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 🌟
- !fieldrecording@slrpnk.net - Recording nature and other sounds outdoors.
- !xmpp@slrpnk.net - Discussion & News for XMPP (Jabber), a secure and decentralized chat protocol
- !documentaries@slrpnk.net - 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 !storySeedLibrary@slrpnk.net)
🔋 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!
As usual, I appreciate everything you guys do!
Thank you for linking to Daniele and the Library! :)
This month I’ve been further coordinating https://storyseedlibrary.org/pages/andrewisms-art-collab-2026/ !
We got one finished piece I am VERY impressed with, at least 2-3 more are in the works.
Here’s how I did last month on my solar punk journey as a minimalist in South Florida.
My solar subscription generated 2,283 kWh against 2,209 kWh used including charging for my electric car (likely a wash with data center usage for the family). I also had my last round interview at an amazing local ESG company which will allow me to escape my toxic culture fossil fuel job. The few clothes I own are falling apart, but rather than buying new, I’m off to Goodwill to see if I can find some natural fabrics that work. Sadly, my local grocery store closed which will make me more reliant on driving and delivery to get food. At least both are electric.
I hope you are also making steps on your paths and would love to read about them and get ideas.
I had to get new summer clothes from the thrift store recently too. I managed to score two pairs of shorts and a pair of pants, all in a linen-rayon blend, which is my favorite fabric - natural fibers, keeps me cool but has some softness and drape!
I’ve also started a new hobby recently (beading with seed beads and pony beads) and so far I have bought only one pack of beads new. Everything else has been thrifted or found on Depop/Facebook marketplace so I’m pretty happy with that. I’m a creative by nature but I hate how many creative hobbies involve buying a ton of brand new supplies (especially when so many of us are ready to share or offload)
I love linen and I love rayon (lyocell) but I’ve never seen a blend. It sounds heavenly. Congratulations on the find.
My family all bead except for me. They’ve done it for 25 years and love it. Yes, there is some gear, but it’s not terrible as far as hobbies go. That said, there must be at least 10,000 beads in my house now. It bothers me as a minimalist, but it makes everyone else happy so they stay.
I’m up in the thousands already… My partner has set a hard limit until I use some of them up XD My other hobby is quilting so it could be worse. Fabric doesn’t store quite as neatly.
all the links work this month, huzzah! only gripe is you keep referring to liberapay as librapay which is a totally different thing.
It wouldn’t be a monthly meta by me without some typos (really thought I had it this month after triple checking that the community highlights were right) 😅
Thanks for catching that! They should all be right now :p
At this point I think you have to manually add a typo if you discover there’s an update without one. It’s part of our instance’s cultural identity
You have no idea the smile that idea put on my face.
Soon enough we’ll have the rest of the fediverse upgrading us to the dyslexic techno-hippies 😎
As someone who was raised by hippies, can we be techno-punks instead of techno-hippies.
Back during our last outage, someone from a different instanced lamented us being down using that term and I’ve been kinda perpetuating it as a running joke. But I agree, we’re punks first and foremost!
the specific subgenre of punk i am is “dumpster fighter”
I love the art! Thanks for sharing
Very cool, got a subscribe from me :)
I already have some other things in the pipeline to share in the near future that just aren’t readily available yet
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.
