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 🌟
- !FoodNotBombs@slrpnk.net - a community for news, discussion and media regarding the international mutual aid network of collectives called food not bombs.
- !PolarPunk@slrpnk.net - 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.
- !theboondocks@slrpnk.net - The new home of The Boondocks comic strip on the fediverse.
✍️ Writing Community Resources 📚
The moderators of our !writing@slrpnk.net 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!
I know slrpnk is considering PieFed. I am not sure if you have seen this, but it is an interesting comment on some PieFed “features”: https://slrpnk.net/post/33421250/20416621. I am referring to the comment by RedWizard.
I also wanted to ask the same, so thanks for bringing it up.
This is in part a smear campaign by Hexbear users that tells half-truths about entirely optional features. But yes, Piefed has an opinionated dev that likes to implement quickshot ideas and sometimes they end up being a bit half-baked.
However, one of the big reasons we want to migrate to Piefed is that the code is more more “human scale”, with few moving parts, well commented relatively simple code, and easy ways for us to remove and modify behavior at runtime. Lemmy is the total opposite of that and I am already struggling with the overly verbose and cryptic logs it makes for errors (which might be nice for Rust developers, but not for sysadmins).
Somehow they are pretty good as this. I remember them trying to paint lemmy.blahaj.zone as a transphobic instance.
extremely detailed, sourced comment detailing various problems with piefed
You: this is a smear campaign by those dastardly communists
Friend did you get lost during the Red Scare? This is a terrible look
That intentionally leave out most of the picture. This is how propaganda works; not by lying but by spreading selective truths.
The Piefed dev has by the way also responded to these allegations: https://slrpnk.net/post/33525301/20457257
That said, I do think some of these optional features are somewhat misguided. However, in the past the main Piefed dev has had an open ear to such concerns and did end up removing several half-baked features again when people explained why those seemed like bad ideas.
“But, your honor, what about all the days I didn’t commit crimes? Aren’t you leaving out most of the picture?”
The comment by RedWizard originated from this Hexbear thread, which is full of users pretty blatantly smearing piefed.
Since all of the piefed features referenced by RedWizard can be disabled in the admin menu (AFAIK), they’re painting Rimu’s preferences for his piefed.social instance as though it’s an authoritarian decree that will be forced upon all (which is a bit ironic, coming from that group).
Making things opted-in by default is a sneaky way to get what you want while retaining plausible deniability of wrongdoing.
Edit: Removed the analogy to make my comment more succinct.
Most of the options that people are getting riled up about are off by default.
Trying to make the case that a closed-source proprietary corporate product (EDIT: They were referring to Gmail, for those curious) where we can’t confirm if the switches do anything is somehow similar to a FLOSS program that can be audited or even modified, doesn’t particularly hold up, mate.
This is akin to claiming Google doesn’t read your emails if you’re on ProtonMail.