As a matter of community building, lets make this a monthly thing ๐
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 life~~ volunteer found
- Dumpster Diving <- removed
- OpenSourceEcology <- removed
- ~~Rat Zone~~ volunteer found
- ~~Board games~~ volunteer 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 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 ๐ค
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.
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.