaster for starting the thriving !balconygardening@slrpnk.net community the previous month.

Movim#Moderators chat is growing

There are now a dozen accounts in the Moderators channel in XMPP chat. It has acted as a useful channel for casual meta discussion, and remained up when the Lemmy software had unscheduled downtime earlier this month. When things are working normally, join Movim with your Lemmy username and password and message either me or @poVoq to get an invite to Moderators chat.

There may be some issues related to the unscheduled downtime that affect Movim account creation that need to be resolved. We've received your reports and are working on getting everyone who wants to be involved connected.

Tools for moderators coordination

In addition to the #Moderators channel, I've created #mod-urbanism and #mod-documentaries private channels to coordinate the Alt Urbanism and Documentaries (Solarpunk) communities. So far they have been useful for discussing policy and keeping shared post backlogs with my fellow mod. Sharing community duties and ideas with you continues to be a pleasure, @ProdigalFrog :)

You're all encouraged to follow my example. Naming it mod-community-name keeps the community namespace open in case people decide to make that a thing. If you add me and @poVoq to the chat room, we can better assist with moderation duties. As admins, we see all the reports you do, but tend to hold off on acting to respect your agency in your own communities. With that channel of communication open, it's easier for us to get feedback about how we can best support you.

Unscheduled Downtime (text @poVoq)

As outlined here in more detail, we unfortunately had an lengthy unscheduled downtime on the 26th of November. The ultimate cause was not directly related to Lemmy but rather an issue with the SSD boot disk of the new server that we recently migrated to. We identified the likely cause, but it will not be possible to fix in the next few weeks, so as a workaround we restored our instance from a daily backup on the old server. So on the upside, we were able to confirm that the backups work as expected 🤓

Open discussion

As always, this is your thread. You're welcome to comment about any meta stuff you don't think is big enough for its own post. New communities, Lemmy or Movim issues, personal news, and questions for the community will be visible to the entire community here through the month of December.

Thanks for continuing on this adventure with us.

SLRPNK recently received a registration request for @CommunityBoost -- the bot for Lemmy Community Boost, which we've denied.

What is Lemmy Community Boost?

Lemmy Community Boost (LCB) is a system written by @iso, admin of lemy.lol. The purpose is to put new communities into the "All" feed of more Lemmy instances. All SLRPNK communities appear in SLRPNK's "All" feed, but SLRPNK only requests content from a remote community if at least one of our members has subscribed to that community. If no-one on SLRPNK has subscribed to a remote community, then no-one will see posts on that remote community in the "All" feed.

LCB seeks to change this by creating a bot account on SLRPNK that subscribes to every new community on instances that have been pre-screened by Fediseer, a Fediverse Web-of-Trust system maintained by @db0 of lemmy.dbzer0.com (we are members of Fediseer.) The goal would be to make new communities more easily discoverable through the "All" feed, and in theory easier and less discouraging to grow.

As of this writing, more than two dozen instances have registered a @CommunityBoost user, including midwest.social and lemmy.blahaj.zone. More than a handful have either not registered or declined, including lemmy.dbzer0.com, lemmy.world, and beehaw.org. LCB keeps a roster at https://boost.lemy.lol/ with up to date information on participating instances.

We've decided to join the latter group for now. Our concerns fall into two categories.

Locally flavored All tab is a feature

While one might expect the "All" tab to act as the Threadiverse firehose, when visiting multiple instances to find a home, I found clicking on the "All" tab gave a short-hand of the kind of community hosted by the instance. Whatever the official intention for the tab, narrowing it to communities your fellow instance members find interesting is an imperfect but very efficient method of algorithmic suggestion without invasive tracking and click analysis. Perhaps future UI renaming it "suggested" with an alt-text "posts from communities chosen by your instance" would make the tabs' behavior more intuitive.

This unique "All" tab behavior expresses itself most noticeably on smaller instances. These are also the instances whose communities are likely to be most greatly affected by LCB, meaning the smaller instances would be forced to make a trade if all other things stayed the same. But even keeping the previous functionality and renaming the "All" tab, creating a "Firehose" tab may still be an anti-feature.

Hopefully invisible to most users is the battle that admins and moderators fight against spam and abuse. The tools native to Lemmy and Kbin software are less than adequate for the job, and admins coordinate efforts across instances on matrix and XMPP to fight the flow. While some attacks are obvious, others are confusing and subtle. Since most instances allow unsupervised community creation, allowing anyone who creates a new community to broadcast that community name and content across the Threadiverse could open a new vector for spam and abuse.

The vast majority of communities on Lemmy are abandoned, created in a flurry of activity 4 months ago. There are more people willing to create communities than there are people willing to contribute posts to them, or even stick around and moderate them. The communities on lemy.lol seem to follow this pattern. This is the problem LCB is supposed to solve, but is the issue that people can't find these communities, or that there aren't enough people with free time available to keep them alive in the first place?

Some communities in the Threadiverse have reached a critical mass and feel vibrant, others feel like they are on life support -- supported by one or two regular contributors, while many are verifiably dead. LCB doesn't seem like it would bring new users to Lemmy, only redistribute where existing users spend their time. Is this what Lemmy needs, or would it be more prudent to prune dead communities and encourage consolidation of scarce volunteer resources into a smaller number of vibrant and growing communities?

Concerns about performance

While the number of Lemmy instances grows linearly, the connections between them have the potential to grow geometrically. This leads to concerns about software efficiency and hardware performance.

Take the example of a Threadiverse ecosystem with ten instances, each with 100 communities each. A bot user would bring the remote subscription count to 900 for each of the instances, for a total of 9,000 database entries. For each instance, the traffic would be expanded to a potential 9,000 community updates every update cycle, for a total of 90,000 community updates across the Threadiverse each cycle. There are significantly more than ten instances, and if you run the hypothetical example again with 1000 instances, you can see how database requirements and cross-instance traffic can get out of hand.

A firehose style "All" tab could limit the development of smaller instances by requiring them to handle the kind of traffic and database churn only seen by the largest Threadiverse instances. The financial and technical burdens could create a barrier to entry that may have the opposite effect than what was intended.

Caveats about criticism

I'm really impressed by the work @iso put into this tool. The Threadiverse needs more developers to help solve its many problems, and I'm grateful he was willing to write code and share a solution.

As an admin, moderator, and community contributor, I recognize that starting new communities and keeping them alive takes work, and welcome tools that make those activities easier. I think this tool was developed with good intentions.

These concerns are based on our intuitions about the needs and limitations of our instance, and our vision for the Threadiverse. While I stand behind the concerns, I admit they are not the result of a rigorous study. We reserve the right to change our mind if the benefits of LCB become more evident, but we're planning to sit out the experimental phase.

Introduction

Greetings everybody! Slrpnk.net now has two Admins! On the 16th of October @poVoq gave me admin privileges, and I'm now involved in approving applications, responding to report tickets, and coordinating with other instance administrators. Your main admin is continuing to do those things as well, in addition to sysadmin tasks and technology improvements, and we are coordinating over XMPP to keep our actions consistent and in line with Slrpnk's values. Thank you @ProdigalFrog and @punkisundead for your warm endorsements, your support means a lot to me.

XMPP chat integration

As mentioned last month, Slrpnk.net is running an Ejabberd service. Movim.Slrpnk.net hosts a web-client you can use with your current username and password. After logging in to the Movim client, your XMPP account will be active, and you can access Slrpnk chat with any XMPP compatible Android or Apple client. You can find a list of suggested clients at joinjabber.org. Cheogram from F-Droid is a recommended choice.

Audio and video calls are still not fully functional yet, but we've been experimenting extensively with the chat options, and it has been invaluable for coordinating administrative activities. In addition to directly chatting with other users, there are public chat rooms, and you can create invite-only private rooms. The interface is not bug-free, but we've had direct help from the author in troubleshooting problems and fixing bugs. Thanks @edhelas@slrpnk.net!

Everyone is encouraged to join, but especially moderators who share communities. We've created an invite room for all moderators moderators@chat.slrpnk.net, and when demand requires, rooms for each community like "mod-memes" and "mod-anarchism" are available for community-specific coordination.

Call for moderators

We've noticed a rise in spam - this is good news as it is an indication of the Threadiverse's rising popularity, though it is of course also a challenge. There has also been a rise in hate speech and genocidal language due to recent tragic events. Palestinians and Israelis, Jews and Muslims are all people deserving of dignity and respect, and are all explicitly welcome here. I'm proud of the inter-admin solidarity particularly with Lemmy.world and Beehaw.org in responding to reports. I'm also proud of all of you who have participated in discussions, flagged spam and hate speech for us, and shown humanity to others in this trying time. You are an inspiration to me.

To grow and become better, we need people to mod. If you enjoy posting in a community, consider asking the owner of the community if you can help mod; if you're a moderator and you notice a person who you think would be a good moderator, don't be afraid to ask them to join you. If you're already a mod, consider reaching out to other mods to help them with their communities. Our Lemmy feature requests are improvements to the moderation tools, and the XMPP chat significantly improves the ease of inter-moderator coordination. More mods in a community usually means overlapping coverage when there's a diversity of time-zones and sleep schedules, and is a great opportunity to get to know other members of the community and learn social custodial skills from each other.

Fedi-Admin Guild

Since @poVoq announced it last month, we've added admins from four other Lemmy instances to the Fedi-admin guild, with a fifth likely to join soon. The guild runs on the open-source forum software Loomio, which is designed to facilitate online decision-making. It was designed for community governance, and though it is still a work in progress, the developers have been very responsive. If you're looking for another reason to volunteer as a mod, access is still open to you even if you're not an admin. Both Lemmy and Loomio are fascinating software concepts, if you're curious about that sort of thing, I think you'll like learning the features and seeing the clockwork.

I'm a big fan of the guild initiative as a form of prefigurative politics and for its potential for improving the general Threadiverse stability and performance. It's also an opportunity to build consensus on community norms in this new form of social technology we're all building together.

No UI change this month

We're sticking with the default Lemmy UI for at least another month. You can continue to experience site navigation in Photon and Alexandrite. There's a feedback post for Photon, and the developer, @Xylight@lemmy.world, is active in the threads. There's also an Alexandrite feedback post.

Open discussion

This is the monthly meta thread, 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. Got questions? Ask'em!

You can now test the alternative Photon UI for Lemmy on:

https://photon.slrpnk.net/

It's one of the few alternative UIs for Lemmy that includes moderation features, so that makes it interesting as a replacement for the default Lemmy-UI.

Right now it is still early days and Photon is very actively developed, so don't expect a perfectly polished experience. Once it stabilizes, there is a chance we will switch over to it as the main UI for Slrpnk though, as the current official Lemmy-UI is not very actively maintained any more with the main developer working on a re-write.

Update: Linked in the sidebar now. Will probably take a few more weeks/months before it can be used as a full replacement of the lemmy-ui though. Looking very nice overall though.

Monero is an also-ran cryptocurrency, in the same proof-of-work family as Bitcoin and Etherium.

Monero.town is a Lemmy instance whose main communities are: Monero, privacy, Monero Memes, Meta, and Monero Mining.

Enough has been written on the negative ecological effects of proof-of-work based cryptocurrency that I think it's not controversial to say it is incompatible with the Solarpunk vision.

Pictured inciting incident is a person advertising the crypto-capitalist Lemmy competitor "Nostr" in the anarchism community.

I don't personally mind a debate about Nostr, but like most of the content from Monero.town, it doesn't belong here. More sales pitches from a crypto-currency hype instance are going to be tedious, and crowd out the kind of progressive politics and human interactions we're looking to nurture here. Reddit's /r/anarchism had to constantly repel assholes trying to pass off their edgy capitalism as anarchist, Lemmy gives us the unique opportunity to send a strong message and nip this in the bud.

Fediverse sites that have already blocked Monero.town --

reject (10): solarpunk.moe, polyglot.city, freethought.online, icosahedron.website, sunbeam.city, vtuber.house, fruef.social, cutie.city, fuckcars.social, karas.social

followers_only (3): toot.cat, orbsafe.masto.host, partyparrot.social

So there are a few topics that came up lately that I think would be nice to discuss with members of this community.

Basically this is part of writing a Code of Conduct for our instance and I think we need to talk about some specific type of posts:

Doomers

Naturally the themes discussed in our communities are attracting a lot of climate doomer comments and I would say we also have a significant number of "recovering doomers" here as community members.

Earlier this week I considered closing the /c/collapse community on SRLPNK, because it is not actively moderated and attracts a lot of these types, even though ex_06 (who asked me to have their account re-activated, but not as an admin) originally intended it to be more of a psychological self-help group for people trying to get to terms with the likely loss of many things that defined their life so far.

While the typical doomer could probably need some psychological support, they are usually still in a stage of grief that makes them lash out and not engage in a constructive exchange how to make the best of the current difficult situation we sadly find ourselves in.

Mostly I have been doing temporary bans for such doomers to cool down and not spread their doom and gloom endlessly in our communities, but I think we need to come up with a common idea how to deal with this better.

Discussing civil disobedience

aka Direct Action or the other man's "Eco Terrorist" (yeah right...).

Obviously this is a topic many climate activists find themselves more and more confronted with and you might already be involved with a group engaged in such actions of civil disobedience. And lets not forget about the punk in Solarpunk either :)

However, obviously this is a public web-site and thus easily monitored by law-enforcement and other people that might be interested in reporting such discussions to the local authorities. Thus to protect this service and also our users from themselves we can't really allow planning discussions with specific targets or generally calls for action against specific persons to happen here out in the open (or in the semi-public direct messages).

Obviously, we can never condone violence against persons, but aside from that please be careful with discussing climate activism on the clear-web and rather use fully end to end encrypted means with people you can trust!

However this has obviously a large grey area and people might have stronger views on what should and should not be discussed here.

Absolute Vegans

Vegans are obviously welcome on SLRPNK and I think we can all agree that strongly reducing the consumption of animal products is a worthy goal.

However, there are some very opinionated (online) Vegans / animal rights activists that (intentionally or not) are indistinguishable from trolls and generally very toxic to deal with. Please don't feel personally attacked by this, but I think we need to come up with something regarding this in our code of conduct.

So these were the three topics I had in my mind lately, but feel free to discuss others as well.

I am looking forward to your thoughts on this!

I know we're not federated with lemmygrad but hexbear seems more leftist in general rather than pure tankie/ML. They'll also be the biggest (or second biggest?) instance when they start federating.

What are the general thoughts on it? I personally wouldn't mind and browse hexbear every now and then already so I might be biased. I think there's a fair amount of likeminded people there though.