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.
🌟 Community Highlights 🌟
- [email protected] - Recording nature and other sounds outdoors.
- [email protected] - Discussion & News for XMPP (Jabber), a secure and decentralized chat protocol
- [email protected] - A place to post Solarpunk related documentaries (we got some good ones in there)
📣 Experiments with Taglines 📣
Lemmy has a ‘tagline’ feature which allows an admin to add some custom text or links at the top of the main page.
Inspired by how the admins of Pawb.social are using theirs, we’ve decided to experiment with implementing something similar; adding useful links to what Solarpunk is, highlighting our XMPP and the alternative frontends we host, as well as a link to our liberapay for those who’d like to support the instance.
I believe highlighting our XMPP in this way may be particularly impactful, as a surprising number of our members have told me they weren’t aware that it exists, or that they can access it without having to create a new separate account (it uses the same database that your slrpnk.net login uses, allowing you to use your existing SLRPNK username and password to access it).
If you feel it takes up too much space, we have the option to spit up the different sections and rotate through them individually when the page reloads. We’d love to your thoughts on it. :)
UPDATE: We noticed the main page was a little too busy from a mobile browser, so we opted to switch it up and rotate between the XMPP and Alternative frontend taglines to save space.
🚧 Piefed Migration Update 🚧
For those unaware, we’ve been looking into a potential future migration to Piefed, which has been discussed in previous Monthly Meta threads.
We’ve mainly been eyeing the prospect of migrating due to a persistent database bug with Lemmy which has been particularly troublesome. However, it’s quite a big task to migrate our instance with all of its comments and communities intact, and poVoq would be pioneering that endeavor, as it hasn’t been done before. It is also likely that all pictures previously uploaded to SLRPNK would not make the jump to Piefed, which is an unfortunate downside.
In the time since we considered migration, Lemmy development has begun to approach a stable 1.0 release, and with it are some changes to how it handles the database which could potentially fix the issues we’ve been experiencing. It also would bring with it some long requested quality of life features.
Due to that new development, we’ve decided to give Lemmy 1.0 a trial run to see if it resolves our issues, and reassess from there if a Piefed migration is still warranted.
📸 Meta Post Image 🎞️
The wonderful art for this month’s community discussion is Community Gardens by Daniele Turturicil (CC BY-ND 4.0). It also lets us also highlight the Story Seed Library from which it was sourced, which is a superb library of Solarpunk artwork and story ideas from which to gather inspiration for your own Solarpunk works.
(We also have a Story Seed Library community here at [email protected])
🔋 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 Liberapay: https://liberapay.com/F-hub.org/
Currently, SLRPNK is receiving 46€/month in donations, which is covering a good portion of our recurring expenses. Thanks!
💬 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!
What is the bug that warranting a piefed migration? Is there a issue created?
Apparently RAM issues in connection with the Postgres database, which cause data losses.
Not data losses, but general instability of other services running on the same server that suffer from out of memory problems.
It is somewhat under control now with some mitigations, but the Lemmy devs could never replicate the issue.
The Piefed migration would be also for additional features and also easier maintainability over the rather complex and NIH setup of Lemmy.