Introduction
Each month we pin a post to give all members an update on the state of the instance, as well as a place to direct public comments and discussions, so let's get to the updatin'!
Community highlights
This month we thought to shake up our usual routine to highlight new communities and instead decided to highlight some nice, but older communities. So have a look at these and maybe add them to your list of subscriptions:
Any other communities you would like to highlight? Comment below!
Transfer to new server
After our last attempt to move our Lemmy instance to a new server had to be reverted at the end of 2023, we tried again this month. The new server has been hosting the Pictrs image backend and the various frontends for a while now, but yesterday we finally also migrated the main database and the backend to it.
The new server (a refurbished Intel Xeon with 64GB RAM) is probably somewhat oversized for a small Lemmy instance like ours, but it looks like the multiple times faster NVMe database storage array finally fixes the performance issues we had before.
Let's hope this time we will not run into hardware issues like with the previous dedicated server.
A brand spankin' new Wiki
SLRPNK now hosts a fully functional wiki for our communities to utilize, based on the DocuWiki project.
Currently, only community Moderators can edit the wiki, and like our XMPP instance, you'll be able to use your SLRPNK login to access it, along with editing privileges for your community automatically given.
We have a quick-start guide written that should help you with the first steps of how to create your community wiki.
A few plugins have been added to the wiki to extend its functionality, such as a WYSIWYG editor in addition to the standard markup editor, along with some other bells and whistles. You can find a complete list of the plugins used here.
If you need any help getting your community page setup, you can either leave a comment in this thread below, or message one of the admins, and we'll do our best to get you up and running. :)
Other technical additions
You might have noticed the new bot account that was added as an instance admin last month. This account is currently connected to two additional services that we added:
An automatic RSS feed poster that can be added to communities. Let us know if that is something you are interested for a community you moderate here.
An instance level auto-moderation bot that scans new posts and comments for spam. The software behind this is still a bit of a work in progress, but it should allow us to react more quickly to future spam-waves from multiple accounts.
If you have other suggestions on how to utilize this bot, let us know.
Server Stats
With another month, comes another round of stats!
Right off the bat, the hardware upgrade is having a noticeable effect on the latency of the server, which is pretty darn sweet.
And 65 new solarpunks joined us last month, bringing the total up from 1,138 members to 1,203. Hopefully they find this to be a good home. :)
The monthly users are holding steady, with a slight increase up from 290 to 299. With that amount of people, there always seems to be something interesting to see or read on the server just from our users alone. Counting people coming in from other instances, it really is booming around here!
The Big News
We're proud to announce that Slrpnk.net is now officially sponsored by Exxon Mobile™ as part of their Global Green Outreach for Innovative Forward Thinkers™ program.
In collaboration with them, we'll be featuring new eco-friendly technologies that were produced with net-zero emissions as a long-term goal, which has only been made possible thanks to Exxon's Big Heart Good Guy Partner™ initiative.
Starting us off this month is this fine Gasoline powered Alarm Clock, which gets an unthinkable 24 hours to the gallon! The efficiency wizards at Exxon have truly outdone themselves. Hopefully we'll see one of these pop up in every home in the coming decades.
Open discussion
That about wraps up this month's news. If you have anything you'd like to ask regarding the site, our new tools, or anything else related to this community, let us know.
If you've created a new community or would like to make your own announcements about something happening on the server, you're also welcome to post them down below!
All comments will get extra visibility up until the beginning of next month.
Have a great April, everyone! ^^
Question for the admins: Have you folks been following the development of Sublinks at all?
I'm very intrigued by this project, as moderation tools don't seem to be much of a priority for the Lemmy devs. But I'd love to hear an admin's perspective.
I am aware of Sublinks, but I am not really sure how that will help with moderation issues. IMHO there are two main issues for now: A: lack of some moderation tools in the frontend and B: lack of good interoperability between the Lemmy backend and the Pictrs image storage.
While a monolithic Sublinks that includes image storage would probably help with B it seems like that could be more easily solved than re-writing the entire backend. For A, Sublinks seems to have at best a long term plan and helping frontend projects like Photon seems to be more promising to me.
But that is just my personal impression and I am probably missing some relevant piece of the puzzle.
Unrelated to that: Java is even worse than Rust from a sysadmin perspective (can't really comment from a developer perspective), so I doubt server admins (me included) will be happy to switch to Sublinks on technical grounds.
To be fair, Lemmy has two main developers working on a volunteer basis on the website frontend, website backend, android client, an activitypub framwork, and the documentation website - all released with FOSS licensing.
Perhaps there are specific moderation tools that you can list here along with github issues if available? Then, we can either upvote/help with the issues, or create them if needed.