this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
138 points (98.6% liked)

Solarpunk

6824 readers
36 users here now

The space to discuss Solarpunk itself and Solarpunk related stuff that doesn't fit elsewhere.

What is Solarpunk?

Join our chat: Movim or XMPP client.

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
SteveKLord@slrpnk.net
ex_06@slrpnk.net
poVoq@slrpnk.net
138
Solarpunk instance going offline for awhile was like a true solarpunk experience (sopuli.xyz)
submitted 6 days ago by Lazycog@sopuli.xyz to c/solarpunk@slrpnk.net
23 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

First of all, I love you, slrpnk admins. You handled it all like champions! Happy to have you back.

Someone said in one one of the matrix chats during the outage that the fact that this instance is selfhosted and went down is like true experience of a solarpunk world; there won't always be power and that's okay!

Just wanted to write it down in a post since that message was so spot on.

top 23 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 40 points 6 days ago (3 children)

But then Lemmygrad would have to shut down every day after working hours as in the socialist worker's paradise these things are taken very serious and no bureocrat will work even an minute longer than the official working hours. /s

Joking aside, yes... hosting on older hardware and on a regular fiber connection does mean that if hardware breaks it can take a while to replace.

We have a bit of redundancy with PSUs and so on, and this specific issue we had now could have been avoided (and will be in the future), but we do trade off some reliability for the fun of DIY self-hosting (and it is also much cheaper).

[–] Lazycog@sopuli.xyz 21 points 6 days ago

Ha true!

And also I love that, please keep it fun. I feel like it's truly a solarpunk instance that way :)

[–] OmegaLemmy@discuss.online 15 points 6 days ago (1 children)

I was wondering why you mentioned Lemmygrad so I did a quick research, damn, you've been beefing since 2022?

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 21 points 6 days ago

Even before that 😅

But it's fine, they can have their online safe-space for circle jerking about Stalin and Mao if they want 🤷

[–] cabbage@piefed.social 7 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago)

I would assume they have a five-year hosting plan. ;)

[–] infinitesunrise@slrpnk.net 26 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

That's how I got through it. Reminded myself that in a volenteer-based mutual aid society, 99.999% uptime garauntees aren't a thing and that would be good because it would apply to my work as well. Services go down, and as you shouldn't be addicted or otherwise dependant on such services, you can do something else with your time.

[–] alzymologist@sopuli.xyz 15 points 6 days ago

99.999% uptime guarantee is a silly thing, once you realize that all things that have to be just available all the time - some health or security or manufacturing lines - get 10 minutes downtimes easily with all these fancy nines. It's just some cliche to disempower us punks.

[–] dharmacurious@slrpnk.net 17 points 6 days ago (2 children)

In addition to this excellent point, during the outage I saw several people asking which server to switch to from .ee, and the replies made me realize how much I love it here. My fellow Slrpnkians didn't get all bent out of shape and pissed about things the admin just simply couldn't control at the time. From what I saw (maybe it's different in private messages/behind the scenes, iunno) any people talking about the skrpnk outage from their alts were all being very reasonable, understanding, and just being generally decent netizens. I love it around here.

[–] ellie@slrpnk.net 4 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I feel like downtimes are a badge of honor for self-hosting in some ways. Being more efficient and minimal means there will be slightly less redundancy and that can be a good thing. Perfect uptime to avoid lost revenue during downtime is a capitalist craze, and not how an ecological project should operate.

[–] activistPnk@slrpnk.net 3 points 5 days ago

Indeed. The instances that have solid uptime have, in most cases, sold their soul to the devil (aka Cloudflare, which is a centralised threat on the free world and all things good).

[–] Lazycog@sopuli.xyz 7 points 6 days ago

That's the kind of commenting I saw from slrpnk users as well!

[–] keepthepace@slrpnk.net 17 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

First of all, I love you, slrpnk admins.

First, yes, <3 to all.

Then:

Meh, I consider that resilience is not opposed to sustainability.

We don't have to prioritize it right now, and I will always be grateful of volunteers who do the best they can with what they have.

And to me the lesson was that several communities (french-speaking jlai.lu) still worked and I just used an alt there to continue the conversations I had, and that I could still access through them the past conversations in slrpnk.net. This is a testament to the resilience of the fediverse architecture.

I just disagree with the sentiment that we should somehow romanticize power outages. Some people need a reliable power sources to survive, and it is a totally preventable thing. We can route around them in a radically different way though.

But thinking "this could be down for a week with no warning" also implies that I need to keep a fallback mechanism if I am using it to organize any sort of event with people.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 9 points 6 days ago (1 children)

But thinking “this could be down for a week with no warning” also implies that I need to keep a fallback mechanism if I am using it to organize any sort of event with people.

That is probably a good idea regardless of the external service you use. The best is IMHO if you have a group of people for an event to host something yourself, but of course you are welcome to use slrpnk.net as long as you can accept the above mentioned risk.

That said, overall our uptime is quite good, so it is nothing I think you need to worry about all that much.

[–] keepthepace@slrpnk.net 5 points 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 children)

Really this is just a general remark, not something specially related to slrpnk.net and you are doing an awesome job, that I am grateful I don't have to do. Please don't see it in any form as a criticism of this server!

I am just saying that we should not embrace downtimes as an unavoidable thing or a problem we need to live in order to have a sustainable world. Resilience is also an important aspect of solarpunk.

[–] poVoq@slrpnk.net 7 points 6 days ago (1 children)

It's fine, no offense taken.

But what I mean is that resiliance often doesn't mean better uptime, but having alternatives at hand and knowing what to do in case of an outage.

[–] keepthepace@slrpnk.net 5 points 6 days ago

Yes, it changes the criterion from "uptime of a server" to "uptime of a service" and that's why I mention that the fediverse and even the old discussions on slrpnk.net kept being accessible.

But if we went to let go of the old world, we can't have the back thought of "you know, worst case I'll host that on a google drive, I know that one will be up". We need to get to this last mile.

[–] greengnu@slrpnk.net 13 points 6 days ago

We appreciate the slrpnk admins <3 them all.

Down time is fine, I support the goals

[–] umbraroze@slrpnk.net 7 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

"Well shit, a UFO just crashed in the middle of the town square. That'll take some time to sort out. Whatever. I'll fix up my bicycle and go see what's going on in the next town over."

(Edit: spent this time getting acquainted with PieFed through piefed.social. Seems like pretty nice software! Hope slrpnk will migrate, as they suggested.)

[–] awentu@scribe.disroot.org 6 points 5 days ago

I just assumed it was Earth Week

[–] activistPnk@slrpnk.net 2 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago)

Downtime by a freedom-respecting trully decentralised node like slrpnk.net really exposes how Lemmy clients leave a LOT to be desired.

The prospect of data loss is gutting. A proper client would be syncing threads of interest between the server and my PC, so during downtime I can still at least locally access past content. No proper clients exist for Lemmy.

[–] deafboy@lemmy.world 4 points 6 days ago (2 children)

Why stop with power? We should aim for water outages as well! Just when I was starting to think this might not be a pathological ideology...

Good luck to the admins though, I appreciate the effort to stay out of cloud. It's hard to maintain constant uptime when you don't have teams of people dedicated to keep stuff afloat.

Now when I think about it, is it even possible to run lemmy on a cluster, like a regular web app, or is it a monolith?

[–] Lazycog@sopuli.xyz 7 points 6 days ago

Happy cakeday :)

My home country has a general guideline for all the inhabitants: keep stocked up on emergency food water + some other stuff enough that you can survive 3 day power, water and other outages.

Been living with that in mind for a long time!

Never been under a true test though.

[–] Dave@lemmy.nz 5 points 5 days ago

Now when I think about it, is it even possible to run lemmy on a cluster, like a regular web app, or is it a monolith?

There's a page for info on horizontal scaling Lemmy here: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/administration/horizontal_scaling.html

It does seem to be out of date (for one, it mentions that pict-rs can't be horizontally scaled due to the sled database, but pict-rs now supports postgres so maybe that has changed.

I know larger instances run a separate federation container and many instances (including mine) run multiple lemmy-ui containers for the front end, but as I understand it the Lemmy backend can only run as a single service.