As a matter of community building, lets make this a monthly thing 😊

Community gardening

As stated in our Wiki, we allow members to create their own communities as a way to encourage contributions, but this comes with the responsibility of active moderation. The site admins can’t moderate all communities and unless a posts gets reported, they might not even know about spam etc. Thus we will regularly prune seemingly abandoned communities.

The current list set for pruning is:

So unless someone wants to step up and take them over for moderation and active contribution, they will be removed at the end of the month.

In addition there are these two communities that attract quite a bit of moderation workload and the current mods need support with that (otherwise it might be better to prune them as well):

Technical updates

The originally planned move to a smaller dedicated server was only partially completed and ran into some issue with 8GB RAM being slightly too small for our current Lemmy database use. It might be just a a memory leak issue that should be fixed with the next Lemmy release, but given some related consideration I decided to try use another server with 16GB RAM instead. This move has not been started yet, but I will try to keep the down-time to a minimum.

This server also has a built in GPU that would likely allow automatic scanning for illegal images via Lemmy-safty. This image recognition script is fully local, so no data is transmitted to any 3rd party, but it will likely result in some false-positives (Likely NSFW / child themed ones, which seems not like a major problem for our instance). Any hits will be removed from the storage automatically so this will also protect our moderators from having to deal with such potentially traumatic imagery.

I also made some progress with the account integration between Lemmy and an XMPP/Jabber server. The idea is that you will be able to use your existing username@slrpnk.net ID also for federated chat via the Jabber network. This is more secure than the internal Lemmy DMs as Jabber clients support end to end encryption (like Signal more or less). If in the future some Lemmy clients will add privacy preserving UnifiedPush we can also support that via this XMPP server.

I also started trialling a Movim web-client for it, which besides being a nice chat interface for private 1:1 and group chats, can also act as a long-form blogging site (kinda like Medium or Substack) for our members. Lets see if there is an interest in that 🤔

In theory bridges to Matrix, Discord, Telegram etc. could also be added, but it will need some more testing and might not work out. Voice and video calls will also initially not be supported due to some technical issue, but I plan to fix that ASAP.

Draft code of conduct

I am also still looking for feedback on and maybe some contributions to our incomplete draft code of conduct.

Open discussion

If you have any other topics related to our community here on slrpnk.net please comment below.

    • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Hmm, looks like I should file an issue on the Hanubeki repo then. It’s might be intentional though, as it is made for Japanese writing and they use the ° for other purposes than degrees. Odd though that it only happens on Windows.

      • silence7@slrpnk.netEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Since you seem to know who to file the bug report with, I’d appreciate it if you could.

            • poVoq@slrpnk.netOPMEnglish
              3·
              1 year ago

              As feared, this is a specific issue due to use of Japanese font spacing and will not be fixed.

              I am still thinking about the theming of the site, but there are not a lot of nice custom themes for Lemmy-UI right now and I don’t have the time to make one myself unfortunately. Contributions welcome of course.

              Another idea is to maybe switch to Photon as the main frontend, as the official web Lemmy-UI is not very well maintained by the Lemmy devs (they are working on an alternative themselves). The main issue is mod tools in alternative frontends, but Photon seems to put some focus on that.