Introduction

Another month has passed, which means the old Meta Community Discussion will be replaced with a new Community Discussion, which gives an update on the happenings of the instance, and to provide a place to talk and comment your thoughts on the instance, or for anything else that doesn't warrant its own c/Meta post.

Now, let us have a quiet moment in remembrance of the June discussion thread as we release it from its pinned status, back into the wilds of the fediverse.

...Right, that's quite enough remembering.

Slaps server

Let's bust out July.

Feddit.de is limping! Long live Feddit.org!

A few months ago, Feddit.de suffered a partial error, while the main admin was unavailable due to longer work related travel. As the Feddit.de admin is still missing, several of the site's moderators collaborated with the Fediverse.foundation and last week, Feddit.org was launched to cover many of the same communities as the old Feddit.de hosted. This is an inspiring development, and demonstrates one way a federated social network can respond to damage.

Community Highlights

We had some new communities pop up on the server last month!

• !competenceporn@slrpnk.net, created by @Emotet, who, I would like to point out, has a really cool animated avatar and profile background. Their community is focused on competent people doing things competently in media.

• !electricvehicles@slrpnk.net, created by @sabreW4K3, which focuses on news and discussions on EV's.

• !ancienthistory@slrpnk.net, created by @reallykindasort. A place to discuss and share history of ancient peoples!

In other news, @countrypunk is looking for new moderators for !nature_spirituality@slrpnk.net. If that topic interests you, why not throw them a message? I'm sure they'd appreciate the help!

We'd also like to thank @JacobCoffinWrites for graciously taking over as moderator for !utilitycycling@slrpnk.net, and to @Midnight for becoming part of the !collapse@slrpnk.net moderation team! Good stuff y'all :)

If you're already a mod, joining the SLRPNK XMPP chat is a great way to grow your moderation team and share tips with other moderators. (it's also usable by all members of the instance, and you can use it for non-solarpunk chatrooms too, it's totally federated!)

If you're not already a mod, and see a community that you would like to support with moderation, don't hesitate to contact the current mods, or us admins.

Some examples of abandoned communities in need of new moderators are:

• !nolawns@slrpnk.net, devoted to avoiding monoculture lawns (fairly low activity, would be a great community for a beginner moderator!) EDIT: !nolawns now has a new mod, @quercus@slrpnk.net ^^

• !podcasts@slrpnk.net, which is for... podcasts. (slightly higher activity, but still quite manageable) EDIT: !podcasts has found @LibertyLizard@slrpnk.net for its new moderator!

Again, if any of those seem like your bag, slap a comment down below, and we'll mod you up! Having those extra set of eyes and developing your community into whatever your creative vision holds is not only a tremendous help to us admins, It's quite fulfilling in its own right! :D

Technical Updates

Last month we updated our instance to Lemmy version 0.19.4/5, which brought some minor technical issues that were mostly fixed in the latter release. One major change was the introduction of an image proxy. This means that images in newly added posts (and new user/community avatars) are no longer directly downloaded from the federated servers, but rather first mirrored on our server. This has some privacy advantages and should also improve site loading speed a bit. We will have to see how this will affect our image storage capacity in the medium term, but so far it doesn't seem to have had a big impact and with our recent server upgrade, we do have quite a lot of storage space.

We also experimentally increased maximum upload size to 10mb and allowed small video files as well. We need to see how the impact of this is, though. If it results in too much bandwidth and/or storage space use, we might have to reconsider this.

Open Discussion

Aaaand... Yeah, that's the news for July. It was pretty chill, pretty snazzy, even! But now it's your turn to share whatever snazziness is happening on your mind. Anything related to the instance, the fediverse, or the server you'd like to ask about or discuss? Create a new community you want everyone to know about? Then mosey on down to the comments, my dude!

Everything you post here will be highlighted until the start of next month, which is like, a really long time (until it isn't. Time is cruel, cruel mistress).-