SLRPNK community discussion - September 2023
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:
Buy it for lifevolunteer found- Dumpster Diving <- removed
- OpenSourceEcology <- removed
Rat Zonevolunteer foundBoard gamesvolunteer found- Solar Powered Vehicles <- removed
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 [email protected] 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.
This all looks super awesome! I appriciate all the work you are doing & look forward to being able to use my srlpnk login for a variety of fediverse services :)
Also its really cool db0 created a automated photoscanning tool. No one should be forced to personally review content for things like csam 🤢
Also here are some code of conduct points that could maybe be useful:
Solarpunk is about looking towards brighter futures. Please try to find optimism in what can be very grim realities. This means moving away from doomer talk about how all hope is lost. We all know there are problems so lets work together to create solutions.
Stay civil when talking to others. We all have different views, and many of us are passionate about them. This does not give you the right to insult, brigade, or bully another person. If something is truely harmful, disgusting or hateful, please report it to moderators so it can be removed.
Activism puts the punk in solarpunk. As all punks know though, some plans must be made in secret. Lemmy is an inherently open and accessible space. ANYONE can read when is written here: the FEDs, lawyers, even the company youre planning on sabatoging. Do not use this space to plan activist work. Use secure channels instead, such as an end to end encrypted messaging service.
Encourage others to take positive steps, even if they are small ones. Lets lift each other up and make this a welcoming space for people to explore how we can make tomorrow a better place.
There's a fine line between avoiding 'doomer talk' and actively lying about the state of reality.
I'm all for hope (I desperately want to have it) but I'm really struggling with all the posts here that massively minimise the danger we're in and promote wishful thinking.
I don't know how this can be changed or improved upon but vehemently pretending that protesting, signing petitions, and setting up community gardens is enough, is just making me uncomfortable.
How do we lift each other up and make tomorrow a better place when all the science points to climate collapse and fresh water and arable land being depleted in the next 5 to 30 years?
I think its about where the focus is. There was a really good discussion on it last week. I agree it is a fine line to walk. We dont want to be blindly positive, nor do we want to be hopelessly negative. I think part of it is being okay with imperfect or partial solutions. Perfection is the enemy of the good, and people who only hear about how awful everything is tend to tune things out or quit trying.
I think what most people want is to be realistically aware of where the world is without being so overwhelmed they stop trying. I agree petitions and community gardens wont fix the world, but I do thing they are still a positive step in the right direction. We want to recognize and encourage actions like that. Its not all that needs to be done, but it is still nice that it is happening.
Avoiding doomer talk doesnt mean only agreeing, nor does it mean avoiding hard topics. I think it is about maintaining some hope that we can make things even a little bit better, and celebrating those moments even when they are small.
Example of being a doomer: Going onto a post of someone sharing a community garden they started just to rant about how gardens dont make a sizable impact on global emmissions & how it is privilaged and wasteful since the garden isnt even planted according to permaculture principles.
Example of being an encourager: going onto a post of someone sharing a community garden they just started and complimenting their work, recommending some native plants they could consider for next year, and linking to additional steps people could take (like starting a compost, giving out free seeds and seedlings to other people in the neighborhood, replacing grass with other vegitation, etc)
Doomer: electric cars are terrible, we still need to mine the minerals, and the whole car centric focus is problematic >:/
Encourager: congrats on the hybrid that will cut done on emmissions for sure! i notice youre in Vancouver. They actually have a petition to set aside money to convert some roadways into solar powered trains. If youre interested come the the city cousil meeting this sat it would be great if you could come show your support!
One final thought: the c/collapse community was originally created as a space for people who are feeling a but doomed to talk about those feelings, vent, and work together to move towards a healthier mindset. So avoiding doomer talk isnt about burying those feelings, i think its more about being mindful of where and how we vent those feelings of doom & the impact those feelings can have on others.
By depleted, do you mean completely gone, or beginning to decline? If it's the former, could you link the study which points to that happening in 5 to 30 years? I ask only because the more dire estimates I've seen seem to suggest things will certainly be A LOT worse, but not uninhabitable globally.
global fresh water reserves will be 40% over capacity by 2030, and 90% of global top soil and arable land is 'at risk' of depletion by 2050.
Alright so I did a minor deep dive on this, and this is my tl;dr conclusion so far:
Both of those links make claims by individuals (granted they're part of the UN, but still) without citing any studies to back them up, and the studies I did find on those subjects make me question the legitimacy of their claims.
Longer version:
So it seems we can detect if we're drawing too much water to the point of it not being able to fill back up, but we do not know how much is there.
If it is true that we cannot accurately measure the total amount of freshwater, how can he claim to know that exact percentage of over capacity, and with no studies referenced? It seems pretty odd.
While there is no doubt that we ARE using too much fresh water, and we ARE losing topsoil, I do not believe certain doom is imminent. But if you can find the sources they were basing their claims on, I will stand corrected.
The answer to your first point is going to be maths and the water cycle.
You proved the second point. We should do day trips to industrial agricultural properties to teach them.about the wonders of no till farming practices. I'm sure they'll love it, even if it isn't as profitable!
I'll find you some 'better sources' tonight when I get home as it's 7am here right now and I'm writing this while brushing my teeth.
I read more of the study I linked to, which actually seems to support the first claim you linked to, at least partially. Essentially, almost all groundwater capacity estimates are based on deeply flawed assumptions that were criticized in the 90's. These old estimates over estimate by orders of magnitude the amount of water available.
The study says that it is possible to acquire accurate measurements of total storage capacity with direct measurement using a particular system, but so far that has not generally been done, so we still don't have truly accurate measurements, but the old ones are definitely overestimating what highly agricultural/industrial areas have (it mentions that in places that did not have an agrarian revolution, like Africa, the amount of groundwater is quite stable, and is not in danger of being depleted.
So...Yeah that actually paints a pretty dire situation, and my shallow deep dive conclusion of that was wrong. But as there really doesn't seem to be enough data, it doesn't seem possible to give an exact estimate of 40% overcapacity.
While No-till definitely seems to not be as profitable until 10 years of application, in the minimal tilling article one of the options is Strip tilling, which gives comparable yields to traditional tilling while keeping most of the benefits of No-till:
It does have some disadvantages compared to traditional tilling, but none that are showstoppers. Would farmers willingly adopt this new technique on mass of their own volition for the sake of the soil itself? Probably not. As the topsoil article I linked to mentioned, the only reason agricultural media sources started reporting on NASA's study at all is because it estimated how much money the topsoil erosion would cost the farmers per year. Maybe if they feel their livelihood is truly at risk, they may be more willing to adopt these new methods.
Alternatively, these new methods could be legally mandated, or subsidized (Pay the farmers to use the new methods), just like the government did to combat the dust bowl.
Though the part below that in the article isn't super promising...
I guess the only difference now is that they won't have any other options but to try other methods once the ground water is used up and their yields are reduced from lack of viable topsoil.
I realized just now that when referencing the second link, I said "Again, no sources or studies cited, just a claim." which makes it sound like I was directing that at you. Sorry about that, I didn't mean to direct at you, I was referring to the UN FAO making that claim without sources or studies, and edited my comment to make that more clear.
The entire argument rests on the assumption that we need to continue with the same or even higher levels of conventional agriculture. There is some truth to it in the sense that it is currently the cheapest form of food production, but just by reducing food waste and animal mass production, a large part of that overconsumption of freshwater and top soil already disappears (if not entirely... one would need to do the math on that).
In addition to that, vastly more efficient food production methods exist that require no or very little top-soil and need only a fraction of the fresh water compared to field irrigation. This isn't miracle technology, it just needs people building the infrastructure for it, which currently isn't done as mining fossil water and depleting top soils is cheaper.
I like the CoC points, brief and to the point.
Thank you :)
Just wanted to say thank you very much for your work on this instance, both the community and technical side. I'm really glad you're keeping the system current and figuring out new features. I don't have any objections to the community gardening thoughts, and will review the draft code of conduct soon.
Movim sounds cool and I'm interested to try it out, I have a free WordPress site but wouldn't mind moving to a federated alternative of some sort and I really like it here so that could be great.
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.
Why XMPP and not Matrix, which is something more modern, with E2EE and more broadly used.?
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 😜
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.
I might experiment with running some Slidge based bridges to more popular networks once everything is running well.
Great idea, kudos. Is this generally implemented in Lemmy instances, or your own genius ?
I am adapting a similar integration for Mastodon, see the link I shared in another response here.
boffo !
Sorry for the 30 minutes down-time or so. As explained above I moved the database to a different server and I underestimated how big it had gotten again (30GB 🤯 why? 🤔). It should be all back working again now, lets hope we didn't miss any important federated messages 😬
With this move all the vital parts are now on one dedicated server (8 threads, 16GB RAM), meaning it will be easier to get additional system-admins on board for server maintenance (before on the shared server that was not something I was willing to do, given the security implications). More details on that to follow soon 😎
In unrelated news: I started experimenting with a community wiki here: https://wiki.slrpnk.net Not much to see yet, but the plan is that community moderators will be able to log in with their existing Lemmy account and edit their own dedicated sub-section for each community they moderate. This subsection can then be linked in the community sidebar.
Thanks for your work in creating this comfy online space.
30GB is mad - text, images, video, what makes the major chunk of this?
Thanks for adding a wiki! If you want any help with that I'd be happy to spend a couple of hours a week (better not promise more because life).
No the images/videos are another 70gb right now. I am mainly surprised by the large database, because there was a recently fix in Lemmy that reduced the size to 3-4GB, so I am not exactly sure why it grew this big again.
I will probably transfer a few general solarpunk related things on the landing page of the wiki (once it is actually working) and any help with that is appreciated, but the main idea of this wiki is to give community mods their own wiki-space to document things relevant to their communities.
Should we ban some bots?
I find external cross post bots from Reddit annoying (if not explicitly set up by the community moderators themselves) and the link fixer bot is also a bit too spammy for my taste (edit: linkfixerbot is banned now).
What about the tl;dr bot?
Any other bots any of you would like to have removed from this instance?
I like the tl;dr bot. Its only once per post and can easily be blocked by people who dont like it
I agree, tl;dr bot is alright in my book.
the rest of them can fucking go though, IMO
How about: https://slrpnk.net/u/[email protected]
I think as much as alternative front-ends are a good idea for privacy, the actual links tend to break more often then not and this bot also only links to one specific alternative, meaning all the links it posts are probably going to be broken in a few weeks.
Edit: I banned the piped bot as it was spamming communities. No big loss I think.
I personally find the link fixer bot quite helpful for what it’s worth.
About the link-fixer bot, I've tried editing my links like it says and they didn't work after. When I moused over the link it provided the actual url looked like the slrpnk.net one I'd been using. Is there a good format I should use that will actually work? What's best for federation?
In my experience they work if the community they reference is already known to the instance. Since this is often not the case, it isn't the default behaviour of Lemmy to make links like that, even though they are more convenient across instances that do know the community already.
Just wondering: Is it technically possible to close communities till there is moderation? Like no posts, votes and comments allowed but current state is preserved.
Besides that I really enjoy when I browse the local timeline on slrpnk.net and thats because the communities here are awesome and interesting.
I think that's a better response to inactive communities. Instead of "pruning" them, make them "dormant" (to keep the garden metaphor going) so old content can still be viewed and if in future someone wants to take over and grow the community they can.
But if the communities can't be locked down to keep spam and illegal material out of comments I agree it's sadly better to prune.
The cost of being a small community in a big nasty Internet. Makes you yearn for the days of walled garden BBSes.
I can remove them, which doesn't really delete them and they can be restored. But that also means that they are hidden from non-admin users.
Just completely locking communities would probably need a change in the main Lemmy codebase.
Edit: one could make it moderator post only and then manually lock all the old posts.
Edit: oopseee responded to the wrong post sorry lol
There is an option to only allow moderators to post in a community, but I think that still allows votes and comments from others.
Hi I'm a Game Designer (tabletop and videogames) and if the ownership of the board games community is up for grabs, I'm cool with keeping watch over it. One of my favorite games is Wingspan which isn't solarpunk but definitely is ecological and educational.
I'm thinking a good way to invigorate the community is to encourage discussions on board game design as well that way people in the solar punk community can support making environment and ecology themed game projects together. I can leverage my experience in this way.
But the main question is if most people end up using the community for general boardgames discussion is that considered alright? Most board games aren't solarpunk oriented and many of them might even have anti-ecological themes (ex. most natural resource management games, think Settlers of Catan).
Cool, please make an introduction post in that community and I will promote you as a mod there.
The topic of solarpunk is broadly defined, its not a big deal if other board games are discussed in that community.
okay I've made my introduction post, thanks for everything, here's hoping the best for the community there
Got to play a pre-release version of Daybreak a while back, so it's definitely possible to do that kind of thing.
Yeah I definitely support the idea of integration with Jabber
I would be willing to work on the code of conduct, but I need a TOC to work off of for additional topics, since I am pretty OOTL on typical items in a CoC.
I think there needs to be a statement about graphic/illegal images (unless that's covered by Lemmy in general). I also think you need a statement about bots and what type are allowed and what ones are not.
I don't really want to make our CoC into the typical long legalese of over-specific rules. It's more supposed to be a set of paragraphs that give people a good idea what kind of behaviour is expected of them in this community.
If you have some good ideas for such paragraphs, maybe based on some good or bad behaviour you have seen happening on the network, just share them here for discussion.
I have to agree with this. Bad behavior gets tailored to rules when you're engaged in a legalistic rules interpretation, which tends to be really problematic.
I volunteer to moderate Buy It for Life. I'm not sure how often I'll be able to contribute to it with content, but I can certainly moderate it.
Thanks. Please make an introduction post in that community so that I can make you mod there.
Introduction made! :)
I feel like this is a dumb question, but I haven't found a straightforward way to donate here to help keep the lights on. Are you accepting donations? I'm not exactly Daddy Warbucks here, but I can contribute a little and value what you do.
We have a page on that topic on our Wiki, but tl;dr please donate to the Lemmy developers instead.
Maybe I should mention this here as well: https://slrpnk.net/post/2207489
tl;dr: please try out https://photon.slrpnk.net
Edit: seems stable enough, but not yet ready for a full replacement of the Lemmy-ui. So for now I linked it in the sidebar only.
would be a real shame to see Open Source Ecology go, it's a great project - would be happy to help by removing spam and keeping an eye on things, i'm not affiliated with them but could post any news updates i see and possibly reach out to Marcin to see if anyone on the team wants to take an active role.
I think the community was never official. If you want to reach out and ask them if they are interested in taking over officially, that would be great.
thanks, i'll check who's doing their social media at the moment and reach out
hi i'm new! i would be interested in a matrix chat about climate stuff if there ever is any, xmpp seems a bit wonky with its encryption in comparison or it was when i last used it
In my experience e2ee in XMPP is less wonky than Matrix, but its higher security level (much more similar to Signal than what Matrix does) comes with some trade-offs that could seem wonky. For example you can't do e2ee in large XMPP group-chats (which does work, albeit very wonky in Matrix), but IMHO in a large group chat where you can't vet all members, e2ee makes little sense (and of course it still is always TLS encrypted).
For what it's worth, this is a long rabbithole on the whole e2ee thing so just in short:
From what I gathered poking around in the past XMPP's OMEMO seems to have had shakier protocol design often leading to silently lost messages if you use multiple devices (I asked around among devs what it actually did and why, would take a while to explain) while Matrix usually has noisily lost messages so you can try to resend. So since that happened to me I've abandoned XMPP personally, I wouldn't know why these differences existed or whether it was fixed since then.
(Regarding group chats, I also think e2ee is still useful there, can limit leaks a little if you use history since joining and ban leakers if possible.)
Please see this post regarding applying as a mod on 2XC: https://slrpnk.net/post/1856052
I just became aware of a bug in Lemmy that (sometimes?) prevents some moderation actions to propagate to other instances. I was getting a lot of reports for posts on /c/twoxchromosomes that I had already moderated and banned the users.
My current guess is that it might be caused by me as a site admin taking moderation action instead of the community moderators doing it, which is quite bad as especially the not actively moderated communities often need site admin intervention.
Not sure what the best way forward for this is, but it is quite serious especially for /c/twoxchromosomes as the misogynists are running rampant on other instances and there seems to be little I can do about it from our side 😭
Edit: seems like my guess was right and the Lemmy devs pushed a fix for this. Hopefully they will make a minor release with it as the upcoming big version 19.0 is still a heavy work in progress.
Ok, we deployed lemmy 0.18.5 here that should in theory fix this bug. Lets see if it helps.
I would say the best thing to do is to report it on Github and drive discussion into the issue.. I find Lemmy moderation tools to be a bit lacking still... Hopefully they are working on them, as it is an absolute must, specially once a new wave of users come aboard.
I'd like to understand the rationale behind the default sort order for posts and comments.
There isn't much to configure about that. The Lemmy docu has some info though: https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/03-votes-and-ranking.html
Yeah, but 'hot' instead of 'top' means that trollish comments get more visibility than might make sense because they induce responses explaining why they're wrong. Not sure its actually the best choice even if it's the default
a movim instance would slay so hard 🙏 i've wanted to use it more but the network seems even more monocultured than fedi. would you restrict it to people part of this instance though? i would love to be able to log in with my existing jabber account
Like I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, opening it up to random Jabber servers would cause additional problems with moderating spam and since Movim doesn't implement Oauth2 (yet) it is also not great from a security perspective if you use an external account on our Movim (it effectively gives me access to your Jabber password). Once we got things running nicely, feel free to migrate your account's bookmarks and contacts over to our XMPP server though.
Does anyone have any "Intro to Lemmy" Wikis? I visited the main page a while ago and am still puzzled as to what a "Federated space" is. Thanks!
You are probably over-thinking it 😊
It just means that people from other compatible websites can participate in discussions here. Like how you can send an email from gmail.com to outlook.com because they are compatible with each other via the Email protocol.
Small reminder: we need volunteer moderators.
I just added /c/composting to the pruning list(main mod hasn't posted anything since a month), but it would be nice if someone would be willing support moderating it.Main mod here! I won't dispute I have been less active over the last couple of weeks (holidays and other reasons), but I think /c/composting is not doing that bad. It's not high-traffic, but there are posts every few days and I'd say it's not anywhere near dead.
When I created the community, I thought about how much I should post and opted to hold back to see how many other compost enthusiasts would come out of the woodwork. Perhaps I have been a bit too conservative, though?
Ah, just busy/lurking. Sorry for the false alarm then, I'll remove it from the list 😊
Just a minor comment on the font here:
The degree symbol is way too wide - about two characters worth.
This means that you see 2°C
When it's a lot easier to read:
This is how it looks here, which is the default AFAIK. I think only your browser is loading a strange font.
After your comment, I tried on multiple browsers and platforms.
Edge, Chrome, and Firefox on Windows all look like this:
Looks good using Chrome and Safari on the mac.
Looks good using Firefox and Chrome on Android.
I'm going to conclude that this is a Windows font choice problem, and likely impacts a significant fraction of people.
You seeing the same thing?
I luckily don't have any Windows left in my life 😅
Can anyone else on Windows confirm that this is a general Windows font issue?
I just checked on my work computer on windows 10 and it did appear oddly spaced.
Can you try changing the theme to something non-hanubeki and see if that fixes it? I can't check right now, but maybe it is related to those custom themes.
I had the odd spacing as well, and testing it just now, switching to non-hanubeki themes does fix it.
Changing my theme from the default to litely fixes the spacing on Windows.
Hmm, looks like I should file an issue on the Hanubeki repo then. It's might be intentional though, as it is made for Japanese writing and they use the ° for other purposes than degrees. Odd though that it only happens on Windows.
It does seem to be theme related since it happens when I'm logged out but not when I'm logged in.
slrpnk.net takes a while to load. I am referring to the initial load. I tested without a VPN connection and it seems to only happen when I am connected to the VPN.. I am using Mullvad.
Any idea why this might be? Can you do something about it?
No idea to be honest. The only thing I could imaging is the location of the VPN. Hypothetically if you are EU based for example, but chose a US based location for your VPN, then a non-VPN connection would be much faster as our servers are located in Portugal.
I am actually connected to a VPN server in Portugal! Are you Portuguese by any chance?
Also, there is something wrong with slrpnk.net, I think? I am seeing some behavior that I used to see on lemmy.world, namely, replying is taking forever (https://lemmy.world/post/90611). I click on "Reply" and it keeps on spinning. I don't remember how he fixed that, but I think it had something to do with the config file. I think he had debugging enabled or something to that point?
EDIT: It seems like this only happens from the Inbox screen.
EDIT2: Found the post to which I am referring: https://lemmy.world/post/288652. TLDR: "Federation debugging" was enabled. Should be disabled.
EU citizen living in Portugal.
It's definitely not the "Federation debugging", but I also noticed some odd stalls from time to time since moving the main database to a different server 3 days ago. I think I'll need to do some more database tuning on this new server as it isn't quite as CPU performant as the previous one. Edit: ok did some database tuning, lets see if that helps.
Edit2: Looks like we are occasionally running into this issue (as many other Lemmy instances it seems). I guess the previous database server was just fast enough to usually respond in < 10s, and on the new one it happens more frequently and thus is more noticeable. It doesn't look like this can be fixed by tweaking the database and rather needs the mentioned Lemmy code improvements that are likely coming in version 0.19 sometimes in the coming weeks.