Spooky nights have come and gone,
A new monthly thread, but we shan't drag on.
Come one, come all, do join us down below,
Us Admins read every comment, dontcha know.
Share your news, your fun, your most wondrous thoughts,
The server, by the by, lives now upon the cleanest solar watts!
And thus, let us welcome November.
🌟 Community Highlights 🌟
We have a new community thanks to @CurlyWurlies4All, who created [email protected], a place to document and discuss the downward trend of the tech world as described by Cory Doctorow.
Or maybe you’re interested in how you or your community can better respond to the upcoming changes due to climate change? You might want to check out [email protected], which gathers together some excellent articles and guides on preps, mutual aid, and disaster response.
But what if you have a burning question about solarpunk problems, solutions, or ideas? Something that makes you do the chin grabby thing and ponder about the future? Well why not ponder about visiting [email protected] and drop a big 'ol brain tingler in there! (I’m sorry).
⚕️ Experts & Fighting Misinformation 👩🏿🔬
We recently received a report for a post spreading potentially dangerous misinformation in [email protected], and as the creator and mod of that community is MIA, we had to determine ourselves if the report was legitimate. We eventually determined that the post wasn’t misinformation, but as we admins are not medical experts, it took a fair amount of effort to research.
With how potentially dangerous medical misinformation can be, and with how widespread it is online, this situation highlights the importance of having someone qualified to root out that mis-info on subjects where it has the possibility of doing serious harm. We’ve decided to lock the community to prevent the possibility of that occurring in the future, at least until someone with the ability to weed out that harmful information wishes to take over moderating the community.
🛠️ Technical Updates 📡
Despite last month’s announcements, not much actually happened so far. We are currently considering pushing back the Photon frontend migration until the new Svelte5 based version stabilizes, but are optimistic that it will bring a nice speed improvement.
We are currently struggling a bit with IP/DNS issues, as our contract with the glass-fiber internet provider does not guarantee a fixed IP (the joys of DIY hosting…). After nearly five years of never changing it, they seem to have made some backend changes and now it seems to randomly change some time. For now, we put an automatic monitoring and DNS updating in place as a mitigation, but this is not ideal on some slow updating DNS mirrors. It would be possible to upgrade to a contract with a fixed IP, but it would require some negotiations as their default offer for that has a lower upload bandwidth. On the upside, it might finally allow IPv6 connections. For now, we will probably wait and see how often this happens and how well our mitigation works.
Our Movim XMPP chat and blogging service has also seen some updates with some bug fixes and additions of “Briefs” as a sort of microblogging feature. This is not compatible with Mastodon etc., but you might have some fun with it nevertheless. The upcoming group video/audio calls are still a work in progress and will hopefully arrive by the end of the year or so. In addition, we updated the Ejabberd XMPP server to the latest 24.10 version, which includes some nice bug-fixes and a few new behind the scenes features.
⚡ Solar-Powered Servers ☀️
We have not really analyzed our power consumption via the newly installed solar panels, and it has been a bit rainy the last month, so production has not been optimal. By a guesstimate, we covered about 70-80% of the total electricity needs of our servers, with some days of significant surplus but insufficient battery storage capacity. In a few months we will probably have a clearer picture how well it fares over the winter, but so far it is better than expected.
💬 Open Discussion 🗨️
It wasn’t just a poem, we really do like it when you share with us your news, questions, happenings and thoughts. If it’s about the instance, the fediverse, or anything else you think is on topic (like how you created that new community? You know the one), this is the time to slam it (or gently place it, that’s cool too) down below!
We hope you all had a great October and fun filled Halloween. If we’re lucky, maybe November will start with a touch of Steve McQueen. :)
…I’ll stop now.
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Love the poem :) & 70% solar powered is great :D sounds like maybe down the line a battery upgrade might help make it even more efficient?
As always thanks for all the work you guys do to keep this instance up and running!
We just upgraded to Lemmy version 0.19.6. Seems to have gone smoothly.
Edit: currently investigating why our Photon frontend isn’t working for logged in users.
Edit: all 3rd party frontends seem to have login issues right now due to some CORS issue that wasn’t there before. Not sure what is cauing it yet, but we are trying to fix it.
Edit: ok fixed. Sorry for the mess up.
off topic comment, I’m glad to see this community is still alive!
70% is pretty fantastic though
Is there a slrpnk Mastodon somewhere out there?
I’m aware of https://sunbeam.city/about
I’m not a mastodon user, so there’s likely more than that instance.
We have a link list on our wiki, but it probably needs some updates: https://wiki.slrpnk.net/links
We are having some odd issues with the server right now. Not sure what the cause is. As a side effect we updated to the new lemmy version 0.19.7, but I don’t think that was the cause of the issues as we did that only after the server crashed a few times.
Edit: seems to be resolved for now, but we are not sure what exactly cause it, so it might happen again.
Is there somewhere where we can follow the solar panel stats for this instance or that details the set up? This sounds fascinating to me.
For now, no. I have been meaning to set up something, but it is relatively low on my long todo list.
It’s a relatively normal hybrid inverter setup with a 5.2kW LiFePO4 battery and 1840Wp solar panels. When there is surplus power it can also be used to run a air-to-water heatpump (feed into the grid is not allowed here without a very complicated permit).
Ok, thank you! I’m retiring in a few months, and I think I will jump right into this stuff. So I’ll keep an eye out. :)
If you are experiencing slow loading community avatars on the main frontend (lemmy-ui) here on SLRPNK, try deleting all site data (cookies etc.) for slrpnk.net in the privacy settings of your browser and log back in afterwards. For me at least that made a big difference (the issue is related to a bug-fix in Lemmy 0.19.6).
I’ve been with this instance for about a year and I’ve gotta say I am so thankful for it because I have learned a lot and it is refreshing to be in a space with like minded people. Thank y’all for creating and maintaining this.
Ditto
Glad to have you be a part of it ^^
Did you guys delete the local foraging community? I was looking for it and it seems to be gone.
Are you sure it was on this instance? We have a deleted one, but it never had any posts and the mod abandoned it a long time ago.
Oddly, while it shows no posts in that community, if you switch to comments it does show two, and clicking the link to its thread will bring you to @[email protected]’s post from 2 months ago. I assume the posts not showing up in that to be a bug?
Hmm, maybe. But it was not very active anyways and had a somewhat broken community address.
I am pretty sure it was. It may have been abandoned for a few months but I’m pretty sure I posted there once or twice. It was called foraging and bushcraft I think.
Not a big deal since there is another community already on lemm.ee but I did think it was a pretty good fit for this instance, so I was trying to keep it slightly alive I guess haha.
