Each month, we create a post to keep you abreast of news and happenings regarding the server, discuss recent events, and to act as town square for the community.
Hope everyone had a good New Years :)
🌟 Community Highlights 🌟
- [email protected] - a community for news, discussion and media regarding the international mutual aid network of collectives called food not bombs.
- [email protected] - inspired by the far North and South regions of the globe and the unique challenges, adaptations, and resilience of practicing Solarpunk ideals in harsh environmental, social, or political climates.
- [email protected] - The new home of The Boondocks comic strip on the fediverse.
✍️ Writing Community Resources 📚
The moderators of our [email protected] community have started collecting some resources on possible Solarpunk story and world-building elements on our wiki. They are still looking for additional ideas, so please share good resources on the community.
⛸️ Meta Post Image: Children Ice Skating on Frozen Canals ❄️
The City of Amsterdam has over 100km (62 miles) of waterways intersecting the city, built initially as defensive moats that grew in concentric rings as the city increased in size. Today, they are part of an integral transportation network, and many inhabitants get around by boat.
When the weather forecast is cold enough, boat traffic is stopped in select canals to allow the water to freeze. It doesn’t happen every year, and the last time it occurred was in 2021, when this picture was taken. The primary activity is communal ice skating, but it’s possible to travel across the entire city on ice skates once enough of the waterways are frozen.
The choice of post image was inspired by the wiki additions of JacobCoffinWrites, specifically the section on seasonal roads. You can find more examples and ideas for imagining Solarpunk cities – and you can add your own as well!
📡 Technical Updates 📡
In December we moved the Lemmy instance to a different server because we identified some odd hardware issues on the previous server (much slower than expected read speeds on the NVMe SSD raid). While doing so we also took the opportunity to upgrade the database and re-examine the database tuning at bit. While both together seems to have improved overall speed of the site, we are still seeing the regular out-of-memory issue of the database container that causes stalling of the site and temporarily breaks the XMPP account integration. Unfortunately, this issue seems to have become more acute, since the new server has a bit less free memory. We are still looking into possible workarounds but at least it has become a bit more clear now what the possible cause of this issue might be.
🔋 How to Support SLRPNK.net 🌱
If you’d like to donate to SLRPNK to help cover Internet, electricity, and domain name costs, you can now send a one-time or reoccurring donation via our F-hub donation site: https://contribute.f-hub.org/
We also offer Librapay as an option for those who already have an account there, which supports reoccurring donations: https://liberapay.com/F-hub.org/
(Note: the Librapay option supports the broader F-hub project, of which SLRPNK is a part of. If you’d like all of your donation to go toward SLRPNK, use the alternative F-hub donation link, and select ‘slrpnk.net’ in the ‘reason’ drop-down instead)
💬 Open Discussion 💬
Now it’s your turn to share whatever you’d like down below; your thoughts, ideas, concerns, hopes, or anything related to the server. If you have a new community you’d like to shine a spotlight, shine away! If you’re a new user wanting to say hi, feel free to post an introduction :)
SLRPNK Community Resources:
- Community Wiki - Moderators, you can create your own Wiki here for your communities!
- Movim Chat - Open to all members (use your SLRPNK login credentials)
- Etherpad - Collaborative document editor
🗃️ Meta Archive 📰
Our Monthly Meta posts are sometimes home to more in-depth sections written by our admins. Many of our newer members may not be familiar with some of the past guides, so for those interested, we’ve compiled a list below.
- December 2024 - How to Prepare for a Fascist Regime
- February 2025 - How to avoid Big Tech and maximize your digital security & privacy
- June 2025 - A brief guide on Security Culture & Adopting FOSS as prefiguration
- July 2025 - How to build community with fun projects!
⬛ Union Resources 🟥
These are unions from around the world who can train you to become an effective organizer to form a grassroots union with your co-workers!
Hey guys. I just wanna say, I am really fucking thankful for this instance.
Thank you for providing it to us. You are awesome.
It perfectly matches my beliefs.
You are welcome 😊
How about starting a community or becoming a moderator in an existing one?
I have thought about starting a community for overall chat, something like “collapseSupport”. However, I am unsure on what type of content that should entail. To me, it would be content adjacent to other subs, like mental health or composting. So perhaps a more apt sub name should be “talk” or “general”, but that is too general. Regardless of the name, I don’t think I have enough content in me to keep a sub alive.
I am a mod of 2 subs in another account, but they are dead and seem to remain dead, regardless of how hard I try (and want) to keep them alive.
I think we might have too many subs, honestly, and that fragments the community. It is something I have been thinking about. Even in this instance, we are way too fragmented.
I sometimes wonder if it would not have been better for lemmy to be 1 topic per instance, without the ability to create new communities. Or maybe have 2 communities max, 1 main community (for example solarpunk) and 1 meta, for burocracy. So, every instance would have to be for a specific topic. A math instance would be for math only, a solarpunk instance would be for all things related to solarpunk, etc. Then, a tag based system to filter out things…
Do we really need a sub for composting, a sub for DIY, a sub for solarpanels, a sub for green energy, a sub for electric vehicles, etc… Maybe a purge is incoming? Just merge all of those into more general categories? xD
Heyo beSyl, glad to hear how much you’re enjoying Slrpnk! :)
Out of curiosity, would you be interested in moderating [email protected]? It’s a fairly active sub that seems to be self-sufficient, but shouldn’t require too much attention or input. If you don’t have much interest in that topic or would rather not, totally understand, just thought I’d offer.
Sorry for the late reply! I was not ignoring you, I was thinking about that.
I have to say no, sorry. It is not that I don’t value public transport. Of course I do. It is one of the tenets of solarpunk, in my view. However, my goal for this year is to spend less time on social networks and on the internet in general. I even installed an app that blocks all such apps… I feel like being a mod would just add to my overall stress…
Though in the future, once I “fix” some things, I might be able to help out some!
No worries, thanks for letting me know :)
I don’t think it is a good idea to close existing communities with some regular contributions, but we probably need to do another round of community pruning for dead communities, yes. Has been a while since we last did that.
I just think that creating more general categories would be better.
For example, “transportation” for all things related to transportation, be it bikes, cars, buses, ecars, etc. “Energy” for solar panels, wind energy, etc etc. “mothernature” for gardening, composting, fungi, etc? Climate for climate, as that is pretty big already. “Tech” for all tech. The names might not be the best, but you get the idea.
But ya, I understand that this would have been better at the start of the instance.