As a matter of community building, lets make this a monthly thing 😊

Community gardening

As stated in our Wiki, we allow members to create their own communities as a way to encourage contributions, but this comes with the responsibility of active moderation. The site admins can’t moderate all communities and unless a posts gets reported, they might not even know about spam etc. Thus we will regularly prune seemingly abandoned communities.

The current list set for pruning is:

So unless someone wants to step up and take them over for moderation and active contribution, they will be removed at the end of the month.

In addition there are these two communities that attract quite a bit of moderation workload and the current mods need support with that (otherwise it might be better to prune them as well):

Technical updates

The originally planned move to a smaller dedicated server was only partially completed and ran into some issue with 8GB RAM being slightly too small for our current Lemmy database use. It might be just a a memory leak issue that should be fixed with the next Lemmy release, but given some related consideration I decided to try use another server with 16GB RAM instead. This move has not been started yet, but I will try to keep the down-time to a minimum.

This server also has a built in GPU that would likely allow automatic scanning for illegal images via Lemmy-safty. This image recognition script is fully local, so no data is transmitted to any 3rd party, but it will likely result in some false-positives (Likely NSFW / child themed ones, which seems not like a major problem for our instance). Any hits will be removed from the storage automatically so this will also protect our moderators from having to deal with such potentially traumatic imagery.

I also made some progress with the account integration between Lemmy and an XMPP/Jabber server. The idea is that you will be able to use your existing username@slrpnk.net ID also for federated chat via the Jabber network. This is more secure than the internal Lemmy DMs as Jabber clients support end to end encryption (like Signal more or less). If in the future some Lemmy clients will add privacy preserving UnifiedPush we can also support that via this XMPP server.

I also started trialling a Movim web-client for it, which besides being a nice chat interface for private 1:1 and group chats, can also act as a long-form blogging site (kinda like Medium or Substack) for our members. Lets see if there is an interest in that 🤔

In theory bridges to Matrix, Discord, Telegram etc. could also be added, but it will need some more testing and might not work out. Voice and video calls will also initially not be supported due to some technical issue, but I plan to fix that ASAP.

Draft code of conduct

I am also still looking for feedback on and maybe some contributions to our incomplete draft code of conduct.

Open discussion

If you have any other topics related to our community here on slrpnk.net please comment below.

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPM
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      1 year ago

      The XMPP service will be directly linked to the user-database of Slrpnk.net, but of course since XMPP is federated as well you will be able to interact with an external Jabber account. Movim works in theory with any Jabber account, but I will likely restrict logging in to people with slrpnk.net accounts as otherwise it becomes a moderation hassle for the blog posts.

      • beSyl@slrpnk.net
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        1 year ago

        Why XMPP and not Matrix, which is something more modern, with E2EE and more broadly used.?

        • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPM
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          1 year ago

          XMPP is modern, has better (or ar least more secure) e2ee than Matrix and “more broadly used” is very debatable when it come to Matrix. XMPP tends to be used more for private chat and not public chat groups, which distorts the impression one gets on how popular it is.

          And last but not least, Matrix is really not Solarpunk given how it is run by a venture capital funded for profit entity. XMPP is much more grassroots and developed by a diverse set of mostly hobbyist developers with no profit motive. Sure, that means things are sometimes a bit slower developing and not as polished, but I think that is a valuable insight on how a Solarpunk society might also come with some similar downsides 😜

          • beSyl@slrpnk.net
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            1 year ago

            Hum… I might have been mistaken then. I have tried XMPP many years ago and was left unsatisfied. Regardless, I am not able to move people to XMPP. Even getting them on signal is impossible, XMPP is double impossible…

            Maybe one day! Small steps.