SLRPNK community discussion - January 2024

Happy new year and > 1000 members

First off, happy new year to everyone 😊

We also surpassed 1000 members on slrpnk.net near the end of last month. This is a nice milestone and another reason to celebrate.

While we had some server issues last month and also did not yet upgrade to the latest version of Lemmy (due to federation bugs with it), we can still welcome more users in 2024.

Of course the actually active number of users is quite a bit lower, as many of the Reddit migrants did not stick around. But I think we managed to get a healthy number of regular posters and our communities are also well subscribed to in the larger Fediverse.

I also managed to promote our instance a bit on the 37C3 congress in Hamburg a few days ago. Great Fediverse presence there and good solarpunk vibes as well.

New moderators / communities

We got two new communities in recent weeks that seem to be quite popular:

Technical updates

Besides the upcoming upgrade to Lemmy 0.19.x we thought a bit about other services to host. One idea is a collaborative text editor, for which the new Hedgedocs2 alpha is being tested on docs.slrpnk.net (BEWARE users and documents might be wiped without notice during the test period). We will update you when this service stabilizes sufficiently and also if we find a way to integrate accounts with the main Lemmy user database like we do for the XMPP & Movim service. Stay tuned 👍

Open discussion

As always, this is your thread. You’re welcome to comment about any meta stuff you don’t think is big enough for its own post. New communities, Lemmy or Movim issues, personal news, and questions for the community will be visible to the entire community here through the month of January.

Petros,

Do we have an XMPP room/muc for all people to chat here?

poVoq,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

Yes, we have a general solarpunk@chat.slrpnk.net channel. The easiest is to join it via our Movim instance: movim.slrpnk.net/login/umvM76Ls

There is also an invite only room for SLRPNK moderators where we coordinate a bit.

sacredmelon,

the instance was down?

poVoq,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

I didn’t notice and neither did our (admittably a bit too coarse) status checker: health.f-hub.org/…/hosted_slrpnk-net-lemmy

We still automatically restart the backend once a day because of database memory issues and since 0.19.x it takes a bit longer to get back up it seems.

sacredmelon,

I’ve noticed it but it seemed to me that it was taken down completely, because, this isn’t the only instance I’m part of that I was not being able to reach out for some reason.

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Hey folks, I figured I’d ask here since it’s a reasonably like minded group - I’m looking for a peertube instance with the ability to upload, decent people with vaguely solarpunk/anarchist leanings, and which would be a good place for gaming, game development and technical stuff.

I’ve tried searching through the peertube instances before now, but it’s so hard to get a feel for any given instance. If anyone knows a good place I’d love to hear about it.

Petros,

Come to kinowolnosc.pl, let’s see how we get along.

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Hey, thanks for the link, your reply slipped my mind and I just came back to find it. I like the instance, but some of the videos on my youtube channel would go over the upload limit in a single hit, so I wouldn’t be able to import them :/

Petros,

Drop me a link to your channel, let me see it. I can adjust limits, of course.

Excrubulent,
@Excrubulent@slrpnk.net avatar

Oh okay! Here you go then: www.youtube.com/@excrubulent

The biggest video is this one: youtu.be/hAxVNIlA63A

It’s nearly 40 mins at 1440p. My source file is almost 20GB, but I imagine the yt would be smaller. They do some fairly aggressive compression I think.

I try to keep videos shorter than that in general, but my stuff is generally going to be a bit bigger than most, and I don’t want to ask you to expand the limits beyond what your instance can handle.

poVoq,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

Looks like 0.19.2 should be good for upgrading. I’ll do some prep work in the coming days and then we will probably have a short down time on the weekend during the upgrade.

poVoq, (edited )
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

Looks like the upgrade succeeded, but there are still some issues with the login cookies. Edit: manually deleting the cookies seems to fix the “incorrect login error”.

I also decided to postpone the upgrade of the Pict-rs image backend for now.

poVoq,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

Should be fixed now with the upgrade to 0.19.3

schmorpel,

Happy new year to all solarpunks! Thanks to the upkeepers of this site for creating a pleasant place to be online that inspires action in real life. As for escaping the doom and gloom I cordially invite to !permacomputing for a new outlook onto computing, and encourage to explore (and contribute to!) the other solarpunk communities - !diy needs your selfmade stuff, !food wants to know what you made for dinner, contribute to the !aesthetic - because you too, are solarpunk.

The stuff you share here can inspire other solarpunks to take action, even just a little, every day. We can escape the doom and gloom together.

toothpicks,

I feel like every time I come on here it’s a bunch of doom and gloom climate news articles. I get it, but like is that what we want lol? Am I using the site wrong?

Wow I didn’t realize it’s such a small community here!

poVoq,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

Don’t subscribe to the /c/climate community then 😉

But it is true that we have some very active posters in that community… Be the change you want to see and post more interesting stuff in other communities here 👍

toothpicks,

😊

toothpicks,

Thanks I realized I could just block that community 😂

LilNaib,

I’m active in that community but agree there’s too much negativity there, and too much negativity in general. It seems to be improving over time, though.

ProdigalFrog,

If you haven’t already, I’d recommend using the Lemmyverse explorer to find communities that you’d be interested in subscribing to. Once you have a good list of subs going, you can use the ‘Subscriptions’ tab at the top of your main page, and it’ll only show you stuff you’re interested in :)

hazeebabee,

Happy new years to all my slrpnk homies! Glad to be a part of this wonderful instance. Thanks for all the effort from admins, mods, and active members. Cheers yall!

endthymes,

Hi all, recently joined. Seems like a great community and I’m looking forward participating. I just started exploring the fediverse in general and was really drawn into this instance and idea of solarpunk.

I’m coming from mainly being immersed in ‘collapse’ content, but am now more interested in a constructive discussion of the future. I’m still interested in what future sustainable society will actually be realistic in the absence of fossil fuels, which are not as easily replaceable as in mainstream green narratives suggest. For example, we don’t actually have a plan for a self sustaining (without fossil fuels) way to make the photovoltaic solar panels prominently featured in solarpunk art, as discussed in this article. However, that article also mentions concentrated solar power at the end, which involves simply mirrors redirecting the sun to run a steam turbine, shifting reliance on complex technology and global supply chains to an 18th century technology that could in principle be built by small-scale communities in a de-industrialized rooted/thrilling future. Concentrated solar power plants would also just be objectively cool additions to solarpunk art.

Zoboomafoo,

I try not to get hung up over technology that requires fossil fuels, there’s so many other uses of fossil fuel that are out of convenience that something like solar panels needing some fossil fuels to create isn’t worth worrying about at this point

endthymes,

I appreciate your point and I don’t necessarily think we shouldn’t be producing PV. But what is the plan in 30 years when those panels reach end of life? Are we eventually reaching some sort of steady state where we are using the electricity from solar panels to replace those solar panels? Our mining is highly dependent on diesel without a clear replacement, and making solar grade purity silicon is a highly complex and energy-intensive process. Its not about the carbon emissions today, its that it might be come much more difficult to manufacture PV in a future without cheap energy. I’m not sure that will be the future, but currently many people want to completely bet the farm on wind (another testament to fossil fuel) and solar.

JacobCoffinWrites,
@JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net avatar

On the art of solar concentrators, I did one scene of a solar furnace and got some ideas on how to make a more realistic version from the discussions over on the subreddit - I think solarpunk industry is an underexplored concept overall. I also like the idea of low tech solar power (including solar cookers) because its so approachable and because I tend to imagine solarpunk as a guide for rebuilding. Mirrors and water tanks are pretty straightforward and easily acquired.

endthymes,

Awesome! I appreciated the writing to go with it, particularly about asking where all the things depicted in solarpunk scenes come from. Generally as a culture we are blind to the embodied energy in the structures around us and goods we use, which shows up in art.

I don’t want to come off as negative to anyone creating art and expressing themselves imagining the future they want. I just think it’s also important that others critically examine the space of what is imagined for what is actually possible in the real world. Happy to hear any feedback on how do that in line with the intentions of this server.

JacobCoffinWrites, (edited )
@JacobCoffinWrites@slrpnk.net avatar

If you’re asking about offering criticism of my photobashes, I certainly don’t mind! I make these for the discussions, to cause conversations and examinations of whatever concept I’m building the scene around. Solarpunk spaces tend to be pretty quick to point out deficiencies. I research a bit, and definitely try to get it right, but I’m often combining multiple concepts I’ve only just read about, so I expect to get things wrong.

endthymes,

Oh no, no criticism here. Keep it up!

schmorpel,

I’ve also come here from collapse content, back on reddit. I would say it’s quite balanced here - collapse-aware but always pointing towards possible solutions. Thing is, collapse is already happening as we speak, might as well get on with making things better. Edit: Oh and welcome! Glad to see more people join!

Krydex,

As a mere simple lurker, thank you for everything you do :)

andrewrgross,

This all sounds great. Thanks for hosting this server, I’m really liking it.

ZeroCool, (edited )

While we had some server issues last month and also did not yet upgrade to the latest version of Lemmy (due to federation bugs with it) we can still welcome more users in 2024.

This is exactly why I’m here now. My normal instance, like many, has been rendered useless due to the outbound federation bug and the lemmy devs are AWOL. I was already active in some communities on this instance so I was pretty happy to see y’all hadn’t upgraded to 0.19/0.19.1 yet. Thanks for providing a new home base for me!

poVoq,
@poVoq@slrpnk.net avatar

This is one of the older Lemmy instances, so we know from painful experience how buggy major release versions of Lemmy tend to be 😅

But it will be fixed eventually 👍

Nemo,

Thanks as always for making slrpnk the best instance on lemmy!

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