Introduction
Every month we retire the pinned community meta post from the last month, and create a fresh one with updated news. We summarize the state of the instance, and create a space for public comments and discussions that don’t merit their own meta post.
International Worker’s Day is May 1st!
In 1886, a May 1st general strike called by the American Federation of Labor saw a significant response in New York, Detroit, and Milwaukee. But in Chicago, due to the International Working People’s Association founded by the anarchist Albert Parsons, the number of people who went on strike was larger than twice all of those other cities combined. On May 3rd, Chicago police fired indiscriminately into a crowd of striking workers, killing several. On May 4th, the anarchists held a peaceful street meeting where several luminaries spoke. But near the end of the meeting in the Chicago Haymarket, police arrived in formation to forcibly disperse the peaceful crowd and order they desist their first amendment-protected activity in the name of the law.
Whoever it was who threw the bomb into the crowd of officers, all sides agree they were not one of the anarchist leaders who were later arrested, put on trial, and executed. The blast killed one, but 7 more officers and 4 working people would die of wounds from police bullets fired in the smoke and confusion. In the legal farce that followed, the capitalists of Chicago demonstrated through their ghoulish reaction how much they feared working people when they band together. The Haymarket heroes became not just a regional cause célèbre, but coverage of their show trial and martyrdom spread the message of the strike internationally, perhaps the most significant and successful general strike in history. It ended the common practice of 12-hour workdays, and lead the 8-hour workday, your average 9 to 5, to become the international standard.
On this day, we celebrate their sacrifice, and remember the power of working people everywhere. Celebrated in almost every country on this day, it is a symbol of cooperation between people unrestricted by national borders. In the spirit of solidarity, the admins at SLRPNK wish everyone a happy International Worker’s Day!
Activity and Data
It continues to be a pleasure supporting you as an admin. When looking at data, it’s easy to draw unqualified conclusions, and worse, use them as benchmarks and goals. The most important thing is the unquantifiable vibe of the instance, and whatever the numbers say, I’m pretty satisfied with that metric.
That being said, I know people are curious about the numbers, and the numbers are indeed curious. It’s now official: the increase in new and active members was not a quirk of the change of reporting code at the beginning of the year. It appears there’s been a reversal, and every month since January has seen the number of active members increase over the previous month. The growth is small but steady, and is even more curious due to the trend of declining or stagnant reported growth over the same period in larger instances with better funding and fame.
In addition to the growth of active members, our total number of posts continues to grow in a fashion suggesting an exponential curve. Fun.
We don’t do any kind of deep analytics where we could pin down more accurately what’s driving growth and why, so it’s irresponsible to make too big a deal out of this data – but it’s definitely not bad. Whatever is happening, there’s a good chance some of it is due to trends outside of our control, similar to Reddit’s API exodus that brought most of us here almost a year ago. My advice is ignore the numbers and keep doing what you’re doing. Whatever it is, it’s making SLRPNK qualitatively a great place to hang out.
Software Status
@poVoq has done a wonderful job keeping Lemmy and Movim software up to date while screening new versions for major bugs. He has added a collaborative editing application Etherpad to the suite of community tools, available at https://pads.slrpnk.net/. Hedgedocs at https://docs.slrpnk.net/ will be retired due to lack of activity from the software maintainers. I’d like to personally thank @poVoq for hosting SLRPNK and keeping the software working and up-to-date.
The wiki on https://wiki.slrpnk.net remains a bit rough around the edges, as we have not yet gotten around to fixing the remaining issues with the login and easy page editing, but a few people started updating their community wikis anyways. Please let us know if you run into specific other issues. It will likely take some to get them fixed, but at least we can document the various issues for now.
Community Highlight
Check out these two communities created last month: !zines@slrpnk.net created by long-time member @toaster - a place to find great short-form self-publishing, and !forced_obsolescence@slrpnk.net by @activistPnk, a great idea that complements our vibrant !buyitforlife@slrpnk.net community by @ProdigalFrog.
I’d also like to draw attention to !fullyautomatedrpg@slrpnk.net, a forum the authors @andrewrgross and @JacobCoffinWrites are using to imagine a fantasy future to build collaborative stories in. They’ve put a lot of work into their world-building and are eagerly seeking public participation in the project. Congratulations to FA on being boosted by famous sci-fi writer Cory Doctorow!
Finally, !selfhosting@slrpnk.net I think deserves more attention. I have a great deal of admiration for @poVoq, and part of that is the alternative vision he has from most of the rest of the Fediverse and Lemmy instances. While some instances compete for position as the largest general purpose forum, others are happy to be small niche subject instances. SLRPNK falls into the latter category, but with a twist - with us, the medium is also the message. We will hit capacity one day, but we want the Fediverse to continue to grow in spite of us. We’re very transparent about our administration decisions in XMPP moderator chat, and that’s partly because of our social compact with you, but also to teach by example. Projects like !selfhosting@slrpnk.net, the Fedi-admin guild, and the wiki are part of the technology side of this goal – to allow anyone who is interested to replicate what we’re doing here, and improve on it.
The Solarpunk project is bigger than us, and we think Lemmy’s ability to scale through federation is key to allowing us to grow without putting too much power and responsibility into the hands of a few people. Cloud services take away your agency and lock you in to their platforms while violating your privacy. Self-hosting is a way around that technology trap, and the skills you learn can also be applied to eventually host part of the Fediverse as well. If you’re curious about what’s possible, subscribing to !selfhosting@slrpnk.net is a great place to start.
Call for Moderators
Moderating a community here is a great way to build skills useful for online community management. We love to see new communities people are passionate about - but that’s not the only way to get involved. Several communities are undermoderated despite continuing to attract activity. We didn’t get around to closing any communities this month, but will likely start that again soon. Joining the moderation team will help keep the communities you love alive. The first step is joining XMPP chat and asking around. The moderators channel is extremely active, and a great way to coordinate and get support from us and other moderators. You’ll also get a peek at what’s likely to show up in the next monthly meta.
We are still planning to build a new a space for women on SLRPNK since we closed !twoxchromosomes two months ago. @punkisundead has started a discussion on Loomio to gather resources, and @schmorp has also joined the Fedi-admin guild to contribute. We are actively seeking more voices, as this is an important project, and the more people who cooperate on it, the greater chance it will have of success.
Open discussion
It’s now your turn to tell us what’s new! Any topic related to this community, our infrastructure, or the Fediverse at large is fair game. If you’ve created a new community, this is a great thread to tell us about it. All comments will get extra visibility up until the beginning of next month. Got questions? Ask’em!
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How is Slrpnk hosted/how much does it cost? Is it going to hit capacity or load anytime soon?
It’s self-hosted on a refurbished older Xeon with 64gb ram. We recently upgraded it, so performance wise we should be good for a while, but I’d rather help other people set up their own Lemmy instances than continue scaling up the hardware to accommodate much more users.
This is the most fediverse thing I’ve heard in a while. I do love the solarpunk ethos, and it would be neat to see other small instances popping up along similar themes. Kind of like “family instances.”
I’m instance admin curious, but must admit that the obligations of moderating, protecting against evildoers, and fear of csam, keep myself – and I’m sure many others – from starting our own.
I think it would be great to have some non-english Solarpunk themed instance, especially a Brazilian one.
In general, I think more localised options, like city or region based instances are the much better idea over large general instances like Lemmy.world.
As for running instances, I think right now the biggest entry barrier is the image storage requirements. The main Lemmy dB is also relatively big, but it can fit on a typical medium sized VPS. S3 compatible image storage is finniky to set up and most providers sadly have hidden cost traps built into them.
Maybe a shared S3 storage option for Lemmy admins based on this project: https://jortage.com/ would be cool to have (preferrably in central Europe, near the cheap VPS hosts). It could also include image scanning via the Lemmy-safety project.
Personally I set up our server so that we wouldn’t need something like this, but I would be willing to help setting this up if some group of instances would be interested in running such a shared storage back end.
How are images handled? Do they take up a lot of space as posts federate?
I’m interested in setting up my own instance, but I’m worried about storage getting out of hand.
We are just storing them on a SSD raid, nothing fancy. But yes, the image storage can get relatively big and most Lemmy instances that run on VPS or similar use additional S3 compatible object storage for that. For our instance the space required is currently at about 100GB, although I think we can do some clean-up on that.
The image storage backend Pict-rs can do some image conversion to reduce file-size and you can also limit the maximum file-size people are allowed to upload (here it is 5mb). This makes the growth somewhat manageable.
There are some upcoming changes in Lemmy that will allow proxying images similar to how other Fediverse software does it, but that will increase image storage requirements even further.
In general it is not that hard to run a Lemmy instance, but once it federates quite well the system requirements are maybe a bit higher than what people expect. Running it on a small ARM SBC is definitely not something that will work for long.
Great info, thanks!
The ballpark of 100GB is helpful – lower than I was expecting too.
Nah personally I feel like I would rather donate to a community server(s) or something, I feel like the bigger the group of us on an instance, the more we can afford to put our heads together and think further ahead
Yeah personally I think I would prefer to have everything in one place too.
I’d rather help other people set up their own Lemmy instances than continue scaling up the hardware to accommodate much more users
With that in mind, I’m pretty close to pulling the trigger on my own instance, but I keep thinking of more questions/concerns like handling CSAM getting federated to your instance, etc.
Is there a good spot around here to discuss this stuff, where maybe my questions have already been answered?
Relevant
Yeah, this is pretty new. Lets see how it works out.
I have set up something similar but maybe with more focus on instance admins over here: https://groups.f-hub.org/fedi-admin-guild/ (not really used that much though. I think I’ll open signups this weekend; maybe that helps).
There has been some work on automatic scanning of image uploads over here: https://github.com/db0/fedi-safety
Needs a server with a CUDA capable GPU and approx 3GB vRAM though.
If you don’t have a server but you (or your community) has gaming GPUs, you can do it through them
That all sounds great. Thanks for the shout-out too!
Great to hear there are more people !
We had a small semi-unsceduled down-time of the XMPP, Movim and Wiki today. The plan was to just quickly add another SSD to the server, but this caused some unexpected issues with one of the network interfaces. Took slightly longer to fix, but the server is back in working order now 👍
Those numbers are better than a lot of other similar platforms, but aren’t the kind of takeoff that results in a mass audience.
That’s correct. We don’t expect or want SLRPNK to conquer the social media market, or even Lemmy. It wasn’t long ago that user engagement and active users was in decline across the Threadiverse since the all-time highs of the Reddit exodus. The numbers we’re seeing now suggest that SLRPNK, at least, has hit an inflection point, and we’ve been slowly growing over the last couple of months.
In my mind, this is the best possible scenario. Sudden, explosive growth puts intense stress on both the software and communities; there are still open software issues that have not been closed that were revealed the last time this happened. Continued decline suggests that at some point we will not be able to maintain critical mass, and the Threadiverse project will fail. Modest, incremental growth allows people time to improve and adapt the software, and develop the community management skills that are the reason people come here. I look forward to the day when the Fediverse unseats corporate media as the social media ecosystem of choice, but I don’t think this iteration of our section of the Fediverse is ready to do that yet.
It’s worth considering the rise of the Apache web server. It was significantly worse than the Microsoft web server that was the industry standard, in most ways but one - it was free and open source. Its name is a pun on the term patch-y, a description of the patchwork improvements and bug fixes that it received from coders across the world. It continued to grow in popularity with hobbyists and specialists, but that didn’t register on the market share surveys. But at some point, the collection of patches became undeniably better than the market leading software. That’s the point when the ‘takeoff’ became visible.
The features that made that possible are also true of the Threadiverse softwares. They’re free and open source. They are attracting new contributors who are adding life to the community and features to the software. The tools are improving with time, and we have a critical mass of members who find the existing infrastructure sufficient enough to spend their time here. I think that’s what is needed for one day the software and community quality to be undeniably better than anything that corporate media can muster.
Little feedback: !climate is becoming a useless echo chamber with no discussions, maybe it’s no more solarpunk aligned
Prob it needs some rules-reminders to other servers people
I had to check, but I had !climate blocked since … ever? Never missed it, but the occasional discussions around it seem to show it’s not the most agreeable place on this instance.
It is just a result of its size in terms of subscribers and upvotes (which makes it hit the top of the all feed on other large instances). Any such large community on Lemmy attracts a lot of very low quality comments.
