In order to upgrade and transfer the Pict-rs image storage backend of the SLRPNK Lemmy instance there will be an approximately 1-2 hour partial down-time this weekend.

Most likely the Lemmy instance itself will continue to function, but there will be broken images and no option to upload images during this time.

Lets hope everything goes according to plan.

The new image storage backend will be on a faster server that we are currently testing and we plan to also transfer our Lemmy instance itself there before the end of this month.

This is a very minor thing, but I just wanted to ask if anyone else thinks that dark mode should be the default theme.

Obviously I like dark mode, and it's the one I've chosen, but every so often I see SLRPNK while logged out, and I think the dark mode looks much better.

If I'm in the minority on this, let me know, but I'd like newcomers and people who don't bother setting their preferred themes to have the best user experience, so I thought I'd suggest it.

Does anyone strongly prefer light mode? If so, no judgement, I'm just curious if others feel differently.

Heyo everyone! Hope you're all doing well. 😄

Today I was approached by the Admin team, @Five and @poVoq, if I would be willing to help administrate slrpnk.net, an offer I have graciously accepted.

To give some background; I came to Lemmy 8 months ago during the great reddit migration wave. After a brief dalliance with Lemmy.world and Kbin, I discovered slrpnk. It seemed to embody a lot of my ideals, not to mention a certain vibe in its community, as you no doubt have felt as well.

After posting here for a while, I took on moderating !buyitforlife@slrpnk.net when it came up on the chopping block in a monthly meta post. From there, I helped @Five moderate some of the other communities here, like !documentaries@slrpnk.net and !urbanism@slrpnk.net, all of which has been extremely rewarding, and in the process, made some pretty dang 'ol cool friends.

Now, with my swanky new admin status, I'll be trying my best to help out where I can in the community, so don't hesitate to send me a message if you find yourself in need of help as well! My door (or like... lily pad, if you want to keep it amphibian themed. And let's be honest, we both know you do 😏) is always open.

Thank you all for contributing to how wonderful this community is, and continues to be.

Cheers!

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.

Tomorrow, 14th of February there will be a 1-2 hours down-time of the SLRPNK xmpp and Movim services as we migrate the Ejabberd instance to a different internal server and do some other internal maintenance work.

The Lemmy website should continue working as expected.

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!

This comment was replaced with “removed by mod”, but the modlog remains empty. Is this a bug?

I did not see the comment before it was removed but it looks like votes were doing their job so I checked the modlog to see if there was any reason why votes might not be sufficient.

I wanted to see the image size for this post before deciding to download the image. Normally curl -i returns a “content-length”, but not in this case:

$ curl -i 'https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/67127e8e-52ef-42ad-bf39-424b9052ef90.webp'
HTTP/2 200 
server: nginx
date: Mon, 22 Jan 2024 09:56:56 GMT
content-type: image/webp
last-modified: Sat, 20 Jan 2024 16:24:40 GMT
vary: Origin, Access-Control-Request-Method, Access-Control-Request-Headers
access-control-expose-headers: last-modified, content-type, accept-ranges, date, cache-control, transfer-encoding
cache-control: public, max-age=604800, immutable
accept-ranges: bytes
strict-transport-security: max-age=63072000
referrer-policy: same-origin
x-content-type-options: nosniff
x-frame-options: DENY
x-xss-protection: 1; mode=block

Seems like a bug, no?

UPDATE

I don’t do github so I reported the bug here in the off chance that someone notices.

UPDATE 2

Got “content-length: 0” this time:

$ curl -I 'https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/a1582706-199c-4994-9c4b-3057f85f3b97.webp'
HTTP/2 405 
server: nginx
date: Sun, 11 Feb 2024 09:39:44 GMT
content-length: 0
vary: Origin, Access-Control-Request-Method, Access-Control-Request-Headers
allow: GET
cache-control: public, max-age=60
access-control-expose-headers: allow

Not everyone uses or has an unlimited internet connection. So when someone posts a link to a page that contains autoplay video, it fucks us over by surprise by sucking our internet credit dry. It is impossible to disable autoplay in either of the two browsers (Chrome & Firefox). Google has been trying for over 10 years to make a disable mechanism for autoplay and so far they cannot handle the job.

I got burnt by this thread, which is not slrplnk.net but it’s an example of a discriminatory nuisance that harms poor people (who likely have bandwidth quotas). It’s also eco-harmful to waste network energy.

Animated GIFs are a similar but complicated problem and should be treated the same. Blocking images does not block animated GIFs, and while it’s possible to automatically stop an animated GIF, it only stops the playing not the fetching.

When I suggest banning “uncautioned” autoplay, I mean to say there is no issue as long as the existence of autoplay is made loud and clear by the author, so thread visitors cannot get burnt by a surprise hit-and-run bandwidth theft.

It seems like there is an issue with the upgrade from Lemmy version 0.18.5 to 0.19.2 where the old login cookies are not accepted any longer and right now the only way to fix it is to manually delete the old cookies for slrpnk.net from your browser storage and log in again.

For Firefox: Settings > Privacy & Security > Manage Data... > Deleting Slrpnk.net

For Chrome: Settings > Privacy and Security > Third-party cookies > See all site data and permissions > Search for slrpnk.net > Click trashcan icon

For Edge: Settings > Cookies and site permissions > manage and delete cookies and site data > See all cookies and site data > Search for Slrpnk.net > Click little 'v' dropdown arrow > Click trashcan icon

Edit: the Lemmy devs identified the issue and it will require another bugfix release that will hopefully happed soon.

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.

Listen, I love fancy new tech, but pls do something about this self-promotion account, thx.

I've made an account here because I can't contact you through my normal @WaterWaiver@aussie.zone account. Example test showing broken fed.

@Treevan@aussie.zone believes it might be because the Lemmy version disparity between our instances. Not sure, I don't have direct knowledge or experience with the backends.

Context: https://aussie.zone/post/5207334

I'll make an account through Slrpnk if this doesn't work.

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.

Is there any sort of rough timeline for upgrading to 0.19? Apologies for the impatience, but I am so excited for some of the new features (particularly scaled sort and the moderator feed).

Sorry for the lengthy downtime.

We had an hardware issue with the new server at a very inopportune time 😨

For now I migrated the Lemmy instance back to the old server, but it looks like I will have to revise that new server a bit (again...). At least the old server is going strong so fingers crossed.

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.

Thank you @LinkOpensChest_wav@beehaw.org for the cool name idea!

!grasweeti@slrpnk.net is a community to share pictures of cute graffiti, stickers, wheatpastes and more.

I would love if everyone could add image descriptions for their posts in !grasweeti@slrpnk.net

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!

EDIT: check out !grasweeti@slrpnk.net

In my area there are lots of cute acts of vanadalism and I want to collect those and others from all over the world. I cant really think of any name.

Some samples: