New Communities

This month two new communities sprouted from the SLRPNK soil: !hydroponics@slrpnk.net by first time moderator @Guenther_Amanita@slrpnk.net, and !fungus@slrpnk.net by veteran contributor @solo@slrpnk.net.

We're excited for both of these communities. Hydroponics allows solarpunks to practice cultivation even in urban environments. It also appears Hydro's close relative Aquaponics (a closer to closed loop system that involves aquatic life) is also welcome there. This technology may be the key to reducing food transportation pollution, and allow our civilization to rewild much of the land that is now dominated by industrial agriculture.

Fungus has always been part of the solarpunk/lunarpunk aesthetic, and the related aesthetic !goblincore@lemmy.blahaj.zone. The !fungus@slrpnk.net community takes this in a much more practical direction, with a focus on how technologies that incorporate fungus can provide an alternative to plastic, leather, and other problematic materials, as well as provide fuel and clean our air and water. Thanks @solo@slrpnk.net for your regular posts and comment contributions.

We look forward to the verdant growth of both of these communities.

Solidarity with Lemmy.World Vegans

Administration and moderation is necessary, but difficult and underappreciated. SLRPNK has strict guidelines on behavior we don't tolerate on this instance, such as fascism, racism or genocide denial, but we avoid broadening those limits so that we can encourage people with a wide variety of ideas, ideologies, and beliefs to discuss their differences in good faith. We delegate most of the responsibility for keeping a community healthy to the moderators of each community. We have consistently supported the moderators when their decisions have been challenged, even if we don't personally agree with the decision. As admins, we could not keep an instance this large so full of productive conversation without the bond of trust we've built with SLRPNK moderators to consistently respect their agency and judgement.

Federation means that each instance can have its own rules and culture, and we don't seek to impose our rules and culture on the instances of others. We typically don't comment on the behavior of admins and moderators on remote instances.

Lemmy.World is a special case, as it is the largest and best known threaded discussion forum in the Fediverse. It is the default instance for mobile apps like Voyager, and it is the instance that outsiders tend to think of when they characterize the Threadiverse. This puts an unenviable burden of responsibility on the admins of this central instance.

For a more detailed account, you can follow this post in !vegan@slrpnk.net, but to summarize, a Lemmy.World moderator reversed the actions of !vegan@LW mods, and then de-modded them. They were re-moded after the admin apologized once he realized the vegan comments he removed were supported by science. LW is now changing their TOS and Site Bylaws, and Threadiverse vegans are justifiably concerned with the implications of these changes.

The Fediverse is a progressive social movement. People who practice veganism play an essential role in all progressive social movements, and are a valued part of what makes the Fediverse great. This is non-negotiable and should be obvious, even if one doesn't agree with some of their beliefs.

We federate with VeganTheoryClub and Lemmy.vg. SLRPNK.net and Lemmy.vg federate with World while VeganTheoryClub does not. We welcome vegan refugees and host a !vegan@slrpnk.net community actively moderated by SLRPNK member @thisfro@slrpnk.net. Joining SLRPNK means sharing a space with non-vegans, and the potential friction that entails. If you justifiably want less of that, we recommend having a look at the two above mentioned instances.

Federation with Mastodon issues

With a recent change in Lemmy v.0.19.4/5 Lemmy started to add a (hidden in the Lemmy interface) hashtag of the community name to each post. The results is much better visibility of Lemmy posts from ActivityPub Microblogging software like Mastodon that use hashtags for discoverability.

This has various implications for us here on Lemmy. First of all when creating a new community, you should consider the choosing the community name according to the hashtag you would like to have associated with it.

This higher visibility across the Fediverse also comes with downsides, especially when the community name happens to be a popular hashtag. A new community post will appear to Mastodon users (that have subscribed to the specific hashtag) completely out of context as they can not easily see other posts in the same community, nor have visibility of the details outlined in the sidebar, sticky threads etc. Other comments on the same posts are also often invisible to Mastodon users due to the lack of back-filling support on that software. So let's try to be a bit understanding with remote users handicapped that way.

Of course, this wider reach also has attracted some unwanted trolling from microblogging instances that previously didn't really bother to interact with Lemmy communities. As a result, we already identified an instance that we decided to defederate from due to repeated trolling from their members, and we will likely have to be on the lookout for further ones.

Photon as primary frontend for SLRPNK?

You might be aware of the alternative Photon frontend we have been running for a while now. It recently surpassed the default web-UI from Lemmy in regards to available features and general usability. It is also significantly better maintained than the official Lemmy frontend, which has been languishing for a while now, with work on a full rewrite being prioritized.

We are therefore considering to make Photon our primary frontend that people will reach when navigating to the root slrpnk.net domain. The transition should be seamless and we would likely continue running the original frontend as an alternative on a subdomain. Of course, other apps will continue working as usual.

We would therefore like you to try out the current version and give us feedback on this general plan. No final decision has been made yet, so get your voice heard. And if you are interested in making a custom color theme for us, you can do so right inside the Photon theme settings easily. Please don't hesitate to post the results here!

Technical Updates

There are currently some technical issues with our database NVMe drives. This will likely entail some shorter down-times as we need to install additional heat sinks and probably replace one of these SSDs. After monitoring the drive utilisation and talking to other Lemmy admins, we are a bit worried about the long-term sustainability of running Lemmy. Very little effort seems to have gone into optimizing database writes, resulting in an excessively high load compared to other fediverse software. SSDs by their technical design only have a limited quantity of writes they can do during their lifetime, so optimizing this is quite essential to avoid having to replace them regularly.

There is also a login issue with our wiki, that we need to get around fixing. Sorry for the delay in tackling that issue, but various other things came up unexpectedly in recent weeks, so that had to be put on the back-burner.

We also started blocking common bots from large tech companies known for AI scraping. For now it is a rather simple block based on the user-agent they report themselves, so the bad actors can easily get around it. We are still investigating further means to improve this, although for now it isn't that high of a priority.

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!

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.

I've been searching for communities using https://lemmyverse.net, but lately every time I click on a link I get the error shown above (I've edited out my username because it's not really important). For instance the above error was shown when I clicked on the link https://slrpnk.net/c/imsa@lemmy.world

After I refresh the page I can see the content of the community, but I appear to be logged out. Then I hit refresh again and I log in, but sometimes the posts all disappear so the community appears to be empty.

Seems like something weird is going on here. I assume it's a bug. I'm happy to give any extra details you might need to figure out the problem.

EDIT: Turns out I couldn't see posts after logging in because my language wasn't set properly, and the other errors have disappeared with time.

I'd like to gauge interest for a nice solarpunk wiki - an easily searchable repository of knowledge for everything solarpunk. While a lemmy instance is great to share articles, links, meet like-minded folk, give quick tech advice, there is a lot of useful slrpnk knowledge worth collecting in a more systematic manner. Are we enough active people here to get that started yet? It might be early at this point, as @poVoq@slrpnk.net mentioned in a comment elsewhere, but as a wiki fan I'll put that out here. Or are there other wikis out there worth supporting instead?

Since it is safer to self-host these alternative web-clients, I decided to give mlmym a try and it turned out quite easy to add.

Please report back any issues with it here.

Edit: https://github.com/rystaf/mlmym is the source code for this.

Hi SLRPNK,

This post has two purposes. First, I wanted to introduce a new community I just created, !treehuggers@slrpnk.net. This community is for all things tree related, similar to /r/marijuanaenthusiasts which many former redditors may know.

Also, I have a few questions about community creation

1. Since we're a small instance, other instances won't be able to see any posts from before anyone from that instance has searched for this community, correct? If so, maybe I should have waited before creating the introductory post. Is there any solution to this problem?

2. I tried to upload a banner but it doesn't seem to appear. Any thoughts as to why that could be? Are there any limitations to size, file type, or dimensions?

3. I thought I had a third one but I can't remember... I'll edit if it comes to me!

Unclear reason, slrpnk.net is also effected.

Edit: Doesn't seem like an active attack, but rather a database overload issue caused by someone deleting their old and previously very active account, and those deletion requests being federated out to other instances as well. At least that seems the most likely theory right now.

Edit: seems to be mostly resolved, but I hope there will be a bug fix to prevent this from happening again.

/c/twochromosomes explains its name with the following:

The name XX was chosen just because it illustrates the essence of this subreddit and its target Redditors–girly and geeky, and subtly awesome.

Connecting girliness with a genotype and bragging about being cisgender is not my idea of what the solarpunk movement stands for. This is gender essentialism and subtle transphobia. And the beginning of the community and of SLRPNK is the perfect time to be getting rid of transphobic names.

Admins, if you are reading this, please remove this transphobic community.

Everyone else, do you know how I can get in touch with the SLRPNK admins?

There is a solarpunk music community, but what about solarpunk movies? From top of my head I could list a few titles:

• Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
• Castaway on the Moon
• Woman at War

Thoughts about this?

Is there interest in a community for permacomputing projects and discussion? I feel like it fits perfectly with the principles of solarpunk.

PS. if yes, can someone create it? it looks like I don't have the option since my account is in another instance

Music is a huge part of my life, and I would love to know what you fine folks here listen to and what inspires you!

I'd get the ball rolling on a c/ if there's interest.

EDIT: you can find the c/ at !music@slrpnk.net

I believe hydrogen will part of your better future. I was thinking about dedicated community for hydrogen related stuff? What do you all think?

You can read the official release annoucements here.

This is mainly a security release, but it fixes some important flaws in the frontend code. Thus while there are not many changes from a user perspective, it is still a quite significant improvement 👍

Search isn't showing me anything for the obvious terms.

I'd like a climbing-specific sublemmy(?), ideally, but I appreciate that's a bit niche! Just somewhere for chatting about general fitness would be cool. I'd start one myself, but it doesn't seem very solar-punky.

As you might have heard several Lemmy instances have been attacked via a security vulnerability in the browser frontend related to custom emoji.

While SLRPNK was vulnerable to it, we seem to have not been actively targeted and I took the instance down as a precaution as soon as I learned about it.

I have applied all the currently known mitigations, which means that everyone got logged out of their account and needs to log back in manually.

As of writing this the API is working again and can be used with apps like Jerboa safely.

I am still contemplating if I want to re-enable the web frontend now or wait for a release that fixes the issues found.

Edit: the main issue was fixed and I restarted the web ui with it.

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/923025

lemmy.world is a victim of an XSS attack right now and the hacker simply injected a JavaScript redirection into the sidebar.

It appears the Lemmy backend does not escape HTML in the main sidebar. Not sure if this is also true for community sidebars.

I updated to Lemmy version 0.18.1 yesterday which seems to have resolved quite a few issues in the UI and also made the site overall quite a bit more responsive. Very nice team work of all the people involved in bug fixing and performance optimisation of Lemmy 🥰

Edit: it might be necessary to force-reload your browser (Press CTRL+F5) to get the new Javascript files properly.

I also added the Hanubeki themes and enabled the mint version as the default. This is not meant as the final theme here, but just a quick change to have something other than the somewhat boring Lemmy default. But maybe people like it anyway.

I also played around with the new custom emojis a bit and they seem to mostly work.

For exampe:

So I guess we could start collecting some nice ones to be added for everyone to use.

Last but not least I pre-emtively blocked threads.net (the new Facebook service) as discussed here.

I just saw that lemmy.ml has pre-emptively defederated from threads. Are there any plans to do that here? I personally want nothing to do with Meta/Facebook, and I'm sure that's not an unpopular opinion around here.

edit: y'all, please pay attention to where you are when coming from all.

edit again: kbin really ought to make a post's home instance more clear.

Is it possible to use this instance in a dark mode when browsing from desktop?

I've been having issues today with the front page not loading content. Refreshing works sometimes, but not always. I've also had some posts show a loading icon indefinitely. When I leave and come back, they usually load. I'm not sure why, but I figure sharing this will help with troubleshooting.

Is there any bug submission process I should follow aside from posting in !meta?

Please join me to discuss how we can implement 15 minutes cities, experiments that are occurring on this front, and other topics that can help make this a reality.

when I’m logged in, a lot of communities are empty - but i can see loads of posts when logged out. does anyone know what the issue is?

I'm trying to browse !solarpunk@slrpnk.net from @lemmynsfw and it's not seeing most of the posted content. It sees no active users and only two posts (plus one I posted just now to see if I was possible to post).

On !meta@slrpnk.net I see just one post. I'm struggling to figure out what could cause this. Is this a defect, or possibly a setting based on the instance from which I'm connecting? I would've found it more understandable to be able to view nothing, but why these two particular posts and nothing else? Thanks for your help.

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?