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 🌟
- !hackers@slrpnk.net - A place for discussing cybersecurity, but also for discussing hacker culture. Hacktivism, cyberfeminism, crypto-anarchism (not related to crypto currency), internet vigilantism, and so forth.
- !fullyautomatedrpg@slrpnk.net - they’ve released their fifth Role Playing Game module. Download and share it, released free under a Creative Commons license!
If you’re curious about the political MacGuffin at the center of the campaign, check out these communities:
- !cash@slrpnk.net - Cashless society, forced banking 💳, and the War on Cash
- !money@slrpnk.net - Alternative payments methods, regional currencies, community banking etc.
🌍🌐 No borders, no nations! Discussion Summary 🚧🛑
Last month we asked you for your thoughts on country and region-specific community creation on SLRPNK.net. We were impressed by several of your insightful ideas. It seems there is a strong sentiment that SLRPNK should continue to host regional / country based communities.
We’ve put together a draft policy on regional / country based communities. Currently we have four communities that fall into this category:
- !ireland@slrpnk.net - Solarpunk Ireland
- !sea@slrpnk.net - Southeast Asia
- !vietnam@slrpnk.net - Vietnamese culture community
- !EUpolitics@slrpnk.net - Discussions on European Union politics
The community !Ireland by @Greenbeard is currently the gold standard in how we feel region communities should operate. Using the region name as the API community name keeps the URL shorter, while using “Solarpunk Ireland” specifies that the community has a narrow discussion and news focus. Regional communities should follow this template.
The Southeast Asia community by @Mambabasa is an excellent example of posting news for discussion that is relevant to this instance. We’d love to see that continue and grow.
The !Vietnam community by @kid2908 is our oldest regional community. We’d love to see it grow, as not only does the region have many Solarpunk aesthetics, there is potential for a vibrant solarpunk counter-culture among the people. Posts about environmental activism, community celebrations, public transit developments, and grassroots anti-corruption movements are some of the great topics this community has brought to our attention.
We hope these communities will attract people from their regions to discuss local solarpunk-relevant news and initiatives. In keeping with our server’s internationalist spirit, we also encourage people outside those regions to visit these communities to learn more about their world. People submitting stories are encouraged to crosspost from these regional Solarpunk communities to the general !solarpunk community as well.
If any of these communities achieve a critical mass, we’d be happy to support them with technical assistance when they’re ready to transition to their own instance. We’d like to see the Fediverse grow horizontally, and increasing the number of servers hosted by like-minded people is one of our aspirations.
The !EUpolitics community by @whvholst is the only current regional community whose subject seems outside our server context with no easy modification to resolve the contradiction. While individual moderators are free to allow political discussion within the broader frame of their community topic, we’ve tried to avoid building communities with a focus specifically on politics. We encourage politics that are grassroots, horizontal, and bottom-up. We made an exception for !pleasantpolitics based on the motivation of the moderator and the novelty of the concept, but don’t want to make that the general case.
We’re happy for people to use our server to learn the capabilities of the software and get an idea of what moderating a community is like. We’re also happy to be a resource to moderators in re-homing their growing communities to other places in the Fediverse where they would be more appropriate.
Regional or country-specific communities are permitted on SLRPNK.net so long as the topic of discussion is solarpunk-centric. Local opportunities to get involved in grassroots initiatives, environmental news, biome-specific gardening, are all examples of celebrated discussion. Stories about national crime, politicians, economic policy, and wars are not an appropriate focus for regional communities on this server.
Thank you everyone for your feedback on the proposed community rule last month. You’re also welcome to discuss this draft policy for regional communities in the comments below.
🏚️ A Call for Yet More Moderators! 🏡
@SolarMonkey@slrpnk.net is currently looking for some additional help moderating our !art@slrpnk.net and !aesthetic@slrpnk.net communities.
Both communities are very laid back, and shouldn’t require much attention as a mod to maintain. You’d mostly just need to respond to the odd user report for spam posts, or remove non-relevant posts.
If you’d like to volunteer as a moderator, leave a comment below letting us know! :)
Meta Post Image: Pale Blue Dot
On February 14, 1990 the Voyager spacecraft took a photograph of the region of space containing the Earth from its vantage point 6 million kilometers away. The famous science communicator Carl Sagan was deeply impressed by the pictures’ significance. In Pale Blue Dot, the book based on this photograph he said in part,
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
In 2020, NASA revisited the spacecraft data to create a new image obtained using modern image processing techniques. This image is cropped and less grainy, with radiation from the Sun shining from the bottom of the image. The “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam” continues to remind us to care for the only world known so far to harbor life.
🔋 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/ (Note: Your contributions work, but due to an annoying bug they are currently not shown in the summary)
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)
Currently f-hub.org is getting a combined 41.35€/month in donations, which is covering a good portion of our recurring expenses, but some recent hardware purchases (~250€) would be still nice to get covered as well. The recent one-time donation of $50 from an anonymous SLRPNK member will help with that, 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!
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i’m wondering if we should host a community for sharing news about “AI” (specifically generative) and the problems it presents the world. !fuck_ai@lemmy.world has developed a reputation for brigading, trolling, and generally not being constructive but instead being disruptive in a way that isn’t actually helpful. i don’t feel awsome either there being so manny moderators at the current community that all of them can’t be displayed in the sidebar leading to issues with transparency and accountablity.
@Five@slrpnk.net and @ProdigalFrog@slrpnk.net , i seem to recall seeing your names in the resolutions feed. what do you think? the big thing i’m looking to do is to not create yet another drama farm on lemmy and in fact instead lower the temperature and the amount of overall grump there is around these parts
I find that “money” and “cash” should be the same community, if any. I just don’t see enough content for each of them separately. I don’t even see enough content overall. This splitting of communities into 100s different ones is, to me, the death by a thousand cuts.
fyi: !money@slprnk.net should be !money@slrpnk.net, the only such “solaprunk” typo this month
Fixed, thanks.
That dot really does make you feel something :’)
As always, thank you all for your hard work keeping this place running.
I understand that it might be difficult to arrange more than cash donations, but would you all be interested in hardware of any kind to help support the instance?
Happy to help in any way that I can!
It is possible to donate hardware, see: https://slrpnk.net/post/25310797
We somewhat recently got a nice GPU that way, which has been used already for https://video.f-hub.org/ and the plan is to also use it to accelerate the LibreTranslate service for the upcoming Piefed instance that allows easy translation of posts.
The main issue with old hardware donations is usually the power demand. Since we run our servers mainly off a solar PV system we need to keep overall power demand in check.
Aha! I thought I remembered seeing that post.
I have a bit of an older server which may not be of interest due to the aforementioned power constraints but: Supermicro SYS6037R-TXRF 64GB RAM Dual E5-2640 (ish?)
~8x 3TB SAS 7200 rpm drives
For power/space constraints, would something like the bee-link me pro or similar be of interest?
Yeah that server would easily blow past our current aspirational power ceiling of 200W.
A beelink NAS of some sort might be nice for the medium term plans to host a distributed Garage storage cluster, but buying larger drives is quite expensive right now, so the 8TB in double parity we have currently available for that will probably have do do the job for some time.
Thank you as well :)
I’m a confused by the “Cash” community. The description here says it’s about a cashless society (which I’m very interested in) but the posts in the muni are all about banking. What gives?
I believe that community is anti cashless society, as they appear to feel being forced to use a digitally tracked exchange method, either through a bank or other digital means, gives up ones privacy by needing to attach a transaction history to a known individual, where as real cash is anonymous.
A society that eliminates cash and thus requires a bank may also make it difficult to create a bank account if one does not have a government issues ID, or is homeless, which essentially would be discrimination against the poor or those who don’t want to have a government issued ID.
Am I getting that right, @activistPnk@slrpnk.net?
Indeed I am personally anti-cashless (a consequence of being pro-autonomy, pro-privacy, pro-inclusive society, and increasingly disturbed with enshitification of banks which are reckless with data protection, finance climate detriments, etc).
Though I wrote in the sidebar that the discussion on that topic does not require everyone to be aligned. There are comments and votes in !cash from apparent pro-cashless folks. In principle someone can post about how they love cashlessness.
I think you mean a gift economy or something like that, while cashless society is more commonly used to refer to everything being done by digital payment systems and credit-cards etc. that more often than not are highly privacy invasive.
Ah, yes, there’s the disconnect. When I think “cash economy” it’s in contrast to “gift economy” and thus “cashless” led me back there.
But I can see why many solarpunks would prefer a fungible, non-identifying currency over one tied to identity.
I know we have movim chat, but has there been thought given to a chat not hosted with slrpnk in case we have an outage again?
As the admins, to my knowledge, do not have alts using their same user names, it was difficult to track them down. There ended up being two threads regarding the outage, mine got little attention, and the answers to the situation were added by me from the other thread.
I am not complaining about the outage, I opened this account after the previous large outage knowing full well the hosting situation, and that it could… and likely would happen again. I am just looking for a better way to communicate with admins, mods, and follow slrpnk users in the event of an outage.
I do not know much about hosting, but I am willing to learn to help out.
I added my (basically unused) alternative account on another Lemmy instance to my profile now.
I personally would rather put effort into making outages less likely than operating another chat on an external system, but feel free to make an unofficial channel of some sort. I can add it to the many chat bridges that f-hub.org runs so that things stay connected somehow.
EDIT: Wasn’t running on the latest version, fixed now!
@idunnololz@lemmy.world. Hi there, just wanted to let you know I noticed on this post that the Summit app doesn’t seem to properly display the title of spoilers (at the bottom of the main post, the Meta Archive and Union Resources spoiler). It only displays the first emoji, with the rest of the spoiler text only showing when the spoiler itself is revealed. I believe this may be due to the text inside the spoiler being formatted in bold.
It displays correctly from the desktop Lemmy-UI and Voyager app, it’s only not displaying correctly on summit (I believe the Jerboa app had/has the same issue as well, which goes away if the text is not bolded or italicized).
I can’t reproduce this bug. This is what I see (note that I expended the sections):
Can you check which version of the app you are using? I fixed a similar bug a few updates ago.
Ah, my bad! I was still on version 1.76.2 due to the Aurora Store not showing an update available. I reinstalled it from Obtainium to get on 1.78.2 and the issues is now gone.
Sorry for the mention, but thanks for making me check that to fix it (Love the app btw, you did a fantastic job with it!)
Nice. Good to hear!
Thanks for that excellent post, I have a questions, what’s the “alternative f-hub link” to donate exclusively to slrpnk ? Also another one is : when you say technically help those community transition to their own instance, it means that they will no longer be part of slrpnk even though they are solarpunk oriented ? Would that make them less accessible ?
what’s the “alternative f-hub link” to donate exclusively to slrpnk ?
This refers to: https://contribute.f-hub.org/ where you can select the different services hosted by f-hub.org to donate to. Practically there isn’t a huge difference right now, but it might allow better prioritization of donated funds in the future and also doesn’t depend on an external service like LiberaPay.
when you say technically help those community transition to their own instance, it means that they will no longer be part of slrpnk even though they are solarpunk oriented ? Would that make them less accessible ?
They would be of course accessible through federation like other Lemmy/Piefed instances and we would make sure their communities are accessible from the SLRPNK instance.
The idea is really to decentralize efforts and not let a single instance (like ours) grow too big.
Ah nice, thanks for the link ! okay, I understand, thanks for the explanations, i’m still trying to understand the complexity of the fediverse, but it seems so logical now ! Also i have contacted @SolarMonkey@slrpnk.net to help mod the art and aesthetic communities, and we were wondering how adding someone as a mod worked.
Also i have contacted @SolarMonkey@slrpnk.net to help mod the art and aesthetic communities, and we were wondering how adding someone as a mod worked.
I sent 'em a DM explaining how it works a few minutes ago, they should be able to get you modded up soon :)
It does bring up the point that actions like that aren’t really explained anywhere, they can only be discovered from experimenting with the UI. It’d probably be a good idea for us to add a guide for it in the wiki to help any future mods (though probably best to wait until we’ve switched to Piefed)
In the meantime, for any other community mod who may be unfamiliar with it, here’s the guide I sent SolarMonkey:
How to add a moderator to a community
To add a moderator to a community, the usual method from the normal desktop Lemmy-UI is to have the user you want to add to comment on an existing post in the community, or make their own post there.
If they make their own post, you must first navigate into the post by clicking on it (so that you could read the comments or leave your own), and then click the 3 little vertical dots menu at the bottom of their post, where it will give you the option to add them as a moderator. If they left a comment on a post instead, those same 3 little dots will be below their comment.
Alternatively, if they have not made a comment or post in the community, you can use our Photon front-end, which has the ability to add someone as a mod even if they haven’t interacted with the community yet.
If you go the Photon route, you would log in, then navigate to your community and click the ‘Edit’ button with a gear icon next to it in the sidebar. That will open the edit menu. At the top of the edit page there is a ‘Team’ button, which will show you the moderator roster. You can then add new users at the bottom of it.
Woot woot and we’ve got a new mod for both!
Thanks for the help, you are a rockstar!
Yes some guides/norms would be useful:) I mod some very low traffic communities and I think I’ve only received one report ever, but I don’t think I was notified about it (via voyager app). If we put together a mod starter guide with things like mod-friendly tools, norms for communities like the ones outlined in the main post, and maybe some communication tips (collaboration tools) for bigger multi-mod communities (these seem intimidating to me), I think that would be useful.
100%!
For communication/collaboration tools between mods, our XMPP and Movim instance (you can use your existing slrpnk credentials to login) for group chat or voice calls, paired with our Etherpad for collaboratively working on announcements/ideas works really well (both are mentioned at the bottom of our Meta posts, in the Community Resources section).
but I don’t think I was notified about it (via voyager app)
Voyager unfortunately doesn’t have any mechanism to alert you to moderator stuff, it requires that you go to the profile section (the middle button in the dock labled slrpnk.net) and select Administrator Zone, which lets you look at the mod queue.
Personally I’ve found the Summit lemmy app to have the best mod tools of any of the mobile apps, and importantly it does give a notification in your inbox for new user reports.
Thank you! Going to check out Summit
Also forgot to mention, but thanks for volunteering! :D
😁🙌 So happy to be able to contribute actively, the whole instance is such a treat, i feel like a child seeing so many people sharing the same values / intests !
